The importance of a plan:
There are several benefits to be gained when creating your plan. Among these advantages:
Audience Knowledge: Marketing and the act of promoting your business to an audience is the same in the digital space. When you understand your audience, you will be able to create personal ads that your audience will react to.
Effective Resource Management: Organizing a marketing campaign requires a certain budget. If few resources are devoted to it, it will not reach its potential. Conversely, if too many resources are devoted to it, the costs will be excessive.
By properly defining your customers in their equivalent channel, your companies can optimize their expenses, reduce costs, and increase their ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment).
Inter-Coordination: An excellent marketing plan that simulates results is a prediction of failure. This knowledge is an opportunity to unify the different departments in your company to work towards the same goal.
Your Plan Strategy:
A strategy is different from a plan. The former spells out how to do it, the latter spells out what to do. In the marketing space, these two aspects are inseparable as they complement each other.
The strategy of a digital marketing plan seeks to achieve the sole purpose of attracting, converting, and retaining a customer. To conduct this process, the following elements must be considered:
Your Industry: To plan an effective strategy, your company must have in-depth knowledge of their industry. This study will allow you to understand your competitors, trends, products, and services like your…
Your Data: Analysis of data such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, SEO effectiveness and SEM, ROMI…clarifies the situation of your business and facilitates simulations.
SWOT Analysis: This is a method used by large corporations to find out how to navigate their space in a market. These four elements are: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Your Goals: To quantify your success, you need to set goals. However, avoid writing vague goals like “increase sales” because they are difficult to execute and identify.
Rather, you can follow the “SMART” system. An acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Periodic. If you apply SMART to the previous goal, it will go:
“Get 20% more website sales over the next 3 months by optimizing search engine optimization (SEO), launching email marketing campaigns and improving content social media.”
Customer Persona: As defined, marketing has a strong correlation with your customer base. Then, the own categorization of your customer is a treatment called the “Buyer Persona” or the customer persona.
To create this persona, your company must study their preferences, age, gender, region, their thinking, needs… or determine the Buyer’s journey which is the route your customer takes to find your product or service.
Digital Marketing Channels: One of the advantages of digital marketing is the variety of possibilities on different platforms. Once your business understands its audience, it can promote its services on the platform that suits their preference.
For example, if your audience is young, you should consider social media marketing. On the other hand, if he is older, email marketing will be more effective.
To understand the different channels of digital marketing, you can read our article here.
Customer Service: Contrary to popular thoughts, customer service is also part of your marketing plan. Indeed, this service can convince both customers and prospects to come back and become buyers.
- For existing customers: Send messages to know their satisfaction, add exclusive content, private access to new products, and ask their opinion for future decisions.
- For potential prospects: Add them to the email newsletter, offer discounts for the first purchase, and share educational content frequently.
Budget: Finances should be the last step in a marketing strategy. Indeed, working from the start around a budget limits the creativity of your efforts.
After determining the items listed in this list, a company could then set a certain budget to distribute among the various marketing channels.
- For a B2B company: 2% to 5% of turnover.
- For a B2C company: 5% to 10% of turnover.
Conclusion
After executing your digital marketing plan, you need to track the performance of your campaign and adjust accordingly. The data to consider are: virality, impressions, traffic, click-through rate (CTR)…
Creating a marketing plan is the first step you can take to turn your business into a successful one.