7 essentials for creating your digital marketing plan
A digital marketing plan takes in every aspect of the digital marketing journey, looking at all of the channels at your disposal.
Our last blog looked at what digital marketing is. This week, putting together a successful digital marketing plan is the aim. These 7 essentials will send you on your way toward having an excellent digital marketing strategy.
Evaluate yourself
All good digital marketing plans start with looking at yourself first.
How can you know where you want to go and what you want to do in the future if you don’t know what you’re doing today?
Take some time to look at your business as a whole and ask yourself some simple questions.
- What do you do?
- Why do you do it? (a real tough one!)
- What is your value proposition?
- What is your differentiator? (formally referred to as a unique selling point) What makes you stand out from other suppliers?
- What is your current presence in the digital marketing world?
- What is the current presence of your competitors?
- What are the current trends in digital marketing, especially within your sector?
Identify your customers
Knowing your customers is just as important as knowing yourself.
How will you know who to target if you don’t know who your customers are?
You might already have a vague idea of who your customers are but to have a successful marketing strategy you need to get specific!
By creating a few simple personas, you can help give your marketing some direction.
- Look at your existing followers on social media and note their gender, age, interests, locations, marital status and so on. In-built tracking and metrics can help you out here.
- Talk to your customers, use surveys, and ask for a few pieces of information from new customers
- Group similar data together (For example, men aged 35-50 that mainly follow sports teams) and give them labels
- Treat each of these different groups as if they were individuals and use them to communicate on a personal level.
Choose your platforms
You need to know where your customers spend most of their time.
Do they use Facebook and LinkedIn? Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest? Twitter, Instagram and YouTube?
Find out where your customers are and join them! Check out LinkedIn groups or Twitter #hash tags. It’s no good uploading brilliant YouTube videos if no one in your audience ever sees them!
Set your goals
This is self-explanatory – you need something to work towards and to measure your success against.
Be sure to measure your success in each or your channels carefully. Some will be better for you than others, but unless you measure, you wont know.
Engage with your audience
Like, follow, retweet, comment, reply, share, favourite.
Whenever anyone follows you, interacts with you, says something relevant to you or your business then interact and engage with them!
It’s what people want, it’s what social media is great for, and it’s a key element of a successful digital marketing strategy.
Create content for your audience
People love content – it’s a fact. Do some research and find out what other people in your industry are doing.
Generally, interesting blogs, good images, and guides are all things that can get great reactions from audiences.
Are you a bar? Write a blog about the best DIY cocktails! Accountant and there’s a new tax law coming? Write a blog!
Get sending emails
Emails might seem old hat but they still often held as the best return on investment of any digital marketing channel (eMarketer, 2015).
Regular emails (1 or 2 a month) with great content that link to platforms your customers know and use, responding to their interests and needs, should be an integral part of your digital marketing plan.
Give Mail Chimp a look to help you make the most of this platform.
Summary
Different marketing channels will work better than others. Much depends on your products and services and the audience you serve. But you have to be in it to win it!
Implement these ideas into your digital marketing strategy and you’ll no doubt see a boost to your business and brand awareness!
