7 Steps to Create a Successful Digital Marketing Plan

Digital marketing is a fast-changing field and strategists need to be updated round the clock to cope with this pace. We work on different digital platforms like Social media, Email, Google ads, and many more. Changes like algorithm, procedural, and even functional are constant and can make us change our planning at the eleventh hour. Google’s algorithmic updates can also make you change your content at the last moment. So it’s highly imperative to create a successful digital marketing plan.

• How to Write a Killer Digital Marketing Proposal

Previously there have been some limited traditional advertising modes like television, radio, and newspaper but during the past few years, digital media has evolved so much that businesses are now considering a separate budget for digital mediums. With a growing number of businesses joining digital platforms successively, it is high time we focus on strong and effective digital marketing plans to improve better ROI and long-lasting branding.

Instructions to Build a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

The first step to building a powerful digital marketing strategy is to go back and dig deep into the efforts of your planning. There are times when advertisers make an attempt in creating a strategy without much consideration. But the ace advertisers put their effort into fixing the problem in the base and rebuild the strategy for better performance. Marketers must always look into the core factors rather than delineating the unimportant factors for a long time.

If you are close enough to accomplish your strategy, why not put other tactics to give it the finishing touch it requires. You can drag other team members in building a major campaign as you will inculcate and experience a lot of ideas from your peers. If integration of another CRM can improve your conversion funnel, you may push for the same before your business managers or responsible authorities. Your business strategy must be performance-oriented.

How to Prepare a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A constructive digital marketing strategy must incorporate the following rules:

• Comprehensive business objectives.
• A structured strategy to accomplish their goals.
• Everything associated with their efforts and planning in finalizing the strategy.
• Focusing on the target audience for better performance.

Most Productive Way to Design your Digital Marketing Strategy

When you have a solid strategy in hand, most of it will be covered in the introduction. Every organization has a different approach towards the market and their audience, so most of them try to put different strategies from their peers. But even after their eagerness for something out of the box, a standard guideline must be followed to get decent performance.

A Document with a Master Strategy – This will be one of your main documents where you will store most of your information regarding the strategy you are preparing. This doc will comprise info that you will cover in the next week, month, and even for the next year. You might specifically mention which platforms you are using, how you plan on implementing them, and what results you would like to achieve. This record will be informative and will answer all the queries of your users.

A Content Calendar – This calendar will include all the details of your content. And you have to plan them accordingly so your content gets available all the time whenever you need them for your marketing campaign. A simple spreadsheet with quarterly schedules will definitely be effective in managing all the content. This will definitely help you control your content to sustain the whole marketing campaign.

A High-Level PowerPoint – As you are making such a lengthy and detailed strategy, you should present it in such a way so that your manager and other leaders in the marketing department should not have difficulty in understanding them. This is where the need for preparing your strategy in PowerPoint has come. If you present your lengthy strategy through PowerPoint, that might be easier for your manager and other senior leaders to go through step by step. If you put every detail in an apparent and structured manner, it will be a win-win strategy for everyone.

Step by Step Procedures to Formulate a Marketing Plan

It is highly necessary to preplan your marketing plan and list out every detail that can be implemented in an apparent manner. Prioritizing them would definitely make them transparent and comprehensible.

Make your Research Crystal-Clear

The research will be a vital part of your marketing plan and should include:

Competitor Analysis

SWOT Analysis – This is the analysis of your company’s shortcomings results, competition, uses, advantages, and everything that you need to consider for competition in the market.

Understanding your Buyers’ Persona – In this section, you have to mainly focus on the audience you want to market your products for. Also, segregate the audience you want to keep a distance from.

Understanding your Buyers Buying Cycle – Here you have to understand the objective of your conversion funnel. Digging deep into what, why, and how will definitely give you an upper hand over your competitors.

Make your Strategy Clear

After getting a hold of your objective and like-minded audience, it’s a great opportunity to put your strategy on the table to get that work on your behalf. The strategy must include

• Defining Your Goals
• Knowing Your USP (special offering recommendation)
• Ensuring You Have a Strong Brand
• Making Sure You Have a website that is optimized
• Creating good Content
• Defining Your Distribution modes (social, email, and so on.)
• Having an SEO Strategy

Creating your Digital Marketing Plan

Well, you might have a lot of strategies in your mind for digital marketing, but if you are damn serious towards success, you must follow a simple rule of SOSTAC® model. In simple English, it translates to segregating your plan into six categories.

S stands for Situation assessment – which implies where are we now?

O stands for Objectives – which implies where would we like to go?

S stands for Strategy – which outlines how we will arrive.

T stands for Tactics – which are the points of interest of strategy.

A is for Action or execution – helping the plan to perform.

