What is a Digital Marketing Plan and How To Design It For Your Company or Online Project?

Designing a digital marketing plan in the most professional way possible is a great competitive advantage for any of our projects and at the same time, it allows us to coordinate strategies and organize our work much better.

The actions that companies develop in the digital field are crucial to improve the results of any business in an environment as massive and extremely competitive as the Internet.

For this reason, also online, it is important to clearly define what we want to achieve and, in turn, draw a route or plan the actions that we will implement in a defined period of time to achieve those objectives.

Does Any Business Need To Create Its Digital Marketing plan?

Without a doubt, the answer is yes.

Beyond the size of your project, you will always need to outline some objectives and strategies, without them you will not be able to establish and define what actions to carry out, or worse, you may carry them out, but without any order and meaning.

I have written us a wonderful and extensive guide with which explains to you thoroughly and in great detail, everything that entails creating a digital marketing plan step by step.

How To Make A Digital Marketing Plan For Your Company, Business Or Online Project?

Nothing better than a reflection to start talking about a topic, and even better if it is formulated as a question.

The question, in this case, is:

Do you know what the difference is between successful businesses and failed ones?

The answer is much simpler than you think, and this is:

The former have a plan, the latter do not.

I firmly believe that you deserve to be in the group of those who succeed, and that is why in this post on how to make a Digital Marketing plan I am going to give you all the keys to create a complete plan.

I will also explain the benefits of creating your own Digital Marketing plan for your online business. And is that when you want to achieve your goals you must draw a road map, so as not to get lost and reach your final goal. In the layout of this route you will have, first of all, to define your target audience and their needs, and then create the action plan to publicize your project, product or service.

My objective in this post is not only to help you create your action plan, but also to promote a correct focus on the key points of a successful strategy .

Now that you know all this, you have two options:

Implement everything you are going to learn in this post.
Pass by and not give it the importance it deserves.

If you have chosen to stay, take a pen and paper to start drawing up the plan step by step that will help you achieve the success you desire with your digital project.

What İs A Digital Marketing Plan And Why İs İt Essential For Your Online Business?

A Digital Marketing plan is a document where the objectives that we want to achieve in our company or business in the short, medium and long term are set, but it is also where the most appropriate strategies to achieve those objectives are chosen, designed and organized.

This document should not be very long (rather, between 3 or 5 sheets). It should reflect the current situation of the market and the company, the goals you want to achieve in a given future and the planning of the actions you will take to achieve them.

It is recommended to do it at the beginning of any project, but it must be flexible enough so, once you put your company to work, you can review the document and make the necessary changes according to the chosen strategy.

It should be flexible, for example, in the following situations:

Launch of a new product or service.
Innovation or renovation in the company.
Change of philosophy.
Reputation.
Business growth.
Entry of new clients or projects.
Adaptation to changes in the sector.

As you can see, there are many occasions when you will have to redo or modify your initial Digital Marketing plan. And knowing what are the most important principles in Marketing will help you create a more effective one that generates more income.

Before listing the benefits of creating a plan for your company, I want you to be clear about what Marketing is and what its principles are.

Marketing Definition

According to Philip Kotler , economist and one of the fathers of Marketing in the modern era, Marketing is:

It is a social and administrative process through which groups and individuals obtain what they need and want through generating, offering and exchanging valuable products with their peers.

Another definition of Marketing that I really like and I find very revealing is the following:

It is knowing how to generate needs in consumers and satisfy them.

And I like this definition a lot because it supposes the creation of these needs together to your satisfaction, something that can be perfectly achieved with a good Digital Marketing plan.

There are, according to Kotler, 10 basic principles and below I am going to list them to serve as a guide before starting:

10 Basic Principles of Marketing Today

We must never forget that the consumer has power.
You have to target a segmented audience.
And offer a clear value proposition on the product or service.
A good distribution matters (and a lot).
You have to know how to adapt and incorporate new media and channels.
But also control metrics and ROI .
You have to focus on loyalty, not just benefits.
Marketing must be understood as a whole, internally and externally.
You have to create synergies (relational).
And also have a good technological support.

Benefits Of Creating A Digital Marketing Plan

You get a complete view of the needs of the market, your competition and your current situation.
It allows you to identify who you are targeting and why you are targeting it, but also see how to help your prospects.
It is a roadmap to avoid straying from the path.
Thanks to it you can start generating income thanks to exhaustive research of your target audience. Know your needs and create services and products based on the information you have.
It allows you to measure and check what works – and what doesn’t – within your Digital Marketing strategy.

