Create a Digital Marketing Plan in 6 Steps [Marketing Template]
If you want your business to continue growing in the 21st century, you must have a digital marketing plan in place. Digital marketing contains the most effective strategies for reaching valuable leads interested in your business. If you don’t have a digital marketing business plan set up, now is the time to create yours! In this post, we’ll provide you with 6 steps on how to create a digital marketing plan.
Let’s dive in!
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1. Define your brand
The first step to driving success with your digital marketing plan is defining your brand. It’s important to know the ins and outs of your brand so you can sell it to your audience.
Define what is unique about your business. What do you bring to the table that your competitors don’t? It’s important to understand what makes your business unique so you can market that to your audience.
Create unique selling points (USPs) to give your audience insight into your brand.
These are facts about your business that are both unique to your company, but also convince someone to choose your team. USPs strengthen someone’s image of your brand and makes them feel more confident about choosing you over the competition.
Aside from your USPs, you’ll want to define your brand’s mission and values. Define why you do what you do. What motivates your business to start up every day and provide for customers?
Many people define a business based on their values and mission. For example, Tom’s, a shoe company, is strongly characterized by its goal to provide people in Africa with shoes. Each time someone makes a purchase, Tom’s donates a pair to someone in Africa.
This is a strong USP for Tom’s. It motivates people to purchase from them because they know that there is a huge benefit to buying the company’s footwear. Tom’s generosity and mission to do good attract people to the brand.
If you want to have success with your digital marketing business plan, start by defining your business’s brand and figuring out what makes your company unique.
2. Create buyer personas
You can’t create an effective digital marketing plan without knowing who you’re trying to reach. The next step of your digital marketing plan is creating buyer personas to define your target audience.
Buyer personas are fictional people that represent the traits of the people you’re trying to target to buy your products or services. They embody your ideal customer and the person who is most likely to purchase from your business.
To create your buyer persona, collect information like:
- Location
- Age
- Income
- Job title
- Hobbies and interests
- Goals
These are all great tidbits of information that will help you shape your buyer persona.
So, how does creating a buyer persona help your digital marketing plan?
Buyer personas help you know who to target when you’re running your campaign. In many cases, you’ll have more than one buyer persona you’re targeting. Creating these personas helps you market to different types of buyers based on their interests and needs.
Think about a clothing store that offers clothes for men, women, and children. In that case alone, you’ll have an individual buyer persona for men, women, and parents.
The way you market to a single woman is not the same way you’d market to a married woman with three kids. Buyer personas help you keep these different people in your audience separate so you can provide them with the best and most relevant marketing message.
Creating buyer personas will help you create a better digital marketing plan because you will know how to better target members of your audience.
3. Set your goals
Before you embark on a journey to market to your target audience, define your goals. It’s important to set goals so you can determine whether your marketing campaign is working effectively to help your business grow.
When you set goals, set both small and big ones. Your small goals should help keep you on track to achieving your big goals.
Let’s say that your big goal is to increase conversions by 40 percent. A small goal towards helping you achieve that goal may be to gain 10 new email subscribers. This smaller goal helps you work towards accomplishing your bigger goal.
When you set goals, it’s crucial that you set measurable ones. These are also known as SMART goals.
SMART stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
You want to set goals that define what you want to achieve.
They should be easy to measure too. Don’t say, “We want to earn more subscribers,” but rather, “We want to gain 50 new email subscribers each quarter.” The second goal is specific and you can easily measure it in a time frame.
By setting goals, you’ll put your digital marketing business plan on the fast track to success.
4. Choose your digital marketing methods
If you want to know how to create an effective digital marketing plan, choose the right digital marketing methods. You know who you’re trying to reach and your goals, so the next step is to figure out which channels will help you reach them.
There are many methods available to your business to reach these leads:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
These are just a few of the channels you can use to reach your audience. When you start to shape your digital marketing plan, you must choose which methods you want to use to reach your audience.
5. Set your budget
Your budget is a crucial part of your campaign. You must know how much you can spend on your digital marketing campaign before you start implementing your methods. Having a set marketing budget allows you to better distribute your money to the services you need.
When you set a budget, you can break it down and allocate the money to different channels. You must find a balance between how much you’re willing to spend on each channel and how much you need to invest to drive valuable results.
For instance, you may think that $500 per campaign is sufficient to run a PPC campaign, and while it’ll drive some results, it won’t generate the same kind of results as someone who invests $1000 into a PPC campaign.
When you know how much is available in your budget and how much you need to spend on each channel, you will create a better digital marketing business plan.
6. Measure results
A digital marketing plan should always have a strategy for measuring results. Measuring results is crucial in determining whether your business was successful with your efforts. It’s important to constantly monitor your results to ensure you’re putting out the best campaign.
You can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine your campaign’s success. KPIs are statistics that help you define whether you reached the goals you set.
If you aren’t meeting your goals, it provides you with the opportunity to restructure your campaigns to drive better results. You can alter and optimize your strategies to help you reach consumers better.
Start succeeding and create a digital marketing plan today!
Following these 6 steps on how to create a digital marketing plan will help set you on the fast track to reaching more people interested in your business. A strategic plan will help you obtain new leads and earn conversions for your company.
If you want to learn more about how to set up a digital marketing plan, check out our digital marketing services and contact us online to see how we can help you get started.