A 6 step guide to a digital marketing plan

A 6 step guide to a digital marketing plan

 

A digital marketing plan is a document that lists the marketing objectives that a business pursues. It includes funding, channels, timelines, and tactics.
Why is having a digital marketing strategy important?

Keeping track of your strategy boosts the likelihood that your organization will succeed, even though only 37% of marketers do so. A carefully crafted plan includes a “map” with detailed directions for reaching objectives. Here are the key benefits a marketing strategy may offer your company.

knowing who the target market is. Research to identify your target audience is the first step in a well-thought-out marketing strategy. You will be able to speak the same language with consumers and offer genuine assistance throughout the buyer’s journey when you have a clear target audience. You will also be able to better understand your audience’s demands and prepare timely product launches when you have a clear target audience.
effective utilization of resources. By having a strategy, you can avoid spending money on items that are not important for your business and were not previously stated. Having definite deadlines in your marketing plan can help you manage your time effectively as well.
the same course for all corporate divisions. The plan’s availability to all employees as a tool for coordination enables your team to communicate and act properly to go in the same direction.
Therefore, a digital marketing strategy will direct you toward your objectives and enable you to gain from your company. We shall then talk about a marketing plan’s elements.

Parts of a digital marketing strategy

 

• Content promotion
• email advertising
• Advertising
• Mobile advertising
• Marketing through reputation
• using social media
• video advertising
• optimization for search engines
• Google Analytics

The elements discussed here convey their message in a number of different ways. Let’s now examine each of them more closely in order to comprehend how they function.

Content promotion
Attracting customers’ attention, educating newcomers, and nurturing leads are the three basic objectives of content marketing. By supplying your potential customers with the relevant content, you can nurture and educate them, lead them through the sales funnel, and ultimately persuade them to take a desired action.

Case studies, blog posts, articles, reviews, questionnaires, white papers, quotes, charts, glossaries, dictionaries, webinars, newsletters, how-to manuals, and other formats can all be used to communicate content. It seeks to disseminate crucial information and inform prospects about your goods. Some of the explanations why businesses favor content marketing include:

• target audience expansion
• fresh leads
• increased consumer engagement;
• more dependable clients;
• reawakening lapsed customers.
• An excellent illustration of content marketing can be found on the HubSpot blog. HubSpot informs readers about their products and services, including HubSpot CRM and HubSpot
• Service Hub, and offers usage guidelines.

Google Blog

Let’s examine webinars in the context of content marketing. A webinar is an online event that allows businesses to communicate with both current and future customers. With webinar marketing, you can deliver material in the form of a lecture or a live product presentation. Given that they allow speakers to easily reach a large audience from one place, webinars are now seen as both affordable and practical for presenters. They support lead generation, warm up leads, increase conversions, and viewer attention.

Bain & Company regularly holds webinars on crucial challenges for international organizations to stay in touch with clients. Their webinars on various topics make it possible for customers from around the world to get the information they need.

Webinar promotion

• email advertising
  Sending promotional materials to your customers via email is a useful marketing strategy. Email has 3.9 billion users worldwide, making it the most widely used channel for eCommerce companies. Marketers may segment their audiences, send targeted ads, and produce pertinent content for each group.

Without any coding or technological knowledge, you may effortlessly design professional emails. Add text, video, or photographs, then customize their look.

email marketing

A effective email marketing strategy is simpler to develop with SendPulse than you would imagine. You may automatically send emails in reaction to your customers’ activities using Automation 360.

Advertising
Advertising is a potent instrument that aids in business promotion, customer acquisition, and revenue stream expansion. The benefits of online advertising for your company are numerous. They include:

considerably increases the diversity of the audience;
rise in website visitors;
the ability to target and retarget;
permits you to use web analytics tools to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts.
Different ad forms are now available on the Internet to reach consumers. Therefore, understanding the many types of online advertising is essential. The most common varieties are listed below:

advertisements on social media;
marketing using search engines
email advertising
show adverts;
native advertisements
advertisements on video;
website push
mobile advertisements
Here is a fantastic pre-roll film by Artgrid as an example. It provides limitless footage downloads through YouTube video advertising. This pre-roll advertisement, which begins before the main video, actively advertises the advantages of this website.

video marketing

Mobile advertising
Mobile marketing is a type of advertising that uses smartphones to promote goods and services. The optimization of websites, content, landing pages, and emails for mobile use is another aspect of this form of marketing. According to statistics, 80% of users visited the Internet in 2019 using mobile devices.

