Digital marketing planning is no different to any other marketing plan, in fact it’s increasingly strange to have separate plans for ‘digital’ and ‘offline’ since that’s not how your customers perceive your business. However, we’re often required to separate plans for “digital” only based on the way teams and reporting is structured and to help the transition to digital – before it becomes “business as usual”. A common format helps align your plan to other marketing plans!
- Start with the customer. Build your plan around customer insights and needs – not around your products and tactics.
- Keep it flexible. Situations and plans change, especially online, so ensure plans are usable by a clear vision for the year and keeping detail to a shorter term 90-day focus
- Set realistic goals. Include specific objectives in your plans but keep them realistic by fact-based and state assumptions, so they’re easy for others to buy into.
- Keep it Simple! “Jargon light” is best. Again it helps others buy into what you’re saying
- Keep plans up to date. Review and update monthly or quarterly.
- There isn’t a perfect plan. What’s needed changes according to each business!
Creating a structure for your digital marketing plan
Knowing where to start is often the hardest thing when writing a digital marketing plan. So once you have a structure / framework to follow in a table of contents, it’s then almost a matter of filling in the gaps…
Focused on improvement, these guides are for marketers managing the details of digital to ask the right questions of colleagues or agencies about how to get better results. They include:
- Search engine Optimisation
- Google Adwords
- Social media marketing
- Improving results from your website and Landing page conversion
- Email marketing
- Google Analytics
