What is a digital marketing plan, and why do businesses need a digital marketing plan? What are the sections of a digital marketing plan? What’s included in a digital marketing plan? What are the steps in creating a digital marketing plan?
The questions could go on and on when it comes to creating a digital marketing plan.
In this article, we are going to share with you 7 unspoken or unwritten things about digital marketing plans you should know. We will also talk about why eCommerce businesses need a marketing plan and how to create a comprehensive marketing one for your business.
What Is the Role of a Digital Marketing Plan?
According to Johnathan Goodrich, an expert online marketer who is also the author of the article “pay for papers,” every business needs a marketing plan to succeed in this competitive business world. Unfortunately, most small business owners don’t prioritize the creation of a comprehensive marketing plan. They experiment with different marketing techniques that result in moderate success.
There are millions of online marketing tools businesses can take advantage of to stay ahead of the competition. Brands use VYPER as a viral marketing tool to easily build giveaways, referrals, and reward programs.
However, no business should do without a well-developed marketing plan.
The major role of a marketing plan is to identify marketing purposes and
shows how marketing tactics will help companies attain their overall goals and
objectives.
For instance, a new business wanting to grow would create a marketing plan
that highlights the strategies that can increase its customer base.
More Business has done a good example of a well-mapped marketing plan.
What Is a Marketing Plan?
A marketing plan is a
report that outlines a company or organization’s strategy for a month, one
year, and more.
A business could create a marketing plan that outlines the strategies it plans to use to attract new customers, engage with existing ones, or promote their brand.
Usually, a marketing
plan helps businesses to align all their marketing initiative with the main
strategy, to achieve maximum ROI, make use of time and resources appropriately.
Given that a marketing
plan is a driving force for all the companies marketing undertaking, it should touch
on every component of a company’s marketing mix.
A comprehensive
marketing plan would touch on the following elements:
Executive summary- This section explains the aim of your marketing
plan.
Mission statement- This section describes the company.
Trackable goals- This section shows how the company will track success, including the key performance indicators a company is focusing on.
Situation analysis- This section will examine the industry in the
next five to ten years and how the company is adapting.
Target market- This section defines the company’s existing and
potential target market.
SWOT analysis- Your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the industry and comparison to its business rivalries.
Buyer personas- What do customers like? What makes them buy
your products, etc.
Promotion strategy- Havingknown who your target customers are; this section outlines the strategies a company will take to convert them into buyers.
Why Your Online Business Needs a Comprehensive Marketing Plan
Regardless of the type
of online business you operate, without a marketing plan, the odds of failing
are high. Well, there are thousands of reasons your business needs a marketing
plan, but here are the three key reasons.
1. Marketing Attracts Sales
Customers buy products of a company or business they know. They don’t buy from strangers. If they don’t know who you are, what you sell, and why they should buy from you, and not the next business, don’t expect any sales.
That’s where a
marketing plan becomes helpful. It will help you determine what your customers
need and how you can provide them with exactly that.
A marketing plan
outlines how to engage with your existing customers before acquiring new ones.
2. A Marketing Plan Gives You Forethoughts
In addition to helping
your business make sales, a marketing plan will give you greater ideas of where
your business stands in the industry and how it should adapt to the existing
and future trends.
3. A Marketing Plan Is the Driver of All Your Marketing Strategies
A marketing plan will guide all your business efforts. It will assist you in promoting your company’s products or services to a targeted audience determined by the marketing plan.
Other crucial marketing aspects such as your social media marketing strategy will also play a role in achieving the goals set out by your marketing plan.
Should Your Marketing Plan Be Specific or Generalized?
Now that you’ve known the importance of having a marketing plan for your online business, should it touch on specific aspects of your marketing strategy or generalize the aspects?
Generally, whether
specific or generalized a marketing plan should be, depends on your business
and the whole strategy.
Some businesses would need a more generalized marketing plan, while others would need a more focused and comprehensive one. None of these can be wrong or right, regardless, each (generalized and specific) has its good sides and bad sides.
Let’s take a look at
each approach.
A Generalized Approach
When you decide to take
a generalized or broad approach, it means you are going to improve everything
on your marketing and advertising strategies.
Although this would be a good approach, especially if you have a new marketing plan and you’ve never improved in these areas. Still, you won’t have the fine details necessary for creating a comprehensive marketing plan.
The Good Sides of This Approach
Why This Approach Falls Short
The Specific Approach
When you use a specific approach, for instance, focus on specific channels of marketing such as search engine optimization, paid media, etc. you will be able to measure success and know how effective each channel is. This approach is suitable, especially if a channel isn’t helping your business achieve its goals.
The Good Sides of This Approach
Why This Approach Falls Short
With that being said, let’s take a look at
each section of a creative marketing plan before we find out the unspoken
things about it that you need to know.
What are the key elements of a marketing plan?
The decision to create
a marketing plan for your online business is an important one.
Ideally, your marketing
plan should touch on the following sections.
a) Executive Summary
This is the first
section of your marketing plan. Sometimes it’s recommended to write it last.
Here, your marketing
plan should answer the following questions.
b) Mission Statement
Who is your target
audience? What are you selling? Why are you in business? What are your target
customers’ problems that you intend to solve?
c) Trackable Goals
Which KPIs are you
focusing on from each marketing channel?
