Transform Your Brand with an Effective Digital Marketing Plan

It's time to start your learning journey regarding digital marketing plans. Implementing any digital marketing activities without a pre-developed plan or strategy can lead to failure because all aspects that may affect their development are not considered. Here's everything you need to know for an effective plan.

Defining a Digital Marketing Plan

A digital marketing plan is a document that contains detailed information about planning all of your digital marketing campaigns or activities. It details the channels you will use, development, investment, time, etc. According to Philip Kotler, who is considered one of the fathers of modern marketing, the marketing plan serves: “to document how the organization's strategic goals will be achieved through specific marketing strategies and tactics, with the customer as the starting point. This is also related to the plans of other departments of the organization.” Here are some reasons as to why you need a digital marketing plan:  

• Attract, convince, convert and make your customers fall in love with your product or service
• Plan all strategies and actions to attract your target customer
• Segment your marketing campaigns to provide value at every stage

The Structure of a Digital Marketing Plan

Step 1: Situational Analysis

The first thing you need to do is conduct an internal and external company analysis. A useful basis for this is the SWOT analysis, which allows you to look at your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and the market as a whole. We need to know the ecosystem we operate in, what our client's needs are, and where they can be addressed. This analysis is not only qualitative but also quantitative as it looks at factors such as, takes into account factors such as digital habits, resellers, influencers, etc.  

Implementing benchmarking techniques to identify digital best practices and success stories and apply them to your business is becoming an increasingly important part of your overall corporate strategy. You also need to conduct internal research to determine the situation in our company in the digital age: is your website customer-focused? How convenient and easy to use is your site? Do you update your blog regularly? What is the current positioning of your site? And what is your social media presence?

Step 2: Defining Digital Marketing Goals

Once you've identified your strengths and marketplace, work on setting goals so you have a clear idea of where your actions are going to take you. Everything you plan should work towards these goals. Using SMART goals can help digital marketing teams clearly define what they want to achieve and develop actionable steps to reach their objectives. Here's an example of what a SMART goal and a non-SMART goal will look like; “I want to get 20,000 visits to my website per month for three months. To do this, I will do X, Y, and Z". (SMART goal), "I want to increase the number of visits to my website." (Non-SMART goal)

Here's a breakdown of the goals:  

• Specific: You have to be as precise as much as possible about what you want to achieve.
• Measurable: When setting a goal for marketing activities, it's important to make sure that it's measurable.
• Attainable: According to the reality of the brand take into account the possible obstacles that may arise and set realistic goals.
• Relevant: Think about how it will affect the company in the long run.
• Time-bound: Establish a deadline to achieve the proposed objective.

SMART is the acronym for the five objectives to be followed in any digital marketing strategy: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.  

Step 3: Defining Your Marketing Strategy

Once you have defined your business goals, consider what you will do to achieve them. Personalization in digital marketing is becoming more and more important. Therefore, when it comes to determining the execution strategy for the plan, keep the following factors in mind; target audience segmentation refers to who want to reach out to, what their tastes, needs, or preferences are, where you want to meet their expectations, etc. after which you can create your buyer persona. Then comes positioning, to achieve the right positioning, it is very important that you are very clear about what your value proposition is and what it entails. Finally, you need a content strategy that is essential for creating, distributing, and managing original content that engages users and positions the brand as a point of reference in the eyes of users. In addition, you also need to develop a specific communications (content marketing) plan for each channel.  

Positioning is vital as you need to know how you are going to communicate your unique value proposition appropriately across channels where your audience is present (social media, blogs, email marketing, etc.).

Here are some tools that you can utilize in order to implement your content strategy:

• Your audience
• Topics you are going to discuss
• Tone-of-voice
• Posting frequency

Step 4: Digital Strategies and Tactics

Based on our goals (acquisition, conversion, and loyalty), you will start applying various strategies such as email campaigns, social networks, customer relationship management (CRM), web optimization, SEO strategies, and paid media advertising. With the number of channels to manage and the amount of information you receive about your customers increasing, it is very important to use marketing automation tools that allow you to automate your marketing campaigns. With this tactic, you'll be able to create workflows that allow you to build hundreds of campaigns with just one click. You will be able to personalize messages based on your buyer persona, thereby increasing your chances of success; in addition, you will be able to get them, depending on their interaction with the brand, at the time of purchase.

Technology has become a fundamental tool for implementing digital strategies, so it's critical for you to learn how to get the most out of it.

Step 5: Budgeting and Resource Allocation

Budgeting and resource allocation are critical components of any digital marketing plan. They involve determining how much money and other resources will be allocated to different aspects of the plan, such as website development, content creation, and advertising.  

The first step in budgeting and resource allocation is to determine the overall budget for the digital marketing plan. This should consider factors such as the size of the business, the goals and objectives of the plan, and the currently available resources. Once the overall budget has been determined, it's important to allocate it in a way that aligns with the goals and objectives of the plan. For example, if the goal is to increase website traffic, a significant portion of the budget should be allocated to search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

It's also important to consider the return on investment (ROI) of each aspect of the plan. This means that the budget should be allocated to maximize the return on investment for the business. For example, investing in a high-quality website may have a higher return on investment than investing in a large number of low-quality blog posts. Another important aspect of budgeting and resource allocation is flexibility and adaptability. The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, and it's important to adjust the budget and resource allocation as needed to respond to changes in the market and the plan's performance.

Step 6: Measuring Results and Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

The work doesn't stop once you've developed and implemented your digital marketing strategy. The next step is to analyze the results. Analytics has become a critical element in successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending. You need to measure every action with KPIs to see if we're getting the expected ROI. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and actions we have implemented in our digital marketing will help fix what isn't working to reach our goals.

Make sure you have an effective online data visualization system. The digital world is rapidly evolving, so you need to be constantly on the lookout to instantly identify opportunities and room for improvement. If you want to position yourself and increase your presence in the digital space, use these five steps to create a digital marketing plan and leave nothing to chance. Keep in mind that technology can be your best ally in creating personalized, automated, and ultimately successful marketing campaigns. As the task becomes more complex, new tools make it easier to work and increase productivity.

Let us now take a look at the diagram below and inspect how a business may set up its relevant KPIs. First, you need to have an objective where you need to answer the question—'Why does your business or company need marketing?' Once you have your objectives, then you can move on to creating at least two strategies for what you plan on achieving with your objective. The two strategies can then have numerous 'tactics' on how to execute these strategies, and finally, each tactic will have a couple of KPIs that will help you measure the performance of these said tactics. For a more immersive experience on digital marketing, be a part of our Digital Marketing Strategy Online Training.

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