Developing The Best Digital Marketing Plan in 2021
A Digital Marketing Plan is a must if you want your brand to gain success, a well-designed plan covers all the aspects & leaves no scope for failure. It provides a digital marketing roadmap for your brand that will give you clarity of how your brand can grow over a given period of time.
A digital marketing agency's plan includes fundamental factors like business objectives, an impressive value proposition & a defined target audience. Most businesses that have seen a huge growth in the 21st century have given utmost priority to their online marketing plan. Effective digital media planning can help your venture get access to valuable leads through fitting digital marketing strategies. We are here to assist you to develop the best digital marketing plan for your venture through our straightforward model.
What is a digital marketing plan?
A digital marketing plan is what guides you to build your digital marketing campaigns, it is a detailed study of what steps must be taken to achieve the results you are looking for through your online marketing campaign. You must keep a check on the following factors to make sure the digital marketing plan is feasible.
Time-bound organisational goals
Strategies to achieve the goals
Mediums & Platforms to be used
Execution & Development Planning
Determining the budget
Digital marketing roadmap
A digital marketing plan can lead to the following outcomes for your brand:
Build awareness about your brand at the same time building trust in the eyes of the customer & effectively generating actions from the customer
Building a target customer base who return to your brand for repeated purchases, generating high engagement.
Value-Based marketing campaigns that attract more traffic to your website.
As we proceed towards providing you with a structured digital marketing plan, let us understand what are the key factors that seek our attention & should not be ignored. It is a must to have a secure domain, we cannot keep changing our domain & expect customers to find us. Secondly, we must have a target in mind, having an idea about what needs to be achieved provides clarity towards approaching the target.
Analysing the competition is a must before coming up with a plan, in the online world, every detail holds value, we need to understand who our competitors are, how do they engage with their customers, what strategies & platforms are they using.
A brief understanding of how to build your digital marketing strategy.
Steps to be followed
Step 1: Environmental Analysis
There is a reason why many brands fail to successfully implement their digital marketing campaigns. If a digital marketing plan does not have this element of analysing the environment or niche you’re entering, you won’t have a direction to follow. And when we consider conducting an analysis, it is simply not an internal analysis about the team, strategies or your vision.
External analysis plays a major role in determining what are the existing standards and practices being followed in the market, what expectations can be kept when it comes to target setting & revenue generation.
A SWOT analysis is necessary to understand the strengths of your firm, to determine how your team stands out, what’s unique about your offering. Identifying the weak links in your firm, trying to find the solutions to erase those weaknesses. Looking for opportunities in the market, what are the trends that are gaining a lot of traction in the market & holding a lot of scope in your industry.
This step also prepares you for the threats that may arise while you try to establish yourself online, being aware of these threats can help you prepare alternatives to avoid those barriers from stopping your progress.
This analysis familiarises us with the environment we’re about to enter, the more familiar we’re with the circumstances, the better it is for our business. You can gain insights like what are the habits of your customer, what do they usually look for online, who are the major influencers who are responsible for increasing sales in the market.
Creating & maintaining high standards that lead to the best outcomes & implementing those techniques can lead to amazing results for your brand, most brands follow techniques that have gained a lot of success in the market & simply implement them. You need to research about your niche, who is doing the best business, has a huge market share, an impressive customer base, once you identify them, scan their online marketing practices, this will help you visualise their plan & accordingly you can build a plan that resonates with your target audience.
The internal analysis must include understanding whether your business is suitable for the online market, is your website user friendly, is it optimized & compatible for all users, is it giving your customers a unique experience, are you posting content that is relevant on your website, are you working to improve your website ranking, is your brand keeping up with trends on social media. These factors play a massive role in determining your performance on any digital avenue.
Step 2: Goal Formation
We need to be SMART while we set up our goals, now when we say SMART goals, there is a marketing concept that adds a lot of value to the process of goal setting. These goals cannot be vague statements, which are simply stated without adding any analytical value to them. These goals have to specific, measurable, attainable, relevant & time-bound. Every action of your firm should be in the direction to attain these goals.
Here’s a simple example to understand what do we mean by SMART goals. Consider you have built a website for your brand and you set a goal stating that “I want to increase traffic on my website to improve the sales”, You might wonder what is wrong with that statement. Now let’s have a look at how a SMART goal would look like, “I want 10,000 visits on my website for this month & the strategies I’ll be using are defined as well” The difference can be easily spotted as the SMART goal is very specific & time-bound.
Step 3: Strategy Building
Once the goals have been set up, it is time to determine the means to achieve those goals. How you go about creating strategies matters a lot, using the resources in hand efficiently, exploring new mediums, reaching out to prospects, to achieve those functions strategies must be brought into effect. Simply because some strategies adopted by successful organisations worked well for them doesn’t mean your brand will be able to pull it off. That’s because of the scale at which big brands operate, the budget & resources they have cannot be compared to someone who is starting up a new brand. Certain factors need to be considered while you define your strategies.
