Plan > Digital Marketing Blueprint

Why

Exponential digital growth across the world means that a strong focus on digital marketing is required right from the start. Why? Because digital marketing transcends physical borders. A good digital marketing strategy will allow you to reach a global marketplace from anywhere in the world, for less money than traditional marketing. More importantly, you can get to know your audience personally and track responses to your marketing efforts almost immediately. You can then realign your marketing according to responses to ensure a fully optimized digital marketing strategy.

How

Consider the following when building a blueprint for a digital marketing strategy:

• Build customer personas: You can’t start on a marketing strategy if you don’t know who you’re marketing to! Define quantitative demographics (age, gender, location, income, job title, etc.) and qualitative information (tastes, needs, preferences), and create a detailed profile for each of your personas. Here’s a tool that could help

• Identify your goals and tools: Your goals should correlate directly to your business goals. E.g. If your business goal is to increase online sales by 20%, your digital marketing goal could be to generate 40% more leads via digital channels. Measuring your activity is a key part of the evaluation to track the goals. Check this out to see what tools would work best for your business.

• Evaluate your existing digital channels: Gather what you have, and categorize each of your channels, so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media. Your digital marketing strategy ideally would incorporate elements of all three channels, all working together to help you reach your goal.

• Plan and review your content: If you’ve done some digital marketing previously, review your content and decide what content would help you reach your goals. If you’re starting off, the data gathered from doing steps 1 & 2 above should help you decide on what content will help you reach out to your target audience. Based on your findings, create a content plan. This will be your bread and butter so spend some time here! A content calendar is a great way of managing your content plan - we’ve found the tool Trello to be very effective.

• Bring it all together: By this point, you should have clear customer personas, marketing-specific goals, an evaluation of your existing digital channels and a content plan. Now bring it together in a cohesive document; a spreadsheet makes a good canvas.

References

Structuring a Digital Marketing Plan 7 Digital Marketing Strategies A Step-By-Step Guide to Structuring a Digital Marketing Plan