Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Plan: Step-by-Step

Are you looking to market your new business but are stuck at creating an effective marketing plan? If so, then you need to consider a digital marketing plan to help you widen your market. 

However, a successful digital marketing plan involves more than just having a website or posting images on your social media account. Below is a step-by-step guide that will help you come up with a solid digital marketing plan for your business. 
 

1. Thoroughly Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Before coming up with any marketing plan, the first step is to conduct a SWOT analysis. Look at your strengths, weaknesses, any available opportunities, and potential threats for what you have been doing or are looking to get into.

Given the competitive ecosystem you will be operating in, you need to understand everything. The SWOT analysis is advisable since it is both qualitative and quantitative. Besides, it will also help you understand your position in the digital era. For example, it will help you understand the current position of your website such as whether it is customer-oriented or not.
 

2. Identify Your Goals

Now that you understand your position in the market and are aware of your strongholds and weak points, the next step is to identify your goals. Know what you need to improve on and what actions you should take.

An effective digital marketing plan allows you to identify your marketing objectives and help you know how to achieve them. Therefore, for your plan to be effective, you need to understand your goals and what you are looking to achieve.

For example, if you own a business, your main goal could be building brand awareness, beating the competition, or generating more sales. Once you identify your goals, you then need to identify ways through which digital marketing can help you achieve these goals.
 

3. Choose a Marketing Strategy

You now have goals that your digital marketing plan should help you achieve. But how will you achieve these objectives? Personalization is an essential tool in digital marketing. You want to keep these factors in mind as you define your marketing strategy:
 

• Know your audience
   

• Achieve proper positioning by understanding your value proposition and what it includes
   

• Have a content strategy to help you create, distribute and manage original content that your target audience will find attractive and helpful.
   

4. Identify Tools to Help in Your Marketing Strategy

There are numerous tools that you could incorporate into your digital marketing plan. They include:
 

• Keyword Research – This involves identifying the common words your target audience use to search for content. Using these keywords will contribute to organic SEO and help improve the ranking of your site or SEO positioning.
   

• Social Posting – Writing and posting on your website is not enough these days. You need to share it on social media platforms to reach a wider audience. However, there is always the best social media platform for each post, depending on your audience.
   

• Content Calendar – This is particularly helpful to ensure your strategy is sensible. Your content posts need to offer value and a content calendar can help with that as it helps create ideas. Some of the information that the data content calendar should have are the author, date of publication, appropriate tags to use, keyword, author, post topic, etc.
   

5. Set Your Indicators to Measure Progress

Identifying your goals and knowing what you are looking to achieve is not enough. Your plan will only be good if the metrics can be measured. Know what tools to use and which key performance indicators to use to track your progress.

Measuring your progress will help you know what isn’t working correctly and what to do about it. Therefore, once you put your marketing plan to play, ensure you have a highly effective data measuring metric system that offers real-time results. 

Remember, the digital world is constantly changing, and to keep up with these changes, you need to identify any areas that need improvement and make the necessary improvements.
 

6. Know Your Target Audience

Before implementing your digital marketing plan, you need to identify your target audience. Understanding your audience will allow you to understand the content you can use to identify with them. Also, it helps you know which social media channel to focus your marketing plan on.

To identify your target audience, you need to consider your customer demographics including age, location, gender, and specific needs. 

Fortunately, you can rely on tools such as Google AdWords or Alexa to collect information on your target group regarding your business. Also, you need to pay a close look at the values, preferences, and attitudes of your customer. 
 

7. Monitor Your Competitors

You are competing for the same target audience as your competitors, so how can you beat them? To stay ahead of the competition, you need to understand what your competitors are doing. Learn about them and what they do to interact with their customers.

Also, it is critical to understand why they are ahead of you. Is it because they run promotions and giveaways, or is it because they have frequent interactive live sessions on IG? Spy on the practices of your competitors to have an estimate of the engagement you expect from your campaigns.

Monitoring your competitors will also help you understand the tactics that work for them. Also, you will get to learn from their mistakes as you discover new ways you can rely on marketing channels.
 

8. Choose Your Preferred Digital Marketing Channel

The right channel for you will depend on your target audience and the stage of your customer journey. However, you need to be careful with the channel you select since it will either make or break your marketing efforts. Once you have identified the right marketing channel, you can now run your ads.
 

Conclusion

Always keep these eight steps in mind when looking to create a digital marketing plan. It is also a good idea to have your objectives in mind and be ready to make improvements in areas of your marketing plan that don’t go as planned. 

Digital marketing gives you a chance to come up with a personalized and successful marketing campaign, so don’t leave anything to chance. Also, since technology is evolving, ensure that your business evolves with it.