Learn how to create an effective digital marketing plan in 7 steps. What to include and view examples to guide your strategy for success.
Alex Chris Updated April 3, 2024
In today’s world, Digital marketing is the only way to increase your visibility on Google and social media networks and get valuable leads and clients for your business.
To make this happen, you must have a good and effective digital marketing plan that will account for all important aspects of online marketing, and this is exactly what you’ll learn in this post.
A digital marketing plan is a document that describes in detail how to promote a company’s products or services online. It outlines what techniques to use to connect with your target audience and which digital marketing channels to utilize to drive online traffic and increase conversions.
Here is a quick example to help you understand this better. John owns a SAAS company selling accounting software to B2B companies.
A digital marketing plan for his case will include things like:
And other marketing tactics to help him achieve his business objectives.
A digital marketing plan will outline the strategy, focus on the most important actions, and help you use your marketing efforts and money wisely. It will also ensure that your company can quickly adapt to any changes and stay ahead of the competition.
I always tell my clients and students that without a solid plan, it’s like driving with your eyes closed. Don’t underestimate the importance of creating a plan before starting your campaigns.
Let’s see the steps to follow to make a good plan.
Before you do anything else, you should set long-term and short-term goals for what you want to achieve with digital marketing.
Any goal you define should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and align with your business objectives.
For example, if your goal is to get more traffic to your website, you can set a long-term goal of increasing your traffic by 20% in 2 years. To achieve this goal, you should set short-term goals to increase your traffic by 5% in the next 6 months.
To align marketing goals with business objectives, think about what it takes to grow your business and set one or more goals to achieve that.
For example, if your business objective is to increase monthly revenue, you can translate that into the following marketing goals:
When setting goals, always look at your current performance and set challenging but realistic goals.
The next step in crafting a winning plan is to define, in as many details as possible, who your target market is. I know from experience that this is a step many companies leave behind, believing they know their customers well.
Creating detailed buyer personas will help you uncover the unique characteristics of the different types of customers you should target in your campaigns.
For example, creating campaigns for young women with children differs from targeting single men. That’s the beauty of digital marketing. You can use your buyer personas to set up sales funnels for each group and market them based on their interests and needs.
When creating buyer personas, you should gather information about your customers, including:
You can use our template below to get started.
When creating your digital marketing plan, you should closely examine your competitor’s strategies, particularly SEO techniques and paid ads campaigns. The reason is simple: your digital marketing campaigns don’t have to be perfect, but they need to be better than your competition’s because this is how you’ll win customers.
For example, to rank higher for a keyword in SEO, you don’t have to create superb content—you just have to create better content than your top competitors.
Find out who your main competitors are, examine their market share, promotional strategies, and, in general, their online presence. Don’t copy them, but get ideas and look for gaps in their marketing that you can exploit.
You can use the guides below to perform a competitor analysis.
The next step is to specify which digital marketing channels you’ll use in your campaigns. As mentioned above, you can set multiple goals (long-term and short-term) involving one or more marketing channels.
The most common types of digital marketing to use in your plan are:
For each channel, you should set SMART goals and assign ownership to those responsible for the implementation. For example, if you work in a company with an in-house digital marketing team, you can agree with the SEO manager about the goals of SEO for next year and how these can be achieved.
When setting your marketing budget, it’s important to consider various factors. Digital marketing packages cost a few hundred to several thousand per month if you outsource all your marketing.
Follow these tips to utilize your budget efficiently:
Allocate a portion of income on marketing: The first thing to decide is how much to spend on marketing. A higher percentage might be necessary for startups and businesses looking to grow aggressively, while a lower percentage for established businesses aiming for steady growth might be more appropriate.
Choose which services to outsource and what to do in-house: Outsourcing all your marketing to an agency will incur a higher cost than following a hybrid model. Some tasks (like posting content on your social media pages) don’t require expertise. To save money, it’s better to handle these tasks in-house and hire an agency or consultant for the tasks that require expert knowledge, such as ongoing SEO work and PPC management.
Allocate your budget to the channels that generate the highest ROI: In an ideal world, you could use all marketing channels to promote your business, but that’s not the best approach. Run pilot campaigns on different channels to see what’s working best, and then allocate your budget to the most profitable channels. From experience, these are likely to be SEO and Google Ads.
Start with a low budget and gradually increase it: Even if you can afford to spend more on particular campaigns, starting with a low budget is highly recommended. As a rule of thumb, you should keep spending money on a campaign as long as it generates a positive ROI. When you reach top performance, move your budget to other channels.
This is usually the case with Google and Facebook Ads. Allocate a low budget to give the system time to optimize your campaigns, and then gradually increase it until the CPA (cost per acquisition) is at acceptable levels. When the cost to get a lead or make a sale exceeds a certain threshold, it’s time to spend money on other campaigns or channels.
Once you gather all the information in your document, it’s time to create a marketing calendar and set a date for each important task or campaign. Normally, you won’t execute all actions at once. As noted above, your plan should include both short-term and long-term goals.
To stay organized, create a calendar and decide who will execute a task and when. Your plan should include specific dates to review your progress and adjust your strategy.
Remember to account for holidays and the time needed to prepare the necessary material for each campaign. This includes time-consuming tasks like creating content (blog posts and videos), researching, etc.
Once your calendar is ready, you’ve completed the first step in executing your digital marketing plan, but you should not stop there. It may sound unnecessary to stress this, but we’ve seen many companies fail to execute their plan.
The most common reasons were setting unrealistic goals and overestimating the return from paid campaigns, resulting in running out of budget faster than expected.
No marketing plan can be executed from start to finish without changes. I’ve been doing this for 20+ years and have never seen a campaign perform as originally planned. This means monitoring your campaigns regularly is crucial to your success.
You must track the right metrics and KPIs to monitor a campaign effectively. Each channel has its own set of important metrics you should track. For instance:
For SEO campaigns – you should track keyword rankings, website traffic, impressions, and organic CTR.
For PPC campaigns – you should track ad CTR, keyword quality score, impressions, and cost-per-click (CPC).
The above is just a small example. Read our digital marketing metrics post for a complete list of all KPIs and instructions on measuring them.
Here is a pro tip for you: To make data-driven decisions, you should try to gather all data in a single place, and Google Looker Studio (Free) is a great tool for this. Looker Studio can connect to several sources, including Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Google Analytics, and you can combine the data into meaningful reports and dashboards.
View the gallery of ready-made report templates to get started.
Here is a short overview of how the above tips can be transformed into an actionable plan for a website selling dog food.
Step 1: Set Your Digital Marketing Goals and Objectives
Step 2: Define Your Target Audience and Build Buyer Personas
Step 3: Analyze Your Competitor’s Strategies
Step 4: Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels
Step 5: Define Your Marketing Budget
Step 6: Create a Marketing Calendar & Execute Your Plan
Step 7: Monitor Results & Adjust Your Strategy
Remember, success in digital marketing doesn’t happen overnight. It requires constant monitoring, tweaking, and a deep understanding of your audience. Making a digital marketing plan is just the beginning.
Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn.
