-
Digital Marketing Plan – 6 steps for an effective plan
10 Mar 2017 Dominic Comments Off on Digital Marketing Plan – 6 steps for an effective plan
Developing a digital marketing plan is essential for any small business – without a plan, you may end up wasting a lot of money. You need to start driving qualified traffic to your site to get those sales – these are my top 6 tips to do this by focusing on a simple digital marketing campaign.
It’s time for the most exciting and final step of the process: launching your digital marketing campaign. At this stage, your planning will be complete and you will be undoubtedly eager to press ahead with the launch. Excitement aside, it is important to remember that far from being the end of the work, it is in fact just beginning. You cannot just let your campaign run after you have invested so much time planning for its success.
Continuous evaluation and incremental improvements are key throughout the life of your campaign.
Review previous digital marketing campaigns and address any shortcomings
First and foremost, you need to learn from any mistakes made previously and build on these. These are the lessons learned – if you can avoid your previous mistakes and capitalize on your past successes, your campaign will be set on the path to deliver success.
In my experience, the most common mistakes are not investing enough budget, targeting the wrong customers and investing in the wrong channels
Keep reviewing the lessons learned – these will help define your strategy moving forward. Consult your social media channels – you may discover a topic for your content marketing efforts that resonates well with your audience or finding a social media platform that is frequented regularly by your ideal customer. Keep a written record of your lessons learned, this will help you apply the lessons that you learn throughout your 2017 marketing campaigns.
Consult your Business Goals and how your plan fits in with these
What are your business goals? Traffic? Sales? Conversion? The digital marketing plan needs to support the business goals to ensure success. It is highly likely that a successful campaign will help you to make progress in your business, so why not make this progress count towards your business goals?
Do not concentrate on just the digital marketing – have a look at the longer term business goals and how your plan can help these. Your business goals might include increasing your customer retention rate or growing your customer base within a specific sector.
Whatever they are, make sure that you identify one of your business goals and consider it throughout the rest of this process.
Pull these together into your campaign objectives
Once you know what the Business Goals are, you can transform this goal into one or more objectives that you can aim to achieve during your digital marketing campaign.
Lets say your business goal is to improve your customer retention rate – your objectives may be:
Deliver relevant content – Produce three useful pieces of content per week that address your customer’s problems and show that you are trying to retain them as a customer
Improve customer communications – Tell your customers what other services your business offers and give them a discount code if they place an order with you as a reward for their loyalty.
Make offers relevant – Email the customer on a regular basis with more personalised messaging and relevant products they could be interested in buying
It is critical that your campaign objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Based). With SMART objectives, your digital marketing plan has a good chance of succeeding.
If objectives are not SMART, it will be incredibly challenging to track your progress and evaluate the results that your campaign delivers. I would look at between three and five objectives for the vast majority of campaigns.
Develop and implement a campaign strategy
Ok so you know your business goals you are focusing on with your campaign and what the objectives are – The focus of your planning should now turn to the execution. At this stage of your digital marketing plan, you are addressing the important question: “how am I going to achieve my campaign objectives?”
To do this, you need to develop your strategy. Your strategy is your plan and approach to the operational elements of your campaign. A good strategy will act as a definitive guide to day-to-day activities.
Each campaign strategy is different, however, they all include some of the following elements in one form or another:
Approach definition – outlining how and when your digital marketing activities will be carried out – as part of overall campaign / trading calendar]
Campaign objectives – to help you measure your campaign’s success (fortunately for you, you will be able to use your objectives from above
Key messages – these are the most important messages that you wish to convey to your target audience – what are you trying to say to customers about your brand?
Channel selection – explaining which digital marketing channels you will use to deliver your key messages to your target audience (e.g. email / PPC / Affiliates / Display / Social etc)
Campaign assets – this is the content (mostly text and images) that you will use across your selected marketing channels – this could also include video
Marketing measurement – a plan detailing the measurement metrics that you will use to evaluate the success of your campaign (I will help you decide on this during the next step of the process)
Agree how you will measure campaign effectiveness
At this stage you should have a clear idea of what you intend for your campaign to achieve and how you are going to go about doing it. The final step before the all-important launch is to decide how you will measure the success of your campaign. There are two elements that you must decide on.
What do you constitute as a success? (measurement metrics)
How are you going to measure them? (measurement platforms)Measurement metrics will depend on the marketing channels that you select. For example, if one of your campaign objectives is to increase your social media engagement, your metrics may be likes, shares, followers or retweets.
While your measurement platform is likely to be Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics or perhaps HootSuite.
Regardless of your measurement metrics and measurement platforms, make sure that you setup and test them prior to your campaign launch. From the moment that you press the go button you want to be collecting valuable campaign data. Not only will this help you evaluate the success of the campaign as it progresses, it will also help you collate your lessons learned.
Campaign Launch
It’s time for the most exciting and final step of the process: launching your digital marketing campaign. At this stage, your planning will be complete and you will be undoubtedly eager to press ahead with the launch. Excitement aside, it is important to remember that far from being the end of the work, it is in fact just beginning. You cannot just let your campaign run after you have invested so much time planning for its success.
Continuous evaluation and incremental improvements are key throughout the life of your campaign.
SEO in 2017 – what you need to consider Cross device tracking challenges for retailers
Comments are currently closed.