Five Steps to a Successful Digital Marketing Plan

Posted on Aug 29, 2016

Digital marketing should be at the center of any product or service campaign. Most experts agree that it is the single most important asset of modern day marketing, outperforming print advertising, billboards and others mediums at targeting a specific audience. This gives you more bang for your marketing buck. Defining the steps to a successful digital marketing plan is a smart way to ensure that your business meets its marketing goals. These steps only scratch the surface of what is an extremely intricate and well-studied area of marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. Source: Wikipedia

Step One: Set your Foundation

A digital marketing plan will only be successful if you have a great website, and more specifically great landing pages for your online campaigns to point to. Take a look at your current website. Ask yourself the following questions.

Is it responsive?
Does it look professional?
Does it instill trust in your company?
Does it load and respond quickly?
Is it intuitive to users?
Are analytics installed?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, you may want to invest your time in updating your website before embarking upon a digital marketing campaign. If you have questions about your website, start here.

Step Two: Establish Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience will help you set priorities as you create your digital marketing strategy. Know who you’re marketing to. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – determine what needs they want met with a particular service or product.

What age and gender are your customers?
How much money do they make or what occupation do they have in common?
Where are they located? Should you be catering to a local, regional, national or international audience?
What exactly are you attempting to communicate or sell to this specific audience?

Throughout your strategy it is paramount to refer back to this audience model in order to avoid miscommunication and confusion.

Step Three: Develop for SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a key part of improving digital visibility for your brand. Put into layman terms, SEO is a method to help you show as a top result on search engines like Google and Bing. Businesses want to be visible on these pages as it brings potential customers to you in an organic way. Marketing practices are moving further away from the physical and instead rely on digital visibility instead.

What social media platforms does your target audience use?
What news sources do they read?
Who are your competitors and what does their online presence look like?
Are there any other online outlets I can be using to promote my business?
Use your Google Analytics account to see which websites are referring traffic to you and/or which keywords customers are using to find your website.

Content writing is an important part of attracting traffic to your site in an organic fashion. Write new content often for your website and social platforms keeping your target market in mind. Make sure all of the content on your website is up to date and relevant. Make sure there are no broken links or missing images.

Step Four: Choose your Marketing Outlets

By now you should have a good idea of your target market. You should know which social platforms they’re using and which news sources they’re reading. You should know how visitors are currently finding your website and which outlets could be improved upon. Next you will need to set strategy for the next six months or more.

What is your budget for marketing?
Are pay-per-click campaigns in your budget, or do you prefer to stick to “free” SEO and Social?
What will the topics of your blog posts or new pages be over the next several months?

Step Five: Assess and Prioritize your Digital Marketing Plan

You want to closely track market response to your activities and adjust your marketing plan appropriately to either add or remove resources. Create a monthly digital marketing report that includes statistics on your online marketing.

Include key information from your Google analytics reports
What were your top page views from the month?
Note the number of followers from each of your social platforms
If you have pay-per-click campaigns or other paid online marketing campaigns, which ads and keywords are performing best?

The online marketing process is a marathon, not a sprint. It can take time to see results from your digital marketing efforts. Of course, WebWorks89 specializes in creating digital marketing plans for our clients. Let our expert team of digital marketers develop and deploy your strategy from start to finish. To learn more, visit our Digital Marketing page.