There is no doubting that digital marketing is becoming ever more important to the success of your business, but actually knowing what to do and where to begin can be rather confusing. Before you even think about any kind of implementation, you should put together a simple digital marketing action plan.
Why create a digital marketing action plan?
Many businesses approach digital marketing without giving much thought to what they are actually doing. It’s all too easy to throw up a website or a Facebook page and simply hope for the best.
Before you begin, it is important to get clear on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts and then set out a realistic plan for achieving your goals. By putting together a simple strategy, you will be able to take focused action and therefore be much more likely to be successful.
1. Do your research
Many businesses settle with just marketing to anybody and everybody and hoping to get a few of those people to buy, with no real marketing strategy to target audience. It’s more important than ever to choose a target audience to maximize your marketing efforts.
The first stage is to gather as much information about your customers as you possibly can. Who is your target audience? What do they do and what motivates them? What makes them tick? What pains them and how does your business relieve that pain? Most importantly, where do they hang out online?
Research can be done a number of ways including focus groups, hiring a research firm, or simply asking your friends and family if they would buy your product and why.
2. Set an overall digital marketing objective/goal
The next step is to decide on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. Your overall goal might be something like:
“Generate 50 new leads each month and convert at least 20 of those leads into new customers.”
Figure out how much money your average customer is worth and convert your goal into dollars. For example, if an average customer buy is worth $200, and you want to add an extra $1,000 per month to your business, you need to get 5 new buying customers per month. You might need to reach out to 25 people to get 10 people interested of which 5 will buy.
3. Decide on your digital marketing channels
Based on the information you now have, you can then decide on what digital marketing channels you will use to achieve your goal. For example:
- Your website
- Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
For each channel/campaign, you should set a specific objective and key performance indicator. For example:
- “Increase website traffic by 20% before the end of December 2017”
- “Add 500 new subscribers to our email newsletter each month and convert
at least 20 of them into paying customers”
- “Generate 200 new leads from Facebook advertising in the next 30 days”
4. Plan your actions
You should set out exactly what you are going to do – each day, each week, and each month. Make sure that these actions are realistic and manageable so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
Whatever marketing channel you decide to use, you should lay out a specific, daily action plan consisting of exactly what you are going to do each day get those customers. If your main method is cold email outreach, you may set a goal to send 100 emails per day, 5 days a week. If that’s too much or too little, you can always adjust your daily tasks.
If you’re using paid advertising, you will need to set a daily budget for lead generation, and immediately follow up with those leads that come in daily.
These activities should be tracked using tracking tools like Excel spreadsheets, a notebook, a calendar, or phone apps.
5. Closely monitor results
It is important to closely monitor and measure your results, so you need to decide on exactly how you’re going to do that. As an example, website traffic can be tracked through Google Analytics, or your email marketing might be tracked through your autoresponder service (e.g. MailChimp).
When you have run your campaign for a few days and weeks, you should look at the data and find ways to optimize your method to keep driving down the cost of your leads. If you’re running Facebook ads, you should review your lead cost and split test to see if another ad will perform better.
Or if you’re using email marketing and getting a 3% response rate after 2 weeks, try changing your email wording or subject line to see if you get a higher response rate.
****
If you don’t have a plan, start one! You might be overwhelmed with all the different options, but you should pick one or two methods and run with them. Don’t be afraid to outsource your marketing activities to a digital marketing company who can help with everything from market research to Facebook/Google advertising to email marketing.