C is for Control – which implies estimation, investigating, modifying, upgrading, and monitoring.

Formulating your Content Marketing Strategy

Content has been doing the rounds for several decades in this marketing and advertising world. Even you can get solid ideas through sites like Neil Patel, Moz, Quick Sprouts and the list is endless. But when you are creating a separate strategy for your own brand you have to keep your target audience in mind. And it would not be too bad to claim that Content is the king of your campaign.

Is Content Marketing new to you?

A digital marketing campaign can’t succeed without content, planning, and editorial timetable. Look at the content marketing strategy of biggies like Facebook, Amazon, and MailChimp. You will find a lot in common that everyone is focusing on out-of-the-box ideas and powerful CTA. Gone are the days when you used to get hold of your audience through simple content, but with the time that competition has got so stiff that you have to literally come out with something unique to prove your expertise in this field.

Are you a novice in SEO?

SEO is the base of content marketing where you can generate a strong ROI on your content for an endless period. Therefore, it is advisable that if you are new to SEO, you must always start with the Google webmaster guide to doing better in this special department. You should also follow our blog posts for diversifying your knowledge in the field of digital marketing. And for practical exposure, our classroom course can be highly beneficial.

7 Steps to be Followed in Creating a Potent Digital Marketing Plan

We have included everything you need to learn in the following steps. For a potent digital marketing plan, your primary objective should be to create the campaign successfully. In this article, we have summed up everything in simple English to make you understand. We have come up with effective planning, data analysis, and powerful marketing jargon.

1. Engage with your Audience Personally

Who is your target audience? What do they love? What do they eat? What are the interests they mostly follow over the internet? How much do they earn?  Do they have a habit of upgrading their existing product to a new and advanced brand? You have to learn about your buyer persona. A persona is an individual who might be in need or buy your product. This will include everything from necessities, interests, spending behavior, etc to support your research.

2. Do Regular Competitor Analysis

If you have to succeed in the digital platform, competitor analysis is a must-do activity to gain strategic advantages over your competitors. Use third-party websites like Ahref, Ubersuggest, and SEMrush to get the metrics, keywords, visitors, and backlinks of your competitors. Use the top information of your competitors and put them to use on your marketing strategy. We can assure you that your strategy will become more effective and perform better than your competitors.

3. Focus More on your Digital Tactics and Channels

There are many digital platforms where you might invest both time and money to generate impressions, reach, and traffic. Therefore, segregate your platforms and see which platform is performing better and which is not. Better performing platforms can be analyzed and the same strategies can be implemented on the platforms which are not performing better. Similarly, you can analyze the bad-performing campaigns and find out where the strategy has gone wrong. This way you can optimize your digital platforms and even campaigns under them for better ROI.

The value requires enough data and audience patterns to draw a marketing chart. You can use analytical tools meant for individual digital platforms. Like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and other metrics from third-party software can be accrued over time.

4. Great Approach

A blending of digital platforms and blending can be rewarding since many strategies work differently and even better after combining them to a similar digital channel. For example, if you need to expand your brand awareness and audience base, you need to run campaigns on various social media platforms.

• Display Advertising
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Blogger outreach
• Online Public Relations
• Blogging
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• Viral Content Campaigns
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Facebook advertising
• Email Marketing
• Video marketing
• Twitter advertising

5. Measuring is Important!

Create indicators that are not only smart but can be easily quantifiable and measurable. The following steps can be taken.

Increase online deals by 20% from x to y

Increase traffic pursuit movement by 20%

Enhance networking engagement on Facebook by 25% quarterly

6. Is your Strategy Working?

You can always track your audience’s movement behavior, using different measurement tools such as Google Analytics and in the case of FB, you can also check pixels for understanding user movement on that particular platform. Third-party tools like Crazyeggs and ClickTale can be used to track exactly where users are leaving your site.

Heatmaps are visual representations of where your users are tapping. It’s a great way to track and understand the user mindset. It helps in placing your breadcrumbs at the correct points. It can also provide you with an idea of your next strategy.  Monitoring and detailing out every bit of your strategy can place at the forefront of your competitors.

7. The Monthly Audit is a Must

You have to look after the strategies that drive traffic to your site. There are several sites out there that can give you a fair idea of what you need to improve and what is going well for you. If you are a company/agency, the paid tools will be best for enhancing your performance but being an individual you can also opt for the free ones, not as good as the paid ones but can take you forward.

Some tools that can help you track and analyze your growth are Google Search Console, Google analytics, Ubersuggest, Buzzsumo, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and many more. Each tool is famous for its specialization. Though a bit expensive, Ahref is one of the best tools you can use for your SEO goal. If you have a budget crunch, Ubersuggest and tools from Google will help you for sure.