Do you plan and analyze your digital marketing efforts?
Following your gut and implementing random digital marketing practices does not cut it in the hypercompetitive digital marketing landscape.
Without a proper plan, you would only end up going around in circles. It would be nearly impossible for you to secure the budget for your projects and prove your marketing ROI. Above all, not determining marketing goals means you cannot monitor the performance of your campaigns.
Here is how to build an online marketing plan that works.
Perform a Situation Analysis
Before you start building a marketing strategy, you need to assess the effectiveness of your company’s current online presence. Perform a SWOT analysis to identify your marketing strategy’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
You should also perform thorough competitor research. What are the most distinct advantages and disadvantages of their marketing strategies? Are there any marketing opportunities they are missing? Use the gaps in their marketing efforts to build trust with customers and create marketing campaigns that resonate with your audiences.
Build Buyer Personas
Casting your net wide when building a digital marketing strategy is never a good idea. Just because you have expanded your email list does not mean you will boost sales. To create successful marketing campaigns that convert, you first need to narrow down your reach and focus on audiences that are interested in purchasing from you. That is why you need to create buyer personas or refine existing ones.
Precisely because of that, your buyer personas need to be detailed, realistic, and data-driven. They should include demographic information about your target customers, such as their age, location, gender, marital status, education, and income. Additionally, analyze customers’ psychographic data such as their needs, purchasing habits, behaviors, pain points, and goals.
By collecting customer demographic and psychographic data, you will know what drives your customers. That way, you will create marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience, increase engagement, and drive conversions.
Set SMART Goals
Building a marketing campaign makes no sense if you do not know what your goals are. For example, online designer clothing shops can have different objectives, from increasing website traffic and growing an email list to increasing brand awareness and boosting sales. Each of these objectives requires specific marketing techniques, metrics, and targets.
Therefore, defining your digital marketing goals is critical for the success of your campaigns. Your goals need to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
Choose the Right Marketing Tactics
Now that you have determined your goals and created buyer personas, the next step is choosing marketing tactics that will help you achieve your goals. As mentioned above, different marketing goals require the implementation of specific marketing practices.
Say you want to maximize the number of Instagram followers by 20% in three months. To achieve that goal, you may want to host a giveaway or organize a contest to put your brand in front of the right audiences and engage them. You can also create unique Instagram content, such as high-quality images, live videos, engaging stories, etc. Instagram ads are also an effective way to get noticed by the right audiences and create engaging user experiences.
The goal is to choose effective marketing channels that are in line with your marketing efforts and help you achieve the goals you have previously set.
Create a Marketing Budget Plan
Before you start choosing your marketing channels and implementing your ideas, you first need to estimate your marketing budget. Simply put, your marketing budget is the planned amount of money you can spend on your marketing activities.
Having a marketing budget plan is essential for several reasons. First, if you do not estimate your online marketing budget, resources may be spent somewhere else. Second, when creating a budget plan, you will know how much money you spend on your marketing campaigns. That will make it easier for you to calculate your marketing ROI, too.
To calculate your marketing budget, you need to:
- Determine the marketing goal acquisition cost.
- Calculate how much it costs you to create an average piece of content.
- Estimate your monthly operational costs, such as marketing tools, hosting services, SSL certificates, salaries, expenses, team education, etc.
Ready to Build a Marketing Plan?
The foundation of any successful digital marketing campaign comes down to building a detailed marketing plan.
For starters, it is vital to build/update buyer personas and analyze your competitors. The goal is to learn what is already working in your industry so you can create relevant and engaging marketing campaigns.
By setting clear goals, you will make data-backed marketing decisions, track the right marketing metrics, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Choose marketing campaigns that align with your goals and help you achieve the desired targets faster.
Finally, build a marketing budget plan to allocate resources strategically and calculate your marketing ROI.
Do you have a digital marketing plan? Share your experiences in the comments.
Eve Anderson is a marketing specialist turned blogger. Interested in sports and exciting travel destinations. Love to share content that can inform people.