SMS marketing is a powerful tool used by businesses to advertise their goods. You can see here how Domino’s Pizza notifies customers about their 25% discount through SMS.

SMS advertising

Marketing through reputation
Feedback from consumers is crucial for brands and prospective customers. If a brand has received positive ratings, nearly 3 out of 4 people will trust it. That is why a brand’s success depends on getting favorable online reviews. With reputation marketing, you can emphasize the favorable customer feedback about your company and improve your image through both conventional and digital marketing channels. This kind of marketing aims to improve the brand’s standing in the marketplace and boost sales.

See how GreenBay supermarket displays customer reviews and requests input in the screenshots below. Reviews enable customers to swiftly settle on a purchase by familiarizing them with the key benefits.

Marketing through reputation

using social media
3.5 billion individuals, or 45% of the world’s population, use social media for a variety of purposes. Using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn to interact with their audience is known as social media marketing. It aims to develop a brand community, increase sales, and drive more people to websites.

Remember to create pertinent information, pay attention to your followers’ tastes, and try to engage them in a variety of ways if you want to achieve your goals through social media. Analyze your findings lastly.

Create auto-reply flows for Facebook Messenger and Telegram with SendPulse’s chatbot builder. Facebook Messenger is one of the most widely used communication platforms with 1.3 billion users. So let’s go over how to build a chatbot step by step:

Register for a SendPulse account if you don’t already have one. You only need to log in and select the “Messengers” option if you already have one. Next, select “Connect channels” from the menu.
In order to create your first bot, sign in with Facebook.
Join your chatbot so you may send yourself automated messages and campaigns to test the system.
Create welcome emails that will be delivered to your customers.
Make a trigger, then plan an automated process. You can utilize trigger words, rapid responses, input components, buttons, and more while making a flow. Save the flow when you’ve included all the necessary components, then connect it to your trigger. To construct an automated chatbot flow, adhere to the steps below.

A series of predetermined auto-replies that mimic real-world discussions can be seen here. Users of this particular chatbot can search for real estate, including residential and commercial properties.

design of a chatbot
video advertising
Statistics show that 54% of consumers prefer videos over other forms of brand communication. This indicates that you should consider video marketing if you want your company to become well-known. It enables businesses to offer behind-the-scenes information as well as step-by-step instructions, product or service demonstrations, live events, and announcements.

YouTube is an excellent example of a platform that is frequently used to share and advertise goods and services. YouTube has over 2 billion monthly users. The best technique to market your goods to consumers is using pre-roll advertisements.

You can see how H&M’s video marketing campaign for recycled clothing functions here. The procedures that follow the collection of worn clothing are illustrated in the film. H&M is attempting to advertise similar clothing with this video.

video advertising

optimization for search engines
SEO focuses on improving organic traffic to your website. To maintain good ranks, digital marketing managers frequently focus on cross connections and backlinks, keywords, and original content. It raises the website’s visibility. Keep in mind that you can draw in more clients the more visible you are.

For instance, it is evident that you will focus on the website at the top of the search engine results page while looking for a grammar checker.

SEO

Google Analytics
This is a technique for monitoring user behavior on websites. It helps businesses to get data about client preferences and activities. Analytics tools typically provide information on the amount of visitors to this site, the pages they view while there, how long they stay, and other things. The most widely used tools for analyzing website traffic are Google Analytics, Coremetrics, and Adobe Analytics.

For instance, Google Analytics offers you complete insight into the functionality of your website. With the aid of this software, you can gather data on site visitors, divide them into groups based on their interests, gender, and age, and analyze their behavior and conversion path.

The Google Analytics dashboard is displayed below, and it contains the following data: demographics (age and gender), interests, geo (language and location), behavior, technology, mobile, custom, and benchmarking. You can learn more about the typical age of your website’s visitors in the section below.

Internet Analytics

Knowing the components of a digital marketing strategy is crucial today. Besides, it is equally important to know what to do to design a plan.

How to create a digital marketing plan?

