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Create a 5 minute digital marketing plan
Welcome to episode 34 of Digital Marketing Made Easy with myself, award-winning digital marketing speaker, author, and trainer and of course podcaster. Now, we’re going to cover something super simple, but super important in this episode and we’re going to look at how to create a 5 minute digital marketing plan. So I want you to grab a piece of A4 paper and I just want you to put four columns in.
Four columns, that’s it.
Now, in the first column at the top, I want you to write the word objectives and underneath that I want you to look at reach and brand awareness. So write under objectives you’re going to write reach and brand awareness.
Okay. Now further down that column, you’re going to write channels and then you’re going to write funnel and then you’re going to write strategies. So in your first column, you should have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things written down and then a sixth thing, analysis. Okay.
Reach and Brand Awareness
Now these are your starting points. Okay. So we’re imagining, first of all, that we have the reach and brand awareness is the first objective, okay. Then we have the word channel. So we have to think about what channels would we use for reach and brand awareness. So organic search, organic social, and again, it could be organic and paid search and organic and paid social. We could have advertising in terms of Google pay-per-click. We could have advertising in Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, but we could also have social media posts and we could have blogs and website ranking within the world of Google. So they’re your first two. Then we have things like referral, so people referring onto you and looking at direct hits onto your site as well. So maybe just people coming straight onto your website and so on and so on.
The Funnel
So you have to think about the different ways that you’re reaching and getting brand awareness now and then just jot down all the different channels, like brain dump it in. And this is like a really quick and dirty digital plan. Then the next one down, I said, you’ve written the word funnel. Now the funnel, first of all, the stage in this funnel is just getting awareness. That’s all we’re looking at. So it’s basically, how do you get your business in front of other people? Okay.
Look at your strategies
Then number four, which was your strategies. How are you going to do this? So if you’ve picked out your channels, what specifically are you going to do? Are you going to do content marketing? Are you going to do SEO? Looking at getting more visibility or are you going to do Google ads? Are you going to do social media?
Are you going to do advertising? Are you going to do a different marketing based on your analytics? What are the strategies that you want to do? Now, each person will have different strategies. And then analysis is what you need to go and have a look at to kind of get proof and evidence of what you’re doing now. Now, this is the hardest bit and honestly, after this, it’s like plain sailing in the rest of the columns, because if you’ve understood that your objective is reach and brand awareness, and if you’ve understood the different channels that you would use, okay, then you’ve understood that this first step in your funnel is awareness or pipeline or whatever you want to call it. Then it’s really looking at the strategies. Now, you might not have an idea of the strategies and this is where analysis comes in.
So you literally start looking at different things. So let’s say you wanted to appear in Google, go to Google, Google it. So digital marketing should be dynamic. You should be going and looking at all these different channels and kind of observing what’s working and could you do more of it. Looking at maybe where got gaps. Looking at all your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and your threats, often known as a SWAT analysis. Now that’s the hard bit. That’s the bit that’s going to take you a few minutes just to kind of get an understanding of where you’re at. Now, you can come back and spend more time. If you want to spend 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes on this, five hours, it doesn’t matter. But this is just a quick way of getting a plan in place. Now, column two is about how do you get interest and engagement, same process.
And then you look at the third column, which is leads and sales, same process, looking at those key things, your objective, your channels, the stage in the funnel and the strategies. Your last one is loyalty and advocacy. How do you get people coming back? Do you have referral programs? Do you have customer loyalty? So the long and the short of it is my five minute plan has four columns. Your columns are about reach and brand awareness, interest and engagement, leads and sales, and loyalty and advocacy. And literally all we’re doing in each column is looking at what is the key objective? Well, we know that they are the key objectives, the channels. So what channels are you going to get involved in your plan to get reach and brand awareness, interest engagement, and so on. And at what stage of the funnel?
Well, the first stage of the funnel is awareness, as we know, and then the second stage is interest. And then when we get to leads and sales, that third one is action. And then the last one is loyalty. How do we get that repeat business? How do we get them to stay with us and refer people and so on and so on. Now, when we look at the different strategies for each of these strategy for reach and brand awareness, strategy for interest engagement, they’re not going to be massively different. You’re just going to be doing different things. Right? Okay. So when we think about the analysis in your first column, that’s kind of like researching what’s happening now, where you’re at, what’s your current sort of situation for the business, what the things that you want to be achieving. Now, achieving that all important reach and brand awareness is getting a new audience in.