For instance:
d) Situation Analysis
What’s the existing
state of your business? What’s the future of your business? Where does your
business get the most revenue from?
e) Target Customers, Market, Audience, Prospects
Who are you planning to
sell to?
This section outlines
your target market including their job, demographics and many other aspects.
Note that you can’t
sell to everyone. For this reason, it’s vital to define your ideal customers, what
problems they are facing that make them buy from you and not your competitor.
f) SWOT Analysis
Generally, SWOT
analysis is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This is where
you find out how you intend to beat your competitors.
Your marketing plan
should answer the following questions:
g) Buyer Personas
Your marketing plan
tries to get a sneak pick of who your anticipated customers look like, their
characteristics, their likes and dislikes, etc.
h) Promotion Strategy
The marketing plan
should outline the channels you intend to use, the frequency in which you
intend to publish content and the type of content.
This section should
touch on both the digital and traditional marketing efforts.
Design Tips to Help You Create a Comprehensive Marketing Plan
Well, even though your
marketing plan shouldn’t be pretty, you need to strive to have a design that
attracts and convinces your prospective customers.
Here, you can use a
marketing plan template, especially if you are doing it yourself and not a
designer.
Follow these design
tips to nail your marketing plan.
1. Know Your Target Customers
As a rule, you and your
team should know who you are targeting before you make any marketing decisions.
That means, before you write a marketing plan for your business, you must have
defined who you want to target.
2. Highlight Essential Metrics, Statistics, and Numbers in Your Marketing Plan
You need to make your
plan as simple and straightforward as possible yet convincing. For this reason,
coming up with a hierarchy of information in your page design would help you.
To visualize essential metrics, charts and pictograms would do it better. You could change the color of your important statistics and numbers as well so that you can see them from a distance.
3. Your Design Should Be Driven by Your Main Marketing Goal
The major aim of your
marketing plan is to identify your main marketing goal. This should inform your
marketing plan design.
4. Envisage Your Top Channels Using Charts and Pictograms
You must have channels
that are performing better than others and your marketing team should know them.
This would help you to know where to put in more resources. Is your referral
traffic giving you greater returns than paid ads, are you getting more organic
traffic?
With that in mind, let’s
take a look at the unspoken or unwritten things about marketing plan you should
now
Unspoken Things about Online Marketing You Should Know
Online marketing is a
vital tool for the success of every online business. If you are just getting
started with online marketing, you can find the game challenging.
Follow these unspoken
things to have a successful online marketing strategy.
1.
Listen
To be successful with
your online marketing strategy, open your ears more and limit your mouth.
Join the conversation
when your target audience posts content, get to know their likes and dislikes.
Spy on important
influencers in your industry and understand what they are talking about via
their social media channels. This way, it would be easier to reach out to them.
2. Stay Active
If you’ve observed the
most successful online business for a while you must have seen how they share a
lot via their social media channels. Although quality content is crucial, how
often you share it with your target audience matters a lot.
If more people get to
know about your existence and your products, it shows that your marketing
strategy is effective. But this can only be achieved when you share more
content and at the time when your prospective customers are active.
3. Create Mouthwatering Content
Mouthwatering content
or quality content is one that people want to read and not one that you want
people to read. Expert online marketers will tell you to focus on quality than
quantity.
It is, therefore,
better to have 1000 readers who engage with your content than tens of thousands
who connect with you and disappear forever.
That’s where a content
marketing plan becomes helpful. You should research your target audience,
understand their pain points, the information they are looking for and give
them right that.
Here, you can mix
visual content with word-based content. A good rule of thumb is to share
quality content less frequently than to share subpar content more frequently.
4. Consistency is Everything
Be a reliable source of
information and be consistent. Some online marketers would just publish content
and leave it there. Publish content and be there for your target audience. If
they need help, they should get it from you immediately.
The reason why many
companies lose followers on their social media channels is that they share a bunch
of posts and then they don’t respond to comments.
5. Think Before You Post
This sounds a no
brainer but you will be shocked by the many businesses that make the mistakes
of posting without considering what impacts their posts could have.
Some companies would
post bad about their competitors or share demeaning tweets. You need to avoid
all these if you want to be successful with your online marketing efforts.
Before you hit the post
or publish button, ask yourself “is this post representing my company with the
right message?” “is this post going to hurt anyone?”.
6. Don’t Ignore Anyone
You wouldn’t disregard
someone who connects with you in person, right? Also, don’t ignore those who
connect with you on the internet.
Remember that online marketing is all about building healthy relationships with your target customers. For this reason, don’t leave anyone who reaches out to you to go unacknowledged. After all, someone may be reaching out to you in need of help and if you can help, then you will have created a good name for your online business.
Share other peoples’
content to increase the odds of them sharing yours too.
7. Cross-Pollinate
When you share quality content across your social media channels you will attract quality followers. This way, they will also share your content on their social channels and that means your reach would be amplified.
The more your content is shared across social media channels, the more search engines get to know about it since searchers will be using keywords you target in your content.
Final
Words
So there you have it:
Having a marketing plan is beneficial to your online business in many ways. A
marketing plan will help you drive sales and will also help you improve your marketing
strategy to boost brand awareness.
If you read this
article carefully and implement the information we have shared here, you will give
your online business a new light.
We proceeded by showing
you why you need a marketing plan since not all business owners know the
importance of having one.
Have we left anything
you think could be added? Let us hear that in the comment section.