You must be where your target audience is, and your target audience is in the offline world but also, to a lesser or greater extent, in the online world. In Internet.
It is for this reason that if you intend to have an online presence, first of all, consider making a digital marketing plan. Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, we’ll tell you, from start to finish, everything your digital marketing plan should include. Let’s go there!
What is a digital marketing plan?
To carry out digital marketing actions without prior planning or strategy, it is like driving a car at full speed towards a wall. You are bound to hit the wall. In “marketing” language: you are destined to fail.
The digital marketing plan is made up of a document that collects all the information necessary to reach your goals. What information are we referring to? well the Market studies previous ones that define your situation as a company, the objectives concrete to which you want to reach, the strategies what are you going to follow and planning What are you going to do to get them?
As you will see, throughout this post, we repeat concepts such as goals, strategies and planning. And it is that in these three questions, it is where the success of any campaign or marketing action lies.
What are the advantages of making a digital marketing plan?
Well, as you can imagine, the advantages of carrying out a digital marketing plan for your company are many. These are just a few:
- You will know what situation your company is in. Deepening your knowledge of the market and your sector, but above all, your target audience will help you to know where you are and what your strengths and weaknesses are.
- You will be able to align your strategy with the marketing objectives in an optimal way, which allows all the people and departments of the company to row in the same direction.
- As a result of the above, all the people who make up your company will have the marketing plan as a reference to coordinate with each other and the internal communication will be clear and precise.
- Know them available resources (time, money, personnel, etc.) and the best way to use them will help you avoid unnecessary expenses.
What does a digital marketing plan include?
you know the advantages that a marketing plan brings to your digital communication strategy And now it’s time to tell you the parts in which the digital marketing plan is divided.
Company situation
Knowing where you are is almost as important as knowing where you want to go. The first step is to make a digital situation analysis of your company, to discover the possible improvements of your digital presence. How do you do this?
set your mission
Being clear about your mission is a task that you must do before defining a digital marketing strategy. It is, so to speak, the reason for the existence of your businessyour reason for being.
Defining clear objectives largely depends on how clearly you have specified your mission.
Internal analisis
These are the points that we believe are most important and that you should assess when carrying out an internal analysis of your digital strategy:
- Website. Is it optimized? Is your design responsive?
- Blog. Is it published regularly? Do you have an editorial calendar?
- SEO. Do you know your keywords? What position do you rank in Google?
- Social media. Are they up to date? Do you have a clear strategy?
- Email Marketing. Do you have this tool? If so, do you know some data such as participation rate or openness?
- Social ads. Do you advertise on social networks? Do you know the main metrics?
- Web Analytics. How much traffic does your website have? Which pages receive the most visits?
These are just an example of some questions that you can ask yourself, but there are many more and very useful to know your current situation.
External analysis
It’s time to go deeper into the market, in the sector where you compete and discover future trends. You must be clear if you are in a mature or emerging market. These issues will largely determine the actions to be taken.
Being updated is very important, especially to gain an advantage over your competitors. And this is where I wanted to get to: the competition. It is not a question of copying what your competitors do, rather look at what works for them, what actions have given them good results and the mistakes they have made.
The benchmarkingin this sense, is very useful to identify the best digital practices and success stories of the competition.
SWOT Analysis
You may have heard it a thousand times, but the SWOT is still the quintessential tool for know the real situation of a company.
It will allow you to determine the actions to take advantage of opportunities, prepare for threats and be aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
- weaknesses. These are limitations that your company has and are due, to a large extent, to internal factors.
- threats. Threats are those external factors that can endanger your business.
- Strengths. They are also part of internal factors and are often part of competitive advantages.
- Opportunities. Opportunities are formed by factors external to your business that offer the opportunity to implement improvements.
Develop your buyer persona
Can you define exactly how the profile of your target audience? If the answer is no, you have to know that knowing how he thinks, how he behaves, where he lives, his motivations or needs, will allow you to better focus your digital marketing plan and adapt the content to the needs of your target audience.
You can conduct interviews or dynamics with current and potential customers, and ask them questions about their lifestyle and motivations. This will help you to form some buyer persona profiles with real characteristics.
Objectives
It is time to define the goal, where do you want to go or what do you want to achieve with your digital marketing plan.
Every action you take has to be aimed at achieving these goals, otherwise you will go without a defined course.
If you don’t know where to start to set your goals, we leave you a trick that works very well to set goals for a digital marketing plan: the SMART methodology to set smart goals.
- Specific- specific
- Measurable- Measurable
- Attainable- Reachable
- Realistic- realistic
- Timely- Fixed in time
We give you a practical example that will serve as a reference to set your own goals. If your overall goal is create brand recognition and increase traffic to your websiteyour SMART goal may be to publish 20 posts per month on the blog and social networks (Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn) for the next 6 months and go from 1,500 monthly visits to 4,000 in the next 6 months.
Strategies and action channels
The third step is to define which path we are going to follow. Strategies always depend on the objectives that we have set for ourselves and also, to a great extent, on the available resources.
In short, we have to set How are we going to act to achieve our goals?. This point will be very different depending on the type of business you have.
The Actions that you are going to carry out can be unlimited, but they must complement perfectly with your objectives.
If we continue with the previous example, the general objective was create brand recognition and increase traffic to your website.
The strategy you can follow is to create a profile on Instagram, provide it with content and interact with your audience by asking them questions. On the other hand, to increase traffic to your website, you can create a podcast to support your brand and attract users to your website.
Planning
A key aspect for your digital marketing strategy to come to fruition is plan actions.
Setting your actions on a calendar will help you define when you will carry them out and ensure that your communication aligns with your objectives.
Measurement of results
We come to the last step, but no less important. Measuring your results consists of know how you are going to quantify your actions and return on investment.
Reviewing the results will not only help you to know if your strategy works or not, but also to not deviate from your objectives and fix errors.
The indicators or KPIs that you are going to use depend to a great extent on the actions that you carry out. Indicators on a website are not the same as indicators on social networks.
Although making a Digital Marketing Plan It will take a while, it is worth getting to know your company, the sector you are in and your potential clients. But if you do not want to perform this task, contact us. In , how we carry out a study of your audience in order to know their online behavior and set a strategy according to your needs. We will wait for you!
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