No matter the size of your business or how long you’ve been around, developing a digital marketing plan is crucial to your success. Working out a start-to-finish plan may seem like quite a task, but it’s important to keep in mind that any efforts, as long as they’re well thought out and come with tenacious, thoughtful strategy, will set your small business up for success.
We’ve broken the creation of your digital marketing plan down into five parts, each of which we’ll go over in detail. Breaking it down into five sections will make it easier to write, follow, and refer back to as needed. After reading this article, our intention is for you to feel energized and focused on getting to work on your small business’ bespoke digital marketing plan. The following five steps can be followed in order, and will be your guiding light throughout your plan’s development.
What Is Your Current Marketing Situation?
Begin by having a conversation with the individual’s closest to you who are most invested in the success of the business – these people are your lifeline. What are the current marketing efforts you’ve been exploring and investing into? Out of these marketing efforts, what’s working? What’s failing? What has worked and failed in the past?
Before making any big decisions, it’s important to have a good handle on your current marketing reality, so you can refer back to it as you move forward. This is akin to building the foundation of your home – you have to know what the bones look like in order to create a sturdy structure.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Understanding your target audience is information you will continually refer back to as you evolve your marketing communication tactics. Your target audience is the group that shares the demographics, characteristics, and needs that your product or service is made for. There are two components in a target audience, including their demographics and psychographics. Demographics are the superficial descriptors of the audience, while psychographics refer to the motivations of the audience.
To illustrate this, let’s break down the target audience of a women’s intimates brand. Imagine their mission is something like this: ‘We aim to create products that make women feel confident, comfortable and free’. We can make some assumptions about the target audience about a business like this – their demographic is likely professional women and mothers, aged 30-60, and earn greater than 75,000 per year (so as to afford their products). Contrastingly, the psychographic (motivators) of this business’ target audience may be to support body confidence, acknowledge diversity and inclusivity, take an interest in comfort, and these people may not relate to other flashy lingerie brands.
To obtain the important information about your audience, consider psychographic research efforts such as interviewing customers, analyzing web traffic, and evaluating social media engagement topics.
Identify Your Marketing Goals
Your small business’ marketing goals should consider your desired objectives over the next 1-5 year period, and should be the guiding light towards which tactics and strategies you land on for your marketing plan. Some examples of goals are:
We’re big fans of the business goal-setting exercise broken down into 8 simple rules to follow, as developed by Clearpoint Strategy (2020):
Once you’ve set your goals and hit all of the above eight checkpoints, consider the post-goal setting checklist:
The point of setting goals is to decide what you want to see from your business over a certain period of time. This will be critical in determining the strategies and campaigns you will activate in order to meet your business goals.
Identify Your Marketing Campaign Strategies
Prepare for this part of your marketing plan to be the most time-consuming. Your target audience should be the first and foremost indicator of what strategies and tactics you employ, so consider how your audience consumes information when determining your strategies. Are they most likely to scroll through an Instagram feed, explore the Twitter universe, or pick up a newspaper? Remember that your audience should be your first touchpoint when considering your strategy, so always keep them at the forefront of your plan.
Although we can’t decide your exact strategy, complete with your audience and goals in mind, we thought it’d be helpful to share some examples of goals and strategies employed to meet these goals – understanding what has worked before might inspire you to find your own secret sauce.
Some examples of goals and strategies to meet them:
1. Goal: Recognition & Awareness
In order to get your business recognized and talked about, consider using Search Engine Optimization or paid ads in order to instigate traffic to your page. The more leads that come from these digital marketing efforts, the more potential to have those leads converted into sales.
2. Goal: Familiarization
It’s your job to ensure your customer not only recognizes your business, but remembers it. A great way to ensure your business will leave a lasting impression? Content marketing. Engaging and meaningful content is the way to go (The Next Scoop, 2014).
3. Goal: Engagement
Social media marketing can be your go-to community builder. Using the right social channels for your target audience will initiate a dialogue between the business and customer, which results in brand loyalty over time.
4. Goal: Conversion
If you’re happy with the number of leads hitting your website, but stumped on why they aren’t hitting the check-out button, a strategy to consider might be email marketing. Email follow-ups serve as great subtle nudges to close the deal.
Lastly, what is your budget?
Once you’ve looked at your current marketing situation, determined your target audience, your marketing goals, and the strategies you’ll take to meet these goals, it’s time to take a look at what kind of budget will support these goals and strategies. Your goals, and the tactics you choose to achieve them, will have a major effect on your digital marketing plan and what your budget will look like. Remember that when it comes to your budget, there’s no point in comparing your business to others – with your budget, there’s no one-size-fits-all, as all businesses have varying expenses, revenue, and competition.
First and foremost, it’s important to break down the costs that will be included in each goal and strategy employed to meet the goal. Know that some things will cost a large portion of your budget, while other things you can keep low cost. For example, SEO campaigns or paid advertising costs quite a bit more than paying for one single advertisement in a newspaper. Planning out the budget associated with each strategy will give you an idea of how long you’ll be able to maintain each method, and what kind of return on investment you’ll need to see in order to make a given strategy worthwhile.
Determine the percentage of your overall budget that you can allocate towards your marketing efforts. As a guiding light, know the averages: out of total company budgets, marketing budgets comprise of 11%, while companies spend 7.5% of total revenue on marketing (Wall Street Journal, 2020).
In Closing
By following our above 5 steps to tailoring your digital marketing plan to your small business, we’re confident that you’ll achieve your goals, and be informed to reset them year by year. Never underestimate the power of a solid digital marketing plan – if done with care, it can transform the possibilities available to your small business.