 

• Define the audience
• Establish your goals
• Select a digital marketing strategy
• Create a budget
• Evaluate the results

This step-by-step guide will walk you through the process of creating a well-thought-out digital plan. Follow the 6 steps below.

 

1. Outline your brand

To create a successful marketing plan, first of all, you should outline your brand. It includes the ins and outs of your business to effectively sell it to your customers. Secondly, you should mention the benefits of your company. This will give you an idea of ​​what makes you unique and helps to stand out from competitors.

Also, create your unique selling proposition (USP). It establishes the image of your brand and makes customers trust and choose you over others.

2. Create your buyer persona

A buyer persona is a fictional person that embodies an ideal customer. It enables you to target prospects and develop a product so that it could satisfy the needs of your customers. To create a buyer persona, you should know the background of your clients including their job and family, as well as demographics such as gender, age, location, and income. Ideally, you would know about their interests and communication preferences.

Below, you can see an example of an online shop that knows its target audience. TheVeganKind Supermarket provides customers with cruelty-free products. Although the supermarket is located in the UK, and they are ready to ship to every European country. TheVeganKind donates money to animal charities. So, their team focuses on vegan customers from Europe who are animal lovers.

Targeted offers

3. Establish your goals

Before you decide to enter the market, make sure the goals are set. Your goals will define your tasks, means, methods of achieving them, and channels of communication with the audience. Make sure that both long and short-term goals are set because they are equally important.

You should establish relevant, timely, specific, measurable, and attainable goals so that it is clear in what direction to go. Also, it will be easy to track your implementation and performance. Remember to track goals regularly, if you are eager to improve your strategy, tactics, and methods.

4. Create a digital marketing strategy

Once your objectives are set, you should think about how to accomplish them. Select a digital marketing strategy that suits your company. When creating a marketing plan, it is essential to consider which strategy is the best to reach your buyers. Let’s take a closer look at the main steps of building a marketing strategy.

Make sure your goals are defined. Ask yourself what you are trying to achieve by using this strategy. For instance, if you need to drive more traffic to your website, it is clear that an SEO strategy will be a great fit for you. Then, correctly formulate the goal for your strategy, for example, increasing traffic to a certain page by 50% in 6 months. It should be specific and spelled out.
Analyze your target audience. The second point you should consider is whom you are trying to reach. Creating a buyer persona will help you portray your ideal client as it contains information about preferences, behavior, and habits. After this, the acquired information will help you personalize your email campaigns, create relevant display ads, and segment your customers.
Generate leads. This step includes collecting subscribers. This can be done by applying SendPulse’s free subscription forms or using online and offline events, social media accounts, contests, landing pages, surveys, quizzes, and partner websites for list building.
Nurture your leads. Chatbots, SMS, emails, and social media will help you move your leads towards a purchase. Educate your leads and show them how to use your product to get the most out of it.
Retain your customers. Thank them for every purchase made, ask for their feedback or reviews of your product. You can retain your customers in several ways: provide previous case studies to demonstrate the way you communicate with your audience, set expectations, create a roadmap for clients to be informed about their relationship with your business. Moreover, you can create memorable events, develop loyalty programs, and ask consumers to rate your products and services.
Set up automation. After understanding what works well and what doesn’t, you can automate email workflows to support subscribers during their buyer’s journey. Also, you can create chatbots on Facebook Messenger and Telegram that answer FAQs. You can also schedule sending SMS and web push notifications to your customers. Automation helps you save money and time on routine tasks and devote it to more important things and creativity. SendPulse enables you to create email workflows easily by following our guide.

5. Create a budget

Before implementing your strategy, you should be aware of how much you need to invest. A well thought out budget helps you distribute money properly. You can divide the budget for your business into several parts and direct them to different channels. Figure out how much you are eager to spend to gain some positive results.

You need to consider paying for SEO, social media and email marketing, website design, paid advertising, and more. SendPulse helps small businesses get started for free. You can send email campaigns and create chatbots at no cost.

Here is an example of money allocation. You can enter your company’s name, monthly and yearly budget as well as spending on tools, services, channels necessary for your business success.

Budget allocation

6. Monitor the performance

Lastly, to make sure that you have selected the right strategy and it’s effective, constantly track your performance. This will help you find problems and improve your tactics on the go. Besides, you should also track your organic traffic and virality on social media.