Now, we can create both a Digital Marketing plan at the global level of the company or one on a specific product or service.

Be that as it may, the fundamental thing is that the indestructible basis of the actions and strategies that you determine in your plan are focused on the needs of your potential clients or target audience.

And watch out! If you only base your planning on your products and services or on the needs of your company, chances are that your plan will fail.

Why? Very simple, because you are not focusing on what really matters: customers and users .

Never forget that the product is a consequence. The essential thing is to know your target audience perfectly and create products and services based on their needs.

My advice is, therefore, that you propose a Marketing strategy well focused on those needs so that it is really effective and brings you closer to achieving your objectives.

Now that you know what a Digital Marketing plan is, how to approach it and the importance that it has for your business, we are going to get into the matter and start drawing up our plan.

Perhaps it is easier said than done, but if all this is done in a structured and step-by-step way, it is much easier than you think. In addition, the degree of difficulty is much lower than the benefits of carrying it out.

How To Make A Digital Marketing Plan Step By Step?

1) Analyze The Current Market Situation To Create Your Digital Marketing Plan

All right. The first thing we are going to do is analyze both the current market situation and our competition and where you are. And here is something to keep in mind: the mistake that many entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs make is that they open their business to offer products and services that in many cases people do not need.

Thus, even if your product is good, it inevitably fails because it does not meet the needs of your target customers . So you should analyze what you know how to do and how you can adapt it to the current market situation to help as many people as possible. The key, then, lies in helping .

Record this word on fire, since in the process of creating your Marketing plan everything has to revolve around helping your ideal client . Later we will focus on the sale, which is the fundamental or final objective of all planning.

► How to analyze the market?

Nothing better to develop this point than to do it with an example.

Let’s say that you are a personal development coach, which is so fashionable now, and that you are creating your Digital Marketing plan to sell your consultation sessions and courses through the internet.

Your objective, naturally, is to find out how you can help as many people as possible with your knowledge, skills and the resources you have, that is, what problem can you solve for your ideal client.

How are you going to do it? Well, doing (like Sherlock Holmes) an investigation.

To do this, you must answer these questions:

What social networks are they on?
What content do they share?
What are the most frequent searches that your target audience does on Google?
To what extent do they demand your product or service?
What is your economic, demographic, cultural or social situation?

In order to solve all these questions (and some more), you can use tools like SEMrush or Buzzsumo .

Since the tools play a very important role in the research and creation of the Digital Marketing plan, at the end I have created a specific section with the necessary tools, where I explain what their functions are and where in your plan you should use them .

Thanks to them you will be able to obtain relevant and valuable information about the searches or search intentions of your target audience, to which I will dedicate an entire section to explain how to create the profile of your ideal client.

Undoubtedly, the most complete tool to get data from your competition and your target audience is SEMrush .

In SEMrush you will be able to obtain relevant and valuable information about the searches or search intentions of your target audience, analyze the positioning of your competition, know which keywords obtain better results, thoroughly analyze their websites and publications, etc.

2) How To Analyze The Competition To Make A Digital Marketing Plan?

Once we have analyzed what the market needs and its situation, we will give way to other tools to thoroughly analyze our competition. But watch out! With all this, we do not want to copy anyone, but simply see their positioning in the market, their weaknesses, their brand reputation, etc.

In short, we seek to know everything necessary to try to position ourselves above the competition.

Let’s see what data you can know about your skills for free:

Number of followers on current social networks and their evolution.
Average engagement on social networks: likes, rts, favorites, comments, etc. (Buzzsumo tool).
Average engagement on your website or blog: social share and comments (Sharedcount tool).
Shared content typology.
Alexa Ranking.

My recommendation is that you dump all this data into an excel, and then sort and filter them quickly and easily.

3) How To Analyze Your Current Situation İn The Market When Creating A Marketing Plan?

Most likely, you are considering creating your Digital Marketing plan after checking that things are not working as you want. Ideally, you should start creating it at the beginning of your project, when you may not even have data with which to make real measurements.

The good thing about this situation is that we do have data to measure and improve, and that not everything is lost.

To do this, let’s see everything related to the presence of your website on the internet.