Knowing your Target Audience
It seems pretty straightforward when we look at it, but a proper analysis needs to be done to understand the intricacies of who your target customers are, their buying behaviour, their buying capacity, their preferences, needs, wants & desires. Knowing these details is a must as it helps you to understand what your target audience is expecting & in any industry it is a must to understand customer expectations and accordingly deliver the product or service through your firm. Before marketing or selling anything, having a buyer persona is a must. The buyer persona talks about your prospect in detail, their age, their habits, behaviours, how much they earn, where do they stay, their family status. All those details are formulated in the buyer persona.
Position your Brand in the Market
When you have chalked out your buyer persona, it is important to position yourself in such a way that your target audience is attracted towards your brand. What value are you offering in the market & who are the people looking for that value in the market, you need to make it very clear to the target audience what is that discrete value offered by you, how you are different from the existing players, your competitors. The effective use of channels & mediums to reach out to your target audience is necessary to achieve the marketing objective. Your buyer persona allows you to understand where your customers are spending their time, are they active on social media, what kind of applications are they using, where do they spend their time online. Having all these details in hand allows you to target that group & helps you finalise the channels to be used to reach out to your customers.
Content Management and Planning
Creating & managing quality & relevant content should be the most essential part of your digital marketing business plan. As we plan a digital marketing roadmap, what should be consistent is the content that you cater to your customers. Content will be the driving factor that will help you to improve your reach in the digital arena. Unique content that stands out from the clutter can be really effective to create a lasting impact in your customer’s mind. More importantly, it should be sharable, what’s special about sharable content is that your prospects will be marketing your brand for free simply because they found your content unique. Developing a specific strategy for content marketing is a must as it helps you in mapping communication channels for your brand as well. The following factors are a must if you are looking out to publish content that is relevant, relatable & sharable.
1. Keyword Mapping: If you write unique content, covers every detail, is full of insights & wonder why it isn’t doing well when it comes to the number of readers or visitors, it is most definitely because you failed to incorporate keywords in your content. You must identify relevant keywords in your sector & accordingly use them in your content. The SEO ranking improves when the content is filled with keywords. The keyword density should be maintained as well, when you are writing an article, the keywords in your content should be used once in every 100 words. The main motive of digital marketing is to improve your visibility and the chances improve when the search engines find keywords in your content.
2. Create a content calendar: A content calendar helps in giving you a better vision of where your brand campaign is heading. It helps you to monitor your progress, helps you optimize your resources better, and lets you follow a long-term approach. It is important to track whether the adopted strategies are showing timely results, the content calendar allows you to keep a check on your growth. It is a structured format where you should post about the author, title, keywords & tags used, references & the date of publication.
3. Article submission & posting: Simply writing the article won’t be that effective, to see maximum results you need to be more proactive and try to reach out to people who would be interested in reading your article. You should submit your articles on multiple platforms online, create as many backlinks as you can, using social media is a great option to target your audience as well.
Step 4: Market Conversion Tactics
This step revolves around receiving an outcome through a final action from your target customer, this step will help you understand whether your digital marketing plan has been fruitful.
Depending on your brand & niche the different strategies like email marketing, conducting SEO, reaching out through social media or using paid forms of advertising online, you must understand which medium is helping to generate your final goal from the customer.
The use of analytics to determine which channels are truly effective is a must. The extent to which you’re able to personalise your campaign for customers & the number of clicks for your website or on your advertisement must be kept in check, online marketing allows you to understand the exact amount of time spent by your prospect on your website, every detail as to when your customer leaves your website before making a purchase, what products are your customers checking on your website, all these details help you to understand how you can retarget your customers & make them purchase your product.
Your digital marketing roadmap is basically like a web through which you need to make your customer make a move that benefits your brand.
Step 5: Analysing results & performance of the digital marketing campaign
Many brands have made huge losses while spending a massive budget on their campaigns without understanding the cause of failure. In the digital marketing industry, every detail matters & nothing happens on chance, there is always a reason for the failure of your brand campaign.
You simply cannot afford to sit back once the digital marketing plan is set up & the strategies are being rolled out. The use of analytics has turned out to be the gamechanger in the digital marketing arena, it is directly responsible for the success of a digital marketing campaign, not only does it optimize your campaign but also keeps a check on your budget & spending.
The ROI must be measured and you should see if it matches your expectations. This step helps you understand if your goals haven’t been achieved, what are the exact reasons that are acting as barriers. There is always time to correct what is going wrong & get back on track.
You need to be on the lookout if there is any room for improvement. The digital marketing industry is extremely dynamic, what works for your brand today might become void tomorrow simply because your competitors got their hands on some better tools or technology. You need to be aware & alert of new opportunities & grab them as time is very critical. Delayed action can lead to huge losses when it comes to digital marketing.
You need to keep a check on every step if you want to see consistent growth in the digital space. Every detail in your digital marketing plan should be of utmost importance as even the slightest of errors can lead to disasters.