Businesses are moving online and companies that don’t follow the digital marketing trends are vulnerable to fail. To get the most out of your resources and achieve your marketing goals, you need to craft a digital marketing plan for your business. In this article, let’s explore a digital marketing plan from A to Z, including the step-by-step procedure of how to create one for your business.
Here’s an overview of the contents of this article:
- What Is a Digital Marketing Plan?
- What Should a Digital Marketing Plan Include?
- Do You Need a Digital Marketing Plan in 2022?
- How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan in 2022?
What Is a Digital Marketing Plan?
A digital marketing plan refers to a document that summarizes a company’s digital marketing goals, identifies the steps needed to execute those goals, and estimates the timeline to achieve them.
A digital marketing plan is a detailed framework for executing marketing goals. A goal is broken down into smaller, achievable milestones that align with the end goal with action items for each. Distinct documents are created for each milestone and plans are made to achieve them as well.
What Should a Digital Marketing Plan Include?
Following are some of the key components of a digital marketing plan:
- A crisp and clear summary that gives a glimpse of the big, digital marketing plan.
- A breakdown of the goals into measurable, specific, and timebound milestones.
- Carefully sorted digital marketing channels that help you achieve the goals.
- Allocate specific tasks to people based on their expertise.
- Track the progress using a content management system (CMS).
- Budget planning for resources mapped with ROI calculations.
Identifying the right digital marketing channels is highly important as it aids your team in focusing on what’s important for them to achieve the goals. This eliminates the other channels that aren’t worth investing the time and effort in. So take great care while choosing the right channels as they can make or break your digital marketing efforts.
Do You Need a Digital Marketing Plan in 2022?
Documenting the progress of your digital marketing strategies and efforts is a key factor to a company’s success. Stats show that documenting digital marketing strategies increases the likelihood to succeed in your marketing efforts by 538%.
Of all the marketers that implement content marketing strategies for better results, only 37% of them actually document the things that worked and those that didn’t, the way they went about their plans, major and minor hiccups during execution, and learnings.
How does this affect the company’s growth? Well, documenting marketing strategies has a lasting impact on the way teams communicate and collaborate. It provides visibility to the teams working on business goals and educates them on the dos and don’ts of a successful campaign.
Besides that, the following are a few reasons why you need a digital marketing plan in 2022:
Understand Your Target Audience
A well laid out digital marketing plan starts with defining the target audience. This sets the foundation for the sales model you will adopt and meet the needs of your customers through relevant products or services.
Unite Departments Toward a Vision
A digital marketing plan acts as a coherent force to bring different departments in a business together to work toward a common goal.
Cut Cost on Resources
Having a digital marketing plan in place prevents you from spending money on unnecessary resources, be it the people or the tools. In addition, you save valuable time by setting deadlines in the initial marketing plan.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan in 2022?
Creating a digital marketing plan is crucial to meeting the marketing goals of the business. Many companies these days are allocating some of the budget to digital marketing campaigns and tools with amazing results.
Here’s how to achieve your marketing goals by creating a digital marketing plan for your business in 2022.
Related Article: How Blog Content Writing Services Can Influence Your Company
Bring the Entire Team Together
Different departments in a business may often function as individual silos and that’s why a digital marketing plan plays a pivotal role in providing a common vision and bringing them together.
Your social media team may be working on improving the reach on Twitter and Instagram, but does the plan match the content team’s goal to increase the organic traffic through internal linking? How do the teams land on the same page in terms of the business vision? Which goal is a higher priority?
To answer these questions, refer to the digital marketing plan. Review actions that require more effort and remind the individual streams of the end goal, while also specifying individual plans to work on and meet those goals.
Specify the Goals
Goal setting has to be clear. All companies want their site to attract more traffic and leads. How do you go about chasing them? What tools will you use to get the job done? What are the departmental goals? How long would it take to achieve them?
Specify the goals for each marketing team. For example, for the outreach team, it could be, “build 50 high-quality backlinks in a month.” For the content team, it could be, “deliver 10 pillar pages on digital marketing streams over a period of 2 months.” For the social media team, it could be, “increase Twitter followers by 200% in 1 month.”
While specifying goals for each team, be wary of the timeframe. This helps them to keep track of the progress and sets a path for them to fail, learn, and succeed with repeated iterations if things don’t go as expected. This can help them to achieve their goals in the best possible ways by using the right tools and resources.
Use Existing Data as a Reference
If you have been working on digital marketing campaigns for a while, you may have a fair idea of the ROI to expect from a given marketing campaign. Use your existing data as the foundation and make ROI estimates for similar campaigns.
To put this in perspective, let’s say you attract 500 unique visitors per day and 10% of them make a purchase on your website. If you want to increase that number to, say 15%, you could use the resource data for the 10% campaign and make rough estimates on the resources and returns for the 15% campaign. There might be numerous ways to achieve this, but you may find those which require the least amount of time, money, and effort while providing the maximum benefit.
Tip: To identify the most workable and effective ways to achieve a goal, perform an ‘effort vs. value’ mapping assessment, brainstorm with the current team, and sort out those that require the least amount of effort while providing the maximum value.
Perform Competitor Analysis
Performing competitor analysis can help you set KPIs for your marketing plan. You can either set the KPIs yourself or take inspiration from your competitors by taking a page out of their playbook. Be sure to set measurable performance indicators, and execute them.
Start by doing a Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) analysis of your business to see where you stand against your direct competitors. This sets you up for the opportunities you should capitalize on.
For instance, your competitors might focus on budget-friendly laptops as their main sales point. You have an opportunity to position yourself as a premium quality laptop seller for a different audience segment.
Related Article: Why Should Your Business Hire an SEO Marketing Company?
Analyze Your Customers
When you perform a competitor analysis, you begin by diving into their customer audience. You understand who their target customers are and how they benefit from your competitor. This allows you to interpret the problems your competitors are trying to solve for along with learning how to improve your business.
You do not need a market research agency to identify your customers’ pain points. One can find your audience’s pain and suffering by organizing user forums and discussion groups, getting in touch with them in person, or engaging with them on social media and blog comments sections.
Digital Marketing Plan Is a Must in 2022!
A company’s success online depends heavily on a strong digital marketing plan. This is evidenced during these times as companies make the digital transformation to the online channel. Creating and executing a digital marketing plan can place your business far ahead of others in your industry. It can help you scale your business to great heights and position yourself as a reputed brand among industry experts.
What are your thoughts on the digital marketing plan and strategy? Do you think businesses will benefit from this in the future? Let us know in the comments section below.