►Metrics To Measure The Current Status Of Your Online Project

Alexa Ranking.
SEO ranking.
Backlinks.
Monthly visits.
Pages viewed.
Traffic sources: organic-referred.
Search results.
Keyword positioning in search engines.
Presence in social networks.
Heatmaps and content analysis with the sumo tool.

It is good to also check very carefully which online media have communicated information related to your company:

Media that have published it: positive-negative.
Mention in RRSS with recommendations.
Reviews on special pages.

My main objective with this post is to make things as easy as possible for you. For this, I also leave you a list with the metrics to take into account on social networks and blog (this is useful both to analyze the current situation of your online project and your competition).

► Presence In Social Networks

Community metrics: number of followers on social networks.
Contents: content type shared and content type tends to work best.
Engagement metrics: number of likes, shares and comments.
Frequency: number of times you publish on the different channels, publication times and other actions by users (share).
Conversion metrics: number of clicks on links, sales per content promotion.
Customer service: how you are managing customer service; average response time, positive or negative feeling that fans of the brand have.

One of the best management and analytics tools for social media , in my opinion, is metricool .

Once you have all this data dumped and ordered in an excel, you will have your famous ““, and with it everything you need to know about the market, the competition and your current situation to define your Weaknesses, Strengths, Threats and Opportunities.

4) How To Do a SWOT Analysis?

Continuing with the example I set, if you are a personal development coach and you have to create your SWOT , it could be something like this:

Weaknesses: limited capital, lack of presence in your market,
Strengths: training, fresh vision of the business, good contacts, personalized service (coach for entrepreneurs)
Threats: high competition
Opportunities: high demand due to the growing number of entrepreneurs

Always being clear about your weaknesses and strengths is essential for your Digital Marketing plan to be realistic and adapted to what you can contribute.

5) How To Define Your Target Customer Or Buyer Person?

This is one of the most important points (for me) within the creation of a Marketing plan, and it is a point that most people take lightly.

► Defining Our Target Customer or Buyer Person

Typically, we have several profiles of ideal clients or «personal buyers «. One of my favorite series is Criminal Minds. The first thing they do in all cases is analyze the crime scene, that is, start investigating with the data they have to find the profile of the offender.

His research is guided by that profile to achieve his goal: to capture the culprit of the crime. Just as they do in “Criminal Minds”, you have already analyzed the crime scene (current market situation, competition, etc.) and then you must create the profile of your ideal client .

It is, without more, to create a fictitious portrait that helps us define our type of clients to know them better and design actions that report results based on it.

►Factors To Consider To Define Your İdeal Client

Behavior: how it interacts with your brand and through which channels it does so.
Interests: what he likes and what he does with his life.
Demographic data: age, sex and work.
Ambitions: what you aspire to and what you really want.
Contents: which format do you prefer.
Searches: with which keywords it searches and associates you.
Shopping: what do you usually buy and where do you do it?
Needs: what your audience needs from your brand.
Obstacles: what prevents them from performing the actions you want, such as a specific purchase.

Once you have analyzed all this, I recommend that you create a personalized template with names, surnames, history, objectives and challenges; with a professional environment and the current situation of your buyer person.

And I’ll Go One Step Further:

Give it a name and a face! Why? Because putting a face on it will help you even more to identify with your client and achieve total personalization.

Now, when creating your buyer persona you should not forget about the buyer journey.

► What is the buyer journey?

The buyer journey is the creation of a model that will allow you to monitor the behavior, needs and problems of the target audience during the buying process.

Having very well defined within your plan who is your buyer person and what is the buyer journey, will be very useful in future actions when carrying out your strategies.

6) How To Establish The Budget Of Your Digital Marketing Plan?

Before starting with the objectives, we have to analyze the budget, since it is essential to know what budget we have to fulfill or not those objectives. Here you have to be very realistic and always pull up, as unexpected expenses will always arise .

►Factors To Consider When Creating Your Digital Marketing Budget

The budget for tools and material in general.
Budget for specific professionals in a specific area ( copywriter , community manager, programmer, graphic designer, etc.).
Budgets for advertising: Facebook ads , Adwords, etc.
General expenses to achieve the objectives.
Budget for administrative procedures.

By creating a realistic budget, you will be able to form realistic and achievable objectives at an economic level.

7) How To Create Your Digital Marketing Proposal Step By Step?

