Create A Digital Marketing Plan In 6 Steps

Key Points

• To effectively grow your business in the 21st century, having a digital marketing plan is essential. If you don't have a digital marketing plan, then your business will be missing out on lots of amazing opportunities to grow!
• Leads that are interested in your business will drift away if you don't have a clear strategy to engage with them and convert them into a customer.
  
• The best time to create a digital marketing plan is right now! In this guide, we'll cover how to create a digital marketing plan in 6 simple steps.

The first step to creating a successful digital marketing plan is knowing your brand identity. After all, how can you sell your business if you don't even know what it stands for!

Start by thinking about the unique aspects of your business. What makes your company stand out from your competitors? Understanding what is unique about your business is an essential part of building a successful marketing strategy.

To help your customers know more about the brand they need to know what the unique selling points are.

Unique selling points serve two purposes. First, they let customers know why your business is different from others. Unique selling points should also give the customer a reason to choose your company over others - customers should be more confident about doing business with your company, and have a higher opinion of the brand image once they know the unique selling points

After defining the unique selling points of the business, next, you need to consider your company's mission and values. Why does your company offer what it does? What drives the business forward? What goals help keep the company motivated to continue each day?

Many customers are attracted to a company that has values and a mission that aligns with the customer.

For example, global coffee brand Starbucks donates millions of dollars globally to many worthwhile causes. In 2019 more than $5 million was donated to various charities across the US and Canada to help those in need.

This is one example of a strong unique selling point along with values and a mission. Some customers will be motivated to buy from Starbucks because they know part of Starbucks profit is helping those in need.

Knowing your company's unique selling points, mission, and values helps create the brand identity. Once you've done all this you have completed the first step to creating a digital marketing plan

Once you've defined your brand image, the next step is to know who your customer is. Defining your target audience is a must when creating a digital marketing plan.

To figure out your customer you need to think of a fictional person that represents the ideal buyer of your business's products or services. These are going to be the people most likely to buy from you.

The following traits are all key features of creating a buyer's persona:

• Age
• Income
• Location
• Hobbies
• Occupation

These features and others relevant to your business are all helpful in painting the picture of your ideal customer.

How can knowing your customer benefit your digital marketing plan?

The benefit of creating a buyer's persona is that you can target the right people when running a marketing campaign. You will often need multiple buyer personas to cover different types of customers your business would like to attract.

For example, a shoe retailer will have product lines for men, women, and children. The shoe retailer will need a buyers persona covering men, women, and parents.

That way when sending out marketing information it is relevant to the person receiving it. After all, a person with no children won't need to hear about shoe offers for kids!

By spending time figuring out who your customer is, your digital marketing plan will be vastly improved. This is because you can now target the right customers with the most appropriate marketing message for their needs.

Setting realistic goals is vital to understanding if your marketing campaign is effective. Simply having the goal of growing the business isn't enough. Instead, goals both big and small should be set.

Achieving the small goals is a great way to stay on track for reaching the big goals.

Let's say that you want to increase sales by 50%. Getting 20 new e-mail subscribers could be one small goal that needs to be achieved to hit that bigger goal of 50% more sales.

Goals need to be realistic, and importantly measurable. You may have heard of setting SMART goals before. SMART means:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely



Goals need to be both measurable and relevant to your business.

Setting a goal of 'We want more subscribers' is too vague. Instead, the goal could be 'We want 20 new email subscribers within the next 6 months'. This is specific and measurable.

By setting realistic, measurable goals your digital marketing strategy is far more likely to succeed

To be truly effective your digital marketing plan must consider which digital marketing channels are best to use. Remember - you've created a buyer's persona as part of your plan. Use this data to determine which channels will be best to reach your target audience.

There are many channels that your business can utilize, including:



• Email marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Social media marketing
• Content marketing
• Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)

When fine-tuning your marketing strategy, make sure to decide which channels you are going to use to get your message across to your target customer.

Knowing your budget is vital to running a successful marketing campaign. Calculating how much you can spend beforehand means you know where the money needs to go and ensures you won't run out of money halfway through a campaign!

When creating a budget think about the total you can spend and how you want to divide this between different channels. Keep in mind that the more you can spend on marketing, the better the results are going to be.

 

Including a detailed budget for marketing does enhance your digital marketing plan.

Steps 1-5 are essential to get an effective digital marketing campaign into action. The final step is just as important as those first 5. You must check the results of those marketing campaigns!

In step 3 you set realisitic goals both big and small. Has the campaign helped achieve those goals? 

Another way to measure results is to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine how effective the campaign has been. KPIs are a useful way of using statistics to see if goals have been reached. 

KPIs that you might want to track include:

• Conversion rate
• Cost per lead
• Organic traffic
• Return on investment

By checking the results of your marketing campaign, you can see what is working, and what is NOT working. Armed with this data you can adjust future campaigns - maybe a bigger budget is needed, buyer personas need to be altered, or switching to a different marketing channel is going to be optimal

Revisit a section

• Create A Digital Marketing Plan In 6 Steps
• Step 1 - Create Your Brand Identity
• Step 2 - Know Your Customer
• Step 3 - Set Realistic Goals
• Step 4 - Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels
• Step 5 - Set A Budget
• Step 6 - Check The Results!
• Final Thoughts On Creating A Digital Marketing Plan