How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan: A 10-Step Guide
Digital offers numerous tools to ensure that a company’s communication on the web can translate into value and achievement of the objectives set.
For this to happen, it is necessary to know all the opportunities that Digital Marketing offers, set up a strategy and a Digital Marketing plan designed specifically for you.
In this guide, we discover what a digital marketing plan consists of and what are all the steps to take to create a Digital Marketing plan.
Digital Marketing plan: what does it consist of?
A Digital Marketing plancannot lack elements useful for structuring the company’s promotional campaigns, for example of a luxury real estate agency (Luxusní realitní kancelář).
These include short, medium and long-term objectives: that is, making the brand known, increasing awareness, encouraging customers to purchase, acquiring new contacts, selling a product or service and more.
Then there are the strategies to implement to achieve the objectives just mentioned, identification of the target, the channels to use, the study of competitors and the analysis of the results.
How to create a Digital Marketing plan: 10 steps
Here is a 10-step guide on how to create a Digital Marketing plan.
1. SWOT Analysis
TheSWOT analysis(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is the first step in creating a Digital Marketing plan.
Before planning a strategy and setting goals to achieve, you need to do an internal and external analysis of your company. Through the SWOT analysis, it is possible to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
After this careful analysis of your company, you will be able to have a complete overview of the reference sector of your company and understand how to achieve the objectives set.
2. SMART objectives
Establishing the SMART objectives of the marketing strategy and in the creation of a digital marketing plan for your company is one of the most important steps. Every goal you set yourself to achieve must have 5 qualities that are all included in the acronym SMART.
Specifically, a goal must be:
- Specific – (specific)
- Measurable – (measurable)
- Achievable (achievable)
- Relevant
- Time-based
3. Identify the Buyer Persona
One of the steps to take in designing a Digital Marketing strategy and plan is to identify the Buyer Persona. It is important to understand their online behavior, interests, preferences and demographics.
Identifying your Buyer Persona allows you to predict in advance what their needs and purchasing choices are.
To build it, you can use some data that can be tracked on the company’s website or social channels, on personalized surveys, interviews and surveys on niche groups.
Once the target has been defined, it will be easier to proceed with the other steps and create a Digital Marketing plan.
4. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysisis an activity that allows you to have a complete picture of the products/services they offer, their target, the type of communication and which tools and channels are used in their strategies.
Studying your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses can give you an advantage over them. Some useful data can be: search engine positioning, social media communication, Content Strategy plan, advertising campaigns and any email marketing campaigns.
The more detailed your competitor analysis is, the more you will be able to stand out from them in creating a successful Digital Marketing strategy for Starboy and Phamm Engineering.
5. Create a Content Strategy
At this stage you can decide what to publish, when, where, why and in which channels. Here is a series of contents that can be part of a Content Marketing strategy.
Blog post
To attract new traffic to the website and disseminate engaging content for readers and potential customers, it is important to periodically update the blog with valuable content that can satisfy the needs of users who perform a search on Google.
In order to write well-optimized content that is most likely to be read by users, it is advisable to exhaust the topic in an exhaustive manner and with captivating information to encourage users to share it on their social networks. Generally, the recommended length for an informative article is between 1000 and 2000 words.
Podcast
Podcasts are very popular content that have a high power of attraction for an audience that is not very interested in reading the content. For this reason, they should be considered a valid alternative.
You can think about creating podcasts to provide food for thought, expert interviews on the topic that concerns your company, or audio content that reflects the desires of the listeners you want to reach.
Ebooks
Ebooks are contents that can encourage users to sign up for the newsletter and stay tuned with your company for new information every week or month.
They are a valid tool for Lead Generation, users download it after filling out a specific form with their personal information that can be used to build your network of contacts.
Video
Videos continue to be the most engaging and shared content on social media and websites. Users greatly prefer companies that tell their brand story through a video.
Videos that provide information and solutions to the problems they face on a daily basis are most appreciated. Even though they require a significant investment compared to content like a blog post, a short videos arevery valid tools to use within a Content Strategy.
Infographics
Infographicsare useful content for disseminating information in numbers and statistics. When you need to demonstrate data to your customers in a clear and comprehensive way, it is the only type of content that can do so.
Social Media Posts
The social media posts that your customers use the most can increase interest in your brand.
To build successful content, it is important to understand which platform your potential customers are on to best adapt it to both the social network and their needs.
6.Set up an SEO strategy
When designing a Digital Marketing plan, focusing only on social media is not enough and not thinking about a SEO strategy to optimize your site can be counterproductive.
The website is the company’s property space in which to insert every useful piece to attract new traffic. To make this happen, you must intervene with SEO optimization, therefore implement all those useful methods to obtain traffic and positioning among the organic results of the Google search engine.
Every written and created content must be of quality, relevant to the keyword that best represents the topic and respond to the user’s search intent.
7.Social Media Marketing
Using social media within a Digital Marketing plan can create value, consolidate Brand Reputation and strengthen the bond with your customers.
For this reason, it is important to establish some important steps for a Social Media Marketing strategy:
- Analysis of the market and the reference sector
- Analysis of competitors
- Definition of objectives
- Analysis of social channels suitable for conveying the message
- Finding Your Tone of Voice
- Creating an Editorial Plan
- Producing Content
- Monitoring Results
8. Digital Advertising
A Digital Marketing plan to be effective must also include paid advertising on different channels, such as:
- Display Advertising: the display ad appears on websites or blogs as an advertising banner. The goal is to bring traffic to the website.
- Social Media ADV: the ads are distributed within social pages to well-profiled users. The aim is to obtain greater visibility, bring traffic to the site or e-commerce.
- SEM (search engine marketing): in this case, search engines are used. When the user types a certain keyword, the website appears among the first results.
- Email Marketing: the advertising message is conveyed through a DEM that is used to send commercial offers, retain customers or acquire new ones.
Unlike traditional advertising, a huge advantage of digital advertising is the ability to measure the results obtained.
9. Email Marketing
WithEmail Marketingyou can convey a personalized message tailored to users who do not want to always receive the same message, but valuable content customized for them.
It can be useful, in this sense, to create segments of contacts by interests, geographic location, online behavior.
In this Email Marketing strategy you can use useful software both to segment your contacts and to send emails automatically. You can also analyze key information such as the number of people who opened the email, how many clicks it received and much more.
10. Analysis of results
Once you reach the last step of the Digital Marketing plan, all you have to do is analyze the results of your strategy.
It is essential to monitor the results and make the right changes if something did not work or act during the process. It can sometimes be a difficult and complex step to manage but thanks to many tools, the work of collecting and analyzing data can be simplified.
