Your business needs a digital marketing plan, whether small or Fortune 100. These days, almost everyone shops online. If your business isn’t digital, you’re going to suffer.

If you’re not marketing your business online, you’re missing out. Forget that old saying, “If you build it, they will come.”

Simply building a website isn’t enough. You must develop and execute a strategic digital marketing plan to get your website in front of your target market. In other words, your site needs to deliver actual value for your business.

In this article, we will provide tips on building an effective digital marketing plan. We’ve also created a comprehensive guide to SEO, which covers some of this in greater detail.

How to Track a Digital Marketing Plan

Setting goals and measuring specific metrics when executing a digital marketing plan is important. Google Analytics is available for free and will help you track things like:

• Incoming web traffic will show you how many visitors are visiting your website.
  
• Acquisition – Where your customers come from (search engine, links to your site from other websites, marketing emails, or social media channels).
  
• Drop-off rate – What percentage of visitors are landing on a page and leaving, and which pages are most abandoned?
  
• Goals – Goals you can set that will tell you when customers do something desirable, such as making a purchase, requesting a quote, signing up for a newsletter, etc.
  

Your company should already be tracking sales, but now you will have a deeper understanding of how your website drives profit. You should review your analytics at least every month to ensure that your website and marketing campaigns perform well.

Key Components of a Digital Marketing Plan

A Comprehensive Digital Marketing Plan Includes:

Goals

• Identify 3-5 SMART marketing goals aligned with business objectives. Be specific on targets for traffic, leads, sales, etc.
  
• Outline quantitative and qualitative goals for brand awareness, positioning, etc.
  

Audience Targeting

• Define your target customer demographics, interests, and buyer personas in detail.
  
• Use market research and analytics to analyze your existing audience and market.
  
• Map out your customer journey across awareness, consideration, and conversion.
  

Strategies and Tactics

• Outline your planned channels – SEO, PPC, email, social, and content marketing.
  
• Detail tactics for each channel – keyword targeting, ad messaging, email nurturing tracks.
  
• Develop specific campaigns to execute strategy – launches, promotions, etc.
  

Key Performance Indicators

• Determine specific, quantifiable metrics to measure for each goal and campaign.
  
• Set up tracking in analytics and tag management software.
  
• Monitor website traffic, leads, conversions, engagement, sales, and more.
  

Optimising Your Marketing Plan

• Review your plan regularly and optimize based on performance data.
  
• Refine campaign elements like messaging, offers, and audience targeting.
  
• Adapt your plan to accommodate major marketing changes or new opportunities.
  

Determine Your Target Market for Your Digital Marketing Plan

You’ll need to focus on your target market to build an effective digital marketing plan. Divide your customers into segments utilizing information pertinent to your company, such as demographics, past purchases, or the industry they’re employed in.

Determine who your best customers are and create personas based on their characteristics. These are representative profiles of your ideal customers, including their:

• Age,
• Sex,
• Location,
• Income,
• Specific issues,
• Interests.

For example, a wedding coordinator would create personas that represent brides-to-be in different budget segments, such as low budget, medium budget, and high budget.

This would allow the wedding coordinator to build a digital marketing plan targeting customers that fit those personas.

Keep in mind your customers’ life cycles. If you sell small-ticket items directly to consumers, their life cycles likely run short.

Companies that sell to businesses or big-ticket items would have customers with a longer life cycle, mainly because of the more extended evaluation phase required for your prospects to purchase.

Understanding the life cycle will allow you to create marketing material that will appeal to your prospects every step of the way.

You can ensure your website is optimized and has essential information so that customers in the discovery and evaluation stage can find what they seek.

Be Everywhere Your Customers Are

For your digital marketing plan to succeed, you must be everywhere your customers are. There are various ways to reach your customers while they’re online. To connect with them, you can do the following:

Paid advertising

The quickest way to reach your target market is through paid advertising, such as Google Adwords, paid social media ads, and more. It is thought that it could be as high as 98% of your website visitors do not purchase their first visit. Retargeting allows you to advertise directly to individuals who have visited your website.

Social Media

Just about everyone has a social media profile. Your digital marketing plan should reflect the channels your target customers use. Whether that is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, your business needs to have an account and be posting regularly.

Keep your prospects informed about your products, the latest news about your company, and even articles, reviews, or videos in which your company or product has been featured. You can also post about the wider industry.

For example, if you’re in the IT industry, you can post about the newest advances in information technology. On the other hand, if you’re in the dental field, you’ll want to post about a new treatment being tested for treating gingivitis.

Search Engine Optimisation

If your website isn’t optimised, it won’t appear on search results, which means prospects looking for services or products you provide won’t find your website.

