The purpose of a digital marketing plan for any organisation whether big or small is to go through the process of research and defining the goals and objectives of it’s digital marketing initiatives along with targeting digital personas and choosing which channels to implement and how.
Some of the key aspects of a digital marketing plan are as follows:
- A competitive analysis for your product or service – overview of the market, assessment of your performance and offering in the market vs the competitors.
- Define your business’s mission/ objectives of your digital marketing plan such as increase brand awareness, increase sales, increase customer retention, reduce cost per lead, reduce cost per acquisition of customers.
- Next step is to deconstruct these business objectives down into digital goals. Some examples would be: increase the conversion rate on the website, reduce cart abandonments at checkout, increase average order vale size.
- Once the digital goals are established, then the next step would be to define what the main Key Performance Indicators are which map to these digital goals.
- Now that the objectives, digital goals = KPIs and targets are set, the next step would be to define the strategy and a clearly defined audience segmentation – the target audience.
- Develop audience personas and identify the problems you as a business solve for specific types of personas, their needs (emotional, lifestyle, informational) where they can be found digitally, media preferences, perceptions that they have of you as a business/ brand.
- For each of these Personas, develop a clear value proposition for your business and how it relates to them.
- Once identified the personas, next steps would be to research based on informational and geographical needs as well as digital behaviours, the most appropriate digital channels to target them on. Break your tactical solutions into Customer Reach, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention – essentially mapping the Digital channels on the Sales/ Buyer Cycle.
- And finally , define how you will measure all of this with a clear measurement and monitoring framework in place. Check the success of the different elements of your digital marketing strategy at regular intervals to identify whether on track to meet targets or not. Also it’s key to have a plan to take remedial action when it has been identified that the plan is not meeting targets.
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