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Digital marketing can be a complex process when you consider that you need to include social media, SEO, analytics, specific goals, and the strategies that you want to implement. The best way to navigate through this complex journey is to create a comprehensive digital marketing plan that will help you to focus your attention precisely where it needs to be.
If you do not have a digital marketing plan, then you are putting your online business at risk of failure because if you have no digital marketing plan, you will surely get no digital marketing results. To support you in this process, we have come up with a step by step guide that you can use to create a personalized digital marketing plan for your website; read on to find out exactly what a digital marketing plan is and how to create one from scratch.
What is a Digital Marketing Plan?
If you have never heard of a digital marketing plan or you are unsure of the purpose of one, then it is simply a plan that breaks down all the steps you need to take for the digital marketing of your website. This in-depth planning allows you to identify a wide range of information that includes:
- The goals you want to achieve (short, medium, and long-term)
- Detailed action plans that identify the developments you are looking for
- Financial information (investments and budget) and costings for each step
- A specific roadmap that provides key milestones over a specific period of time
Do I Need a Digital Marketing Plan?
You may be wondering if your business needs a digital marketing plan, especially if you are a smaller sized company than some of the more famous contenders out there. In reality, any business with an online presence should employ a digital marketing plan to help you:
- Increase quantity and quality website traffic
- Garner more website conversions
- Automate your digital processes and documents
By implementing a digital marketing plan, you will be giving your business the best chance of success as well as ensuring that you remain on track with the right steps to continue business growth.
What Types of Digital Marketing Are There?
When it comes to arranging your digital marketing, you will find that there are six different areas that you need to consider:
- Content Marketing – whereby you use your online content to attract and engage new users and grow your audience.
- Search Engine Optimization – SEO is a tool that helps you improve your ranking on search engine results pages, improving the organic traffic that visits your site.
- Email Campaign Marketing – this is the process of sending out marketing emails to key contacts to improve your sales.
- Social Media Marketing – this is when you market your site via your personal and professional social media accounts, sharing links and commenting on linked items to increase your audience.
- Advertorial Marketing – this tool is used to create content that reads like an article, but that promotes your business and aims to increase your client base.
- Paid Advertising – this is typically done via a Pay-per-Click system where you advertise a product or service on your site and pay a small fee each time someone clicks on your ad.
When it comes to choosing which strategy to utilize, you are not restricted to just one. In fact, you can use all six if you feel that there is a genuine benefit for your business. Each of these marketing tools is tried, tested, and has enjoyed success for a large number of businesses who have worked on developing their digital marketing plan.
How Do I Structure A Digital Marketing Plan
If you feel ready to get started with your digital marketing plan, then we have the steps you need to take to ensure that you cover everything and can look forward to an improved digital presence. Follow our steps below for success.
Know Your Customer
The first step in any successful marketing plan is knowing who you are aiming your efforts at. This does not mean getting to know every person that heads to your site but more that you have a clear picture of who your target audience is and what you want them to do when they interact with your website.
There are many online tools to help you to develop a strong customer persona that you can use to help when working on new marketing techniques. You simply enter all the information about your business and desired audience and will get a persona that you can then use when planning your content or when learning about your client base.
Try Hubspot’s free persona tool now!
Be Available & Easy To Reach
Another essential step in marketing is to ensure that your customers and potential customers can reach you with ease and receive a response in minimal time. Nailing this step is bound to increase results as your client base will feel like they matter and want to engage with you.
A basic yet effective way of making communication easier for your audience is to ensure that your contact details are up to date on every page of your site and that you have a simple contact form that only requests essential information to make it quicker to fill out. It is also important to be truthful with your audience and only promise a specific response time if you can adhere to it fully.
Work Out What You Are Aiming For
As soon as you know who you are targeting and have made your contact process as simple as possible, then you can start mapping out your goals and the tools you need to put them in place. This is the most exciting part of any digital plan because you have a blank canvas that you can fill with everything you want to achieve.