To ensure your website is search engine optimized, you’ll need to make sure of the following:

• All content is original, and your site has no duplicate content.
  
• All web pages have a title, meta descriptions, and working links.
  
• The website is easy to navigate.
  
• Pages are focused on a specific topic or “keyword” and include the keyword in the URL, title, and relevant text.
  
• All company information, such as locations and phone numbers, is current.
  
• You are using H1, H2, and H3 tags on each page.
  
• Your website is easy for a search engine to read and navigate through.
  
• And that you constantly publish fresh, high-quality, relevant content through blog posts, articles, or videos.
  

Relevant Influencers

If your target market is split into segments, an influencer is likely already marketing to one or more segments.

You can launch marketing campaigns where you collaborate or cross-market with influencers already targeting your desired audience.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the best way to nurture leads that come to your website. By offering prospects a chance to register for your newsletter, a discount for signing up for an email list, or having them sign up for a webinar or ebook, you’ll be able to get their email address.

You can also create a newsletter and have it sent out automatically at intervals to keep prospects interested. This is especially important if you sell high-value items since users are unlikely to purchase on their first visit to your site.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan

The main rules to follow when creating or updating your website are:

Provide a Strong UX

Your customers don’t want to dig through 20 pages on your website to find what they want. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for and even easier to buy it!

Keep most of the information “above the fold” (what the website visitor sees on that page without scrolling down), and don’t overload the page with useless and unimportant information.

Ensure your menu is easy to use and include a call-to-action to get the prospect’s attention.

Create Effective Content

Your website’s content needs to be original and high-quality. If your page title is not relevant to the content on that page, search engines, especially Google, will push your content into the abyss, also known as anything past the first page.

If you run an e-commerce site, you must include photos and videos of your products for your prospects. Luckily, photos and videos are also detected by search engines, which helps you move up in page rank.

Encourage Visitors to Convert

It’s important to include a call to action, whether you encourage visitors to “Buy it now!” “Order Today!” or “Request a Free Quote.”

Including a call to action can help increase conversions on your website, which in turn can increase overall sales and profit for your company.

Take Advantage of Marketing Platforms

Various useful platforms can help you fine-tune your marketing strategy. For example, many marketing platforms allow you to schedule social media posts.

Various CRM tools can link to your website and collect prospect and customer information, which you can use to nurture leads and close sales.

Moz tracks each of your keywords and web pages and suggests how you can better optimize that page to move up in positions. There are many other platforms, and you must find the one right for your business.

Consider Hiring a Professional

Digital marketing is never effective if you just wing it. Instead, you must have an expert to create your digital marketing plan. If you don’t know, hiring someone who does is best.

Many companies decide to either hire an employee who specializes in marketing, a marketing consultant or outsource their marketing to an agency.

Those companies understand the importance of investing in digital marketing, especially in today’s world, where many stores are closing, but online sales are soaring. If you do consider hiring someone or a company, make sure you do your research.

Find a person or company that is experienced in your industry and can help build a digital marketing strategy from the ground up. While picking the right marketing consultant can be tricky, the results make it worthwhile. You should assess the credentials of prospects in detail and get examples of what the expert intends to offer in terms of elements like audience research and sales integration. Don’t be shy about requesting info on past projects they’ve worked on and evidence of successful marketing strategy implementation they have to prove their claims. You want to be certain that hiring a professional is money well spent.

Digital Marketing Plan Template

Use this marketing plan proposal template as a framework when creating your plan:

• Executive Summary: Brief overview of key goals and summary of the plan.
  
• Goals List 3-5 specific marketing goals aligned to business objectives.
  
• Target Audience: Define target demographics, interests, behaviours, and buyer personas.
  
• Current Marketing Overview Summarize existing marketing channels and high-level performance.
  
• Strategies and Tactics Detail approaches for each channel, like SEO, PPC, social media, and email.
  
• Campaigns Outline specific campaigns and promos to execute the strategy.
  
• Timelines Provide timeframes and schedules for campaigns in a calendar.
  
• Budget Summarize budget resources and allocation across channels.
  
• KPIs and Metrics List key performance indicators used to track progress.
  
• Monitoring and Optimization Plan Discuss processes to review and optimize the plan regularly.
  

Digital Marketing Plan Conclusion

Creating a documented digital marketing plan following an optimized framework allows businesses to align efforts to specific growth goals. By outlining strategies backed by data-driven targeting, companies can pursue a more cohesive, effective approach across all digital activities. With regular optimization and adaptation, a strong marketing plan will evolve and scale with an organization over time.

Digital Marketing Plan FAQs