Now let’s get down to business. You already have all the necessary information to determine your objectives and the strategy you are going to carry out to achieve them.

It is time now to define your goals.

► Definition Of Objectives

To chart your goals, you must adhere to the SMART rule . Your objectives must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and specific in time.

Now it is your turn to define the strategies and tactics to carry out these objectives. Among these strategies you must define:

The objectives of your business (you need).
The objectives of Marketing (how to get what you need).
The strategies to achieve them.
The tactics to carry out the objectives.

The ideal is to design a plan with the objectives set for more than 6 months , to obtain sufficient data to measure.

Once we review the objectives, they will vary over time, depending on whether they are met or not.

► Example of Quantitative Marketing Objectives:

Increase the community of followers on social networks.
Increase sales through the internet.
Make a recruitment of new customers through the internet.
Increase the number of registered users in the company.

► Example of Qualitative Marketing Objectives:

Increase the positioning and notoriety of the company.
Increase the geographical penetration of the company.
Improve customer service through the internet.
Develop new products focused on the current needs of customers.

What We Are Trying To Achieve With These Objectives İs To İmprove Our Positioning İn The Following Areas:

Branding or brand creation: to achieve recognition and notoriety.
SEO positioning: necessary to receive web traffic.
Attracting followers and leads to create a database to sell our products or services to.
Sales: achieving sales for increased income.
Customer service: take care of customer service to retain and care for our current customers.

We are now going to further define our objectives and make them more specific . For this I leave you some examples to give you an idea and define your own.

► Real example of objectives of the Digital Marketing plan

All these actions are aimed at obtaining more traffic on your website and obtaining quality leads that become end customers of your personal development courses.

Among these objectives we could consider:

Get 1000 followers on facebook in 6 months (starting to create community)
Decrease the bounce rate on your website to less than 20%
Increase the residence time on your website by 1 minute
Capture leads: 500-600 subscribers in 6 months
Increase the opening rate of emails to subscribers by 30% Increase sales through the web and social networks by 40%

The goal is to achieve all the objectives that we have set ourselves and for this it is necessary to take into account these variables:

Scope: reaching the public
Attraction: motivating the public to visit us.
Conversion: getting the public to perform the desired action (subscribe, buy, sign up for a webinar )
Gain: achieve real profit
Infatuation: if you fall in love with your client, it will surely repeat with you, and that is what you want: to sell and retain.

► How To Make The Strategy In Your Digital Marketing Plan?

Now that you have all your objectives written in general and specific level, we are going to create the strategy and the tactic to achieve them.

The strategy that we are going to define will lead us to achieve our objectives. It is also a parameter that we will vary depending on whether we get some results or others.

To do this, I will again take several examples so that you see it more clearly and you only have to replace your objectives with mine.

If your goal is to increase your community of followers on social networks, here I show you examples of actions to take to achieve your goals :

Objective	Strategy	Tactics
Increase the community of followers on social networks (1000 followers on Facebook and Instagram)	Create giveaways for Facebook and Instagram of free coaching sessions with you	Advertise it through Facebook
	Generate interesting and viral content on topics related to personal development	Generate fun and informative content that can go viral
	Offer special discounts to followers for your courses	Offers and discounts only for followers in RRSS
	Create advertising campaigns to get followers (investment according to budget)	Create campaigns to attract new fans Facebook Ads

As you can see, what it is about is defining an action and seeing how we are going to do to achieve it. Remember that I am basing all the examples on a business geared towards selling personal development courses. According to each sector, some strategies may work better than others, it is about testing and measuring.

Objective	Strategy	Tactics
Increase sales through the internet (20%)	Create advertising campaigns	Campaign on different social networks: Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads. etc.
	Generate agreements with influential people in your sector	Request guest posts, round posts, interviews, collaborations, etc.
	Free product or service test	Send to more active followers, influencers of the product or test of the service.
	SEO objective content strategy creation	Creation of strategic posts to position keywords.

As I previously mentioned, these objectives will vary during the evolution of your project, but if you are clear about how to define them, the path will be much easier.

But beware! When you are outlining the strategy to achieve these goals, keep in mind that you can then carry it out.

So leave the shame aside and go out there to get to know you and your project.

► Networking Within Your Marketing plan

Arrived here I want to give you an advice:

Make it your goal to attend all the events you can related to your sector, in order to meet potential customers, influencers, sponsors, etc.