How do you optimize it once it’s working?
Now, if for instance, you already have lots and lots of leads or lots and lots of customers, there’s no one to say that you don’t look at your marketing plan from another of the columns. So let’s say that you’ve got loads of leads into the business and you want to really focus on getting those into paying customers where you go to a leads column and start really looking at the strategies to move those forward. But the magic here is with this five minute plan is these four columns, a dynamic. And if you host this, like even on an Excel spreadsheet, you just change it kind of day by day. You look at things and see it’s how it’s happening. And it moves and flows just like the normal business world. So when we look at things like channels, you’ve got things like search. You’ve got appearing in Google. You’ve got paid search using Google ads.
You’ve got organic social. So going on TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, whatever you use, then think about what you’re going to do. You could have banner or display advertising. You could have social advertising. You could have email marketing. You could have referrals, so websites that are referring or you could have people who are referring. You could have a referral tool that you use, often a popular one is called firstpromoter. This is a really great tool for setting up and being able to give people their own way of referring. You give them their own unique URL and they can market that out. People, you can even create assets in there that they can use in their marketing. Now, you’ve got things that could be text message marketing. You could be using mobile apps. You could be using custom channels that you have within your audience.
But this five minute plan is really about sort of analyzing where you’re at, setting some objectives, looking at the strategies of what you’re going to be doing. And then I guess the last bit is like really looking at you’re going to implement it and making it better. How do you optimize it once it’s working? So once you’ve got the kind of basic plan, you can go off and use something like Trello to really take it into play. So when we think about getting your visibility in search engines, you might be thinking about content marketing as a strategy and creating and distributing content to achieve specific business objectives, pulling in traffic. Now, you could be looking at things like search engine marketing because you’re not appearing for a particular word. So this is a really dynamic but strategic way of looking at your planning. You could be looking at advertising and if you’re not appearing on page one, for instance, looking at who does. For instance, if you type in digital marketing courses, you’ll see that we appear.
But also because it’s a very popular key word if you click on read who we advertise with, you see that we’re at the top of the tree. So there’s different strategies based on where you are as a business and things like email marketing and doing promotional emails, building a list. You could look at marketing automation, which is basically making sure that your marketing is on autopilot. So if someone signs up, let’s say for a free guide, then your automated marketing sends them the email with the guide. And you can start to look at conversion optimization, looking at how well your website performs, if you’re getting a thousand visitors and that gives you 10 customers or 10 inquiries. How can you make that better? So what we’re looking for here is just a really simple way of kind of getting the plan in place.
Two-minute recap
Now, my last advisory is just literally a two minute recap on when you create your plan, make sure it is around goals and objectives that are not vanity goals. And what do I mean here? Well, if you’re looking to really drive cash into your business and you really want to ramp up the profits, then looking at things like increasing your followers, getting more web visitors, getting more podcast downloads, those things are rather large in terms of length of time to achieve quite big tasks. You maybe need to niche down into something more specific. Like if you need cash into the business, you want to get a cash flow boost, then maybe think about what you could do for your customers. On average, your customers will spend 33% more with you. So could you come up with a customer campaign, something that’s quick, easy to get out there that you could get money coming on quickly.
Could you get a customer loyalty scheme in place? So this is about looking at what you currently have and optimizing it and really looking at when you plot out your four columns, how well are you reaching and getting brand awareness? Are you using ads? And the great thing with ads and I talk about this all the time on our Facebook ads masterclass is that you can get reach for free. You don’t pay for that. You only pay for when people actually click on the ad. So you imagine if you’ve got like 150, 160, 200,000 people seeing your brand and business, what that does, and you’ve not paid a penny. So you have to look at the strategies around each one. And if you’d love to know more about this, please come and join the group. The Facebook group you can find, just type in Dawn McGruer and you’ll see Marketing, Motivation and Mindset group.
This is where the magic happens. These are the places you can ask me questions and find out more about the different strategies for your five minute digital marketing plan. So I hope that was helpful. If you’ve never done a plan, don’t be frightened. Just get your four columns out and start thinking about your objectives, your channels, the funnel, the pipeline, how people come into your world, thinking about the strategies. And then if we know there are objectives and there’s only ever four, then you can start to work on even just one column at a time and start to look at the different ways that you can implement and optimize as you go along. So have a super week and remember, come and find me in the group where it’s Digital Marketing Made Easy.
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