When you have a list of goals that you want to achieve it is wise to make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic & Timed), this way you will be able to monitor and measure the progress you make after a week, month or even a year. If you do not have measurable targets, you won’t be able to work out if your actions have been successful or not.
Evaluate What You Do Already
One of the most important parts of creating a digital marketing plan is to consider what you do already and evaluate the worth of it. Many people think that they are not doing anything to spread the word about their business, but if you think of things such as a business blog, social media accounts, your website and paid advertising, then you will soon realize that you already are doing a lot of digital marketing.
When you have worked out what you are already doing, it is important to consider how effective it has been in driving new traffic to your business. For example, if you had no leads from your paid advertising campaign, then you need to evaluate whether it reached the right audience. If you have a website, you need to look at how many users accessed your site. When you know how well a strategy worked, you can include it in your plan with steps to improve it year over year.
Improve Your Content
It may sound obvious but writing compelling content is the key to getting a wider readership. It is not good enough to just post random personal opinions about your product as this will not entice new readers to your site. Instead, you should focus on SEO driven content that is well-considered and enhances what you already have online.
Each post that you share on your site should help your audience to understand your offering in greater depth and be able to build their understanding of the ethos of your business. Using SEO keywords will help your content to feature in search engine results and linking your new posts via your social media will also draw more people in.
Embrace Automation
Many people are nervous about using automation when it comes to marketing, but the reality is that it offers an in-depth analysis of the marketing steps you have organized to happen. There are a variety of automation tools for you to choose from depending on which marketing tools you are going to implement.
The great thing about automation is that you can centralize all your marketing activities in one place and get a wide range of analysis on how well your activities are performing so that you can increase the effectiveness of your hard work. Lots of automation tools work with your customer relationship management tools so that everything can be connected to from one central location.
Prioritise Mobile Device Viewing
When you consider that the majority of your target audience will access your site and social media through their mobile devices, then it makes sense to prioritize mobile optimization so that your content is accessible.
It is essential to note that optimization does not just mean making a site that can be accessed on a mobile device but also the speed at which the page loads, thoughtful design and being able to access links to navigate through your website with ease. This optimization should be at the top of your digital marketing plan and be continually reviewed due to the constant evolution of tech devices.
Use Tools To Optimize Your Efforts
These days there are tools to support most business and digital practices. The key is knowing which ones to implement and understanding the value they offer your business so that you have all the right tools at your disposal.
The best way to decide what you need is to look at the manual processes you are currently implementing and see what tools are out there to help. One example is to use an email marketing company to send out your email campaigns. You simply input the data and then allow the program to send your email and analyze the results you get from it. The analytics you get from using processes like this will enable you to improve who you are targeting and increase your digital footprint.
Find What Makes You Unique and Use It
Many business owners spend a lot of time trying to fit within a specific mold so that they can offer their products in direct competition with other businesses. When you are working on this premise, it is easy to lose sight of what makes you unique, and this is a dangerous place to find yourself.
Understanding what makes you unique helps you to develop an effective digital marketing plan because you are able to use your uniqueness to sell your product. Customers want to know what makes you different before they will part with their cash and if you can get them to believe in your unique selling proposition, then you are far more likely to get them on board. When you have defined what makes you unique, use this information within your marketing campaigns so that your client base develops a better understanding of who you are.
Monitor the Progress of Your Processes
No digital marketing plan is complete without a plan for evaluation and monitoring. It is no good to review your actions once a month as the digital world moves so quickly. Instead, you need to take the view that there can never be too much monitoring.
Every time you upload something new, you should analyze the impact it has. You should also keep ongoing tabs on the performance of your website and social media accounts. Engaging with the analysis that comes from your automation tools is also an intrinsic part of understanding how you are doing. Then, when you have a good understanding of your own performance, you can start to tweak and change tactics so that you appeal to more and more people as time goes by.
It is clear that having a robust digital marketing plan is an essential part of being a business owner and no matter how small your company may be, you will only grow when you know who to aim your digital efforts towards. Get planning today and watch your digital marketing stats improve as soon as you start to implement your new ideas with your new tools.
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