Digital marketing is nothing more than spreading your cultural product or service through digital media. Your internet presence assures your real presence. So, your product or service has to be visible and locatable by your customers and users on the internet. So far there is no problem. But how can you make your project known, improve your relationship with your clients and users, and optimize marketing and advertising costs?
The answer is designing a good Digital Marketing Plan, which will serve as a roadmap where you set goals and define the path you are going to follow to achieve them, as well as what you need to reach the goal. Good planning will help you to have a digital marketing strategy appropriate to the cultural product or service you offer and to reach your target audience
Follow these 4 steps to design your digital marketing plan
1. Analyze and Diagnose the Situation
The first step is to make an analysis of the starting situation of your project, to detect the key factors on which your plan has to be based. This analysis must be twofold:
External: Research your competition, trends in your sector and your market. Use search engines to see what keywords your competitors are using and how they are ranking in search results.
Internal: it is essential to have a web page, if you do not have it, it is the most urgent task that you must develop. The website helps search engine positioning, so if you already have it, analyze how it is positioned and how much traffic you have.
The same applies to social networks, you do not need to have profiles on all networks but analyze the traffic and followers of those where you are to see their evolution. Also think about what audience each network has, the languages and the publication times of each one, choose the networks that are consistent with what you do.
Also analyze your database of clients or potential clients, it is essential if you want to develop an e-mail marketing strategy. And last but not least, analyze what value you are adding to your client compared to the competition.
With this analysis done, you can now use the well-known SWOT tool, which will help you to visually capture the weaknesses and strengths of your project, and also to identify threats to your business as well as opportunities in the market.
2. Define Your Strategic Framework
The next step is to think about the strategic framework, which involves thinking about the determining factors that affect your marketing campaign, from setting objectives to the scope of future actions, without forgetting the audience to whom you are going to direct these actions. and all legal and juridical aspects that may affect your activity.
Objectives: Any marketing campaign has one of these three objectives (or maybe all three): increase the recognition of your project, generate new business opportunities or achieve direct sales. In any case, remember to apply SMART principles to set your goals.
Target Audience: Think about who and how your potential client or user is, depending on how it is, you will have to apply different strategies and tools. One of the advantages of using digital media to make yourself known is that you can segment your publications by age, geographical location, language, interests or keywords, among others. The more you define your audience, the better you can do that segmentation and the easier it will be to reach it.
Legal and Legal Aspects: Remember to bear in mind the current regulations on personal data protection and electronic commerce. Your marketing plan must take into account aspects of use restrictions, confidentiality and security, which must be consistent with the cultural product or service you offer.
Scope: Think about how long your marketing campaign will last, what resources are you going to allocate to it, and how much audience do you estimate it will impact. Normally, the scope of your marketing plan is one year, since a shorter period may not give results, but a longer period would make you out of date with the digital evolution.
3. Schedule and Plan Your Performances
The next step to make our digital marketing plan is what we are going to do, how and when. To do this, we must think about what strategies we are going to use, what techniques we have available, what will be our time planning and what will be the costs and benefits of our campaign.
Define Your Strategy: Depending on the objectives you have set for yourself, there are 4 main strategies in digital marketing: a) increase brand recognition or branding; b) generate traffic or visits; c) generating new business opportunities or attracting leads; d) increase sales and profitability.
To define your strategy, in addition to taking into account your objectives, you must also take into account your activity, the life cycle of your product or service and your budget.
Choose the Digital Marketing Technique: There are different techniques to be able to execute your campaign in different channels. Each technique has characteristics that can make it more suitable for one strategy or another. What are these techniques? Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Display Advertising, Video Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Advertising (SMM), Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Mobile Marketing (Mobile Marketing).
Define Your Schedule: Plan when you are going to carry out each action, through what means and what resources you are going to assign to each one.
Define Your Budget: You must estimate both the direct costs of advertising and the indirect costs of creating a website or managing social networks and make a forecast of the results you hope to achieve, which you can measure based on the traffic received and conversions. The cost and benefit analysis is what we know as ROI (return on investment) and will allow you to adapt your actions to achieve the objectives set in step 2.
4. Track and Control Your Campaign
Once the campaign is launched, the last step will be to periodically review the results it is giving and if the actions you have planned are appropriate. You will have to use digital analytics tools to be able to measure and have set KPIs that allow you to know to what degree you are achieving the objectives that you have set.
Conclusion After reading this post, you will have seen that there are two words that we have used repeatedly: analyze and decide. It is essential that before launching into digital marketing campaigns and digital marketing gigs, you take your time to design your plan.
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