How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Plan – Part 1

It goes without saying that in today’s world, brands simply cannot afford to put-off digital marketing to the 11^th hour. With all your customers browsing through the internet with a fine-toothed comb, every single effort made to strengthen your digital presence goes a long way in boosting brand awareness, customer loyalty, and, of course, your profits.

Your digital marketing plan should outline the overarching strategy for your brand, along with what you want to achieve for your company by harnessing the power of the internet. So, instead of winging your digital strategy, create a highly effective one by following these steps:

Identify your buyer persona

Your buyer persona is your target audience at a glance. You must define both, quantitative and qualitative data, which means you need to jot down demographics like age, income, job title and location, along with psychological aspects like hobbies, goals, priorities, and challenges. This will help you tailor all communication perfectly for your target audience and will help you “talk” to your buyers.

Define your marketing goals

No digital marketing plan works unless they are driven by goals. Create actionable goals and then pick the right tools to bring them to life. For instance, if you’re looking to boost brand awareness, you might need to improve your social media efforts. Tools like Hootsuite can help you manage all social accounts in one place.

Prioritise your owned media

Owned media is essential media that belongs to a brand – in short, it’s your own content. Rather than simply curating content from other sites and sources, invest time in developing your own. Align your media efforts with your goals at all times to effective digital campaigns. For instance, if your goal is to increase your leads, publishing and promoting e-books can help you identify new customers to get in touch with. Crafting a content creation plan can help you develop owned media without getting too overwhelmed by its demands.

Audit every campaign you put out

When it comes to your digital campaigns, there will always be hits and misses, no matter what you’re selling. The key to eventually ensuring a higher number of hits is by always auditing the results of every campaign you put out. Understand what works and what doesn’t and let those insights guide you during the next campaign.

Create short-term and long-term plans

Once you’ve identified the above details, use them to create short-term and long-term plans. Define yearly and monthly outcomes and work towards those. Additionally, you must also create weekly and daily plans to ensure you’re always working towards the goals outlined in your overall strategy. Digital marketing ‘success stories’ don’t crop up overnight. They are the result of continual creation, hard-work and audits – the constant grind of churning out content until something hits.

Your digital marketing plan must be extremely detailed. Examine every social media platform, media-form, and communication avenue before adding or discarding the same to your strategy. Also, no matter what phase of your strategy you’re in, always keep tabs on what your consumers are saying so that you can update your buyer’s personas to suit different product offerings. This will help you tailor multiple pieces of communication to different audiences and promote various products while you’re at it.