5 Steps to an Outstanding Online Digital Marketing Plan

Do you have a digital marketing or sales team working to generate leads and sales for your business? You must have an online digital marketing plan in some form. Successful companies revisit their marketing strategies every year. They make adjustments and marketing plans with yearly sales targets and goals in mind.

Without a firm marketing plan, things can get messy. You will face problems in hiring and outsourcing resources, budgeting, securing projects, and miss annual goals if you don’t have a firm digital or online marketing plan.

Keep in mind that the marketing plans vary with your industry and goals.

Here are 5 easy steps to create an outstanding online marketing plan:

1. Perform SWOT Analysis for Digital Marketing
2. Do Market Research to Understand Your Audience
3. Select SMART goals
4. Review Your tactics
5. Set your budget

1. Perform SWOT Analysis for Digital Marketing

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is a strategic planning technique business use in business and strategic planning. This is the first step in the online business planning and goal setting process.

You should have an understanding of your products or services and overall business. How do you compare your business with your competitors? How do your competitors’ products or services are better than yours? What are they missing? What competitive edge do you have? Why customers would choose your products or services over your competitors’? you should have a clear understanding of your SWOT.

Strategic entrepreneurs and leaders find the greatest insights hiding behind SWOT. ― Richie Norton, author of Résumés Are Dead and What to Do About It

2. Do Market Research to Understand Your Audience

Successful online businesses should know what their target audience is.

For example, if you sell gaming CDs and gadgets for PCs your target audience is most like to be a younger audience. People over the age of 45 or 50 are less likely to buy your product. According to a blog post on survey research conducted by Superdata Research, 33% of men and 9% of women gamers are in the age brackets of 18–29.

Another example is if you offer gardening services or products, your target audience is likely to be an audience who likes gardening and is buy gardening related materials and supplies or services. The younger audience is less likely to buy your service or maybe are indirect customers.

You have to do research and analyze the market to identify a suitable audience who will buy your product or services.

There are many effective ways to do market research. These include surveys, interviews, and field trials. Also, you should know which market research method is best for you.

3. Select SMART Goals

Companies that provide digital marketing services use and suggest setting SMART goals for their clients. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

For example, if you own an online store, you would use ecommerce marketing services of a digital marketing agency to increase the sale by 25% in two months.

The goal should be:

• specific: increase sales by 25%
• measurable i.e. increase in the number of sales
• attainable i.e. can be achieved
• relevant i.e. online store wants to get more customers
• time-bound i.e. two months.

Learning how to set and achieve goals is simply a skill. Once you learn this skill, the whole world is your oyster. – Khoa Bui, The Goal Setting Playbook: How To Achieve Your Big Goals And Transform Your Life

4. Choosing the Right Tactics

Once you analyzed your business and prepared the goals, then choose the right tactics. There are several platforms and tactics you can choose from that work best for you. Many companies use email marketing platforms to build an audience of potential customers and sell them products or services. There are some really good email marketing services available that you can choose to manage your audience and send marketing emails.

Online stores use SEO marketing to increase traffic to their website where they sell. If your goal is to increase customer engagement you can build an audience on social media platforms. You can hire a social media marketing agency to design interesting and informative posts, and run ads to increase customer reach.

5. Set Your Budget

Before you implement an online digital marketing plan you need to set a budget.

If you decide to hire a digital marketing agency to do online marketing, design a business site, and optimize it.  For this purpose, you will need a budget. Without a budget, you will not be able to reach your goals.

If you are starting a business and low on budget you can set smaller and achievable goals under the available budget.

You should also consider the assets that you will need such as software tools and content for marketing. A good idea is to use the available resources to save the online marketing expense and make a budget for digital marketing.