For example, personal development conferences, talks by other professionals, webinars and book presentations related to the sector always come in handy.

And it is that networking has existed since the market exists. In medieval times, merchants went from village to village, attending fairs related to their profession.

And don’t forget that if networking is so old and continues to be practiced, it is because it works.

In this life it is essential to surround yourself with valuable people who are aligned with your values. Therefore, my biggest advice is to launch yourself. Little by little you will be reaping the fruits of this networking.

8) Promotion Phase Within The Marketing Plan

Now you have to map out the strategy to promote your products or services.

You must bear in mind that not all promotion channels work the same, so you have to decide which channels you are going to be on and which promotion works best in each of them.

The content promotion phase is one of the most important within the digital strategy and in which we must put great effort.

My recommendation: never do a “copy and paste” of content. Act smart and once again analyze what works best for you on each channel.

An important factor to define is the frequency of publications that you are going to make on the blog and on different social networks, so as to say what is the investment in advertising that you will make in each of them.

My recommendations are as follows:

Blog: 2 posts a week
Facebook: 2 contents a day
Twitter: 5 tweets a day
Instagram: 1 content per day
Linkedin: 1 content per day

Once the frequency is defined, you will have to deal with the variety of the contents.

This should be +/- of:

40% promotion
10% contests
20% branding
30% offers

Then it will be up to you to decide whether to invest in the paid promotion (or not).

But let’s see all this with an example:

When	Channel	Format	Desired action
Course launch date	Blog	Post related to the course theme	Share RRSS, download ebook to get leads
	Newsletter	Course notification to subscribers	Course sale landing page visits
	RRSS	Image, video	Click post blog link
	Facebook Ads	Ad campaign promotion on the course.	Sign up for the course

9) Analytical Phase Within The Digital Marketing Plan

We are now entering the last phase of the Marketing plan, analytics.

This is a fundamental part and that many leave far behind, thus making a serious mistake.

Well thought, if we cannot measure the impact of our actions, we will not know what is working for us within the Digital Marketing strategy and what is not.

Therefore, in order to implement improvements in the execution of the plan you have to know how to measure and what KPIs to measure of your actions.

If you do not carry out this step rigorously, all your previous work may be in vain or not the desired results.

Ideally, you should write down the data weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.

► Website And Blog

Percentage of visits.
Pages viewed.
Bounce Rate.
Dropout rate.
Average duration of the session.
Most viewed pages of your website.
Public: age, gender , population.
Actions taken: purchase or subscription.
Number of subscribers.
Sales number.

► Social Networks

Engagement of your publications: shared, favorites, I like it.
Average scope of organic publication.
Average scope of paid publication.
Increased number of fans.
Schedule and day with the best publication data.
Clicks on the call to action.

► Web Positioning

General position of your website in the sherps.
Number of keywords positioned.
Backlinks.
Domain authority.

► Branding

Social mentions.
Recognition by other professionals.

By measuring all these metrics you will be able to keep absolute control of all your actions .

My recommendation is that, even if you see that the results are disastrous after three months (for example), give a certain margin to the strategies so that they work and do not make too many sudden changes.

At the SEO level, for example, if you just launched your project you need more than 6 months to see some results , so be patient and don’t despair.

Tools To Create a Digital Marketing Plan

In this last section I would like to tell you about the necessary tools to carry out your strategy. I have already named some of them throughout the post, although others are new. Here is a brief description of what each one is for in the creation of your Marketing plan.

Excel: it will be essential for you to collect and organize data
SEMrush : perfect for studying keywords and monitoring competition.
Ahrefs : Helps to search the most relevant content by keywords.
DinoRANK or Screaming Frog : for SEO On-Page topics.
Metricool : is a free tool for the management, planning and measurement of social networks and blogs.
Google analytics : it is one of the best tools to analyze the data on your website: the number of visits, page views, unique users, the average time spent on your website, what type of user visits you by age, sex , country, etc., as well as the traffic acquisition channels.
Twitter Analytics : it is perfect to get traffic and behavior data from twitter.
Facebook Analytics : It is ideal to obtain traffic and behavior data from Facebook.
Amazon: offers you information written by the users themselves regarding different products; With it you can get many ideas about the needs, objections and tastes that your audience has.

Source: https://josefacchin.com/plan-de-marketing-digital/