How to create a digital marketing plan

They say failing to plan is planning to fail – so how can you create the perfect digital marketing plan? Before you get started with your digital strategy, you need to have a basic concept of the marketing plan in general – digital or otherwise.

• Using digital channels to meet your goals
• An example digital marketing plan
• Key points to remember

The Chartered Institute of Marketing is a particular fan of the SOSTAC model, which stands for:

1. Situation
2. Objectives
3. Strategy
4. Tactics
5. Action
6. Control.

So, let’s break this down and consider how we can apply this when we create a digital marketing plan.

Situation: where are we now?

In a digital context, this might mean looking at our on-site metrics such as average order values, monthly visitor numbers, or time on site. In a broader context, it’s an overview of what’s working well for us as a company, and where we can improve. You can also apply the SWOT method: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Objectives: where do we want to be?

These are the digital goals we set ourselves. It’s not enough to make blanket statements like “I want to grow my business”. Ideally, your objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.

So, let’s apply that in a digital context. Two examples might be:

• I want to increase my average order value by 10% within three months.
• I want to reduce my bounce rates by 5% when X campaign has finished.

Strategy: how are we going to get there?

At this point, we can apply the insights from our situational analysis and use them to create particular strategies. For example, while we look at our strengths, we might be able to identify a user segment or customer persona – let’s say, working women aged 18 to 35.

We might also look at our brand values. What are we passionate about? Being ethical, low-priced, fast, convenient? With a situational analysis, we can identify who our customers are, what their problems are, and how we can solve their problems with our unique brand.

So, in a digital context, this might be that we offer an easier website experience or omnichannel buying, such as an app and a e-commerce website. We might offer faster delivery. By understanding who and where our users are, we can determine how to reach them.

Tactics: applying the ‘marketing mix’ and other digital methods

In the traditional marketing sense, the ‘marketing mix’ comprises ‘four Ps’ – price, promotion, product and place. More modern variants include a further three Ps – people, process and physical evidence.

This helps us to define our marketing tactics in a digital sense. For example, we might use an e-voucher code to adjust our pricing, or we might use conversion rate optimisation tools to improve the process. We need to make sure users can buy or convert easily on our website, which also embodies the ‘physical evidence’ – an easy online experience.

This goes beyond buying, too. Think of the traditional marketing funnel: after the sale, we want to increase loyalty. How can we turn our customers into brand evangelists? Can we use email to invite them to leave reviews, or send personalised offers?

Action: more than words

These are the specific actions we will take to meet the objectives and follow the guidelines of our strategy. So, if we did want to increase our average order value by 10% in three months, we might consider:

• Liaising with the product team to create promotions that will encourage users to buy related items
• Giving designers tasks such as email campaigns and social media graphics to promote this new customer offer
• Asking marketing teams to segment email lists to send out this personalised offer
• Using sales and marketing teams to track sales performance based on these offers, for example, using ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics.

Control: checking, revising and going again

This last stage involves measuring the performance of your digital marketing plan. You might check your results against those SMART objectives you laid out in the beginning, or you might take a more holistic approach. For example, you might use web analytics tools to take down essential data on visitor numbers, order values, time on site and much more.

Once you have this data, you will have a better idea of what works, and where there could be room for improvements. This will help to inform your future digital marketing plan. Don’t forget, there is no time to stand still when it comes to marketing strategies – particularly digital ones.

Using digital channels to meet our goals

Creating a digital marketing plan is a delicate blend of research and implementation. How we do both depends on the channels we use. You can try the ‘OEP’ approach for this – owned, earned and paid media. For example, we might be interested in using:

Owned media

This relates to content marketing – specifically, anything we own as a brand. So, in a digital context, that might be our website, our social media profiles, our whitepapers and case studies, and much more.

Owned media lends itself to many digital marketing methods, for example:

• Creating a content strategy that helps to boost our SEO and reach our users organically
• Conducting keyword research to come up with blog topics as part of our content plan
• Using your social media profiles to drive traffic to the site, build our social presence and find out more about our key users
• Using whitepapers as ‘gated content’ – that which requires personal information such as an email address before it is available for download – to foster lead generation
• Collating your email data to create user segments and send out more targeted campaigns, for example, promotions for certain demographics or remarketing campaigns.

Earned media

Earned media concerns digital PR – content that is written or produced that talks about us, but was not paid for or created by us. Some examples might include user testimonials or newspaper and magazine articles online.

This kind of media is a great way of building an online reputation, and can be part of a wider link building strategy to promote SEO. Earned media can also help by:

• Positioning our brand on websites visited by our target audience
• Increasing brand authority with positive reviews
• Giving us measurable referral data to determine website performance.

Paid media

This media relates to paid advertising and anything else we’ve paid for to get our brand name in front of our audience. Again, this can inform our overall digital marketing strategy by:

• Using keyword research to focus our pay-per-click and organic efforts
• Finding out more about our converting users by using paid social demographic data, such as likes/dislikes, age and locations
• Giving us measurable performance data such as ROI from paid clicks.

An example digital marketing plan

So, now we know how to create a digital marketing plan and what channels to use, let’s put it into practice. An example timeline might look like this:

Marketing a new line of organic hair products for women

1. We would start with a situational analysis, using digital tools to measure where we’re at: SEMRush can analyse competitors, while Facebook can help us to create ‘lookalike audiences’ and Google Keyword Planner can help us to identify our target audience’s pain points.
2. We’d then create tangible goals, such as selling 500 bottles online between March and April. With our keyword, competitor and audience data, we can build a PPC campaign and create a content calendar answering user questions.
3. We’d take action by putting the PPC campaign live, writing the content, and sharing it on our social media channels.
4. We’d review the performance of the campaign by looking at Google Analytics to measure website visitors, Google Ads to measure return on ad spend, social media clicks and shares to measure content, and our own CRM to check sales figures.
5. We’d check to see if our sales performance matched our predictions, and decide which methods require more investment versus which ones worked best. We’d then run a new campaign focusing on the channels with the best returns – for example, focusing on PPC more than blog content if it brought in more sales.

Key points to remember

So, ready to start your own digital marketing plan? Remember to:

• Run a thorough analysis of your current situation – the good, the bad and the ugly
• Make specific, clear and measurable goals
• Create buyer personas by focusing on pain points
• Propose channels based on your research, your product and where your users are
• Trial a variety of methods to determine the best return on investment
• Review your performance and change your tactics as necessary.

Get started with your digital marketing plan today

If this all sounds a bit too overwhelming, don’t panic. At Beefound.Agency, we have a team of marketing experts who use the latest tools to help research your market and help you to ’bee’ found online. Get in touch with us today for more help with creating your digital marketing plan.