Digital Marketing Plan Structure: 6 Things to Consider

A digital marketing plan structure is unique to your business and includes the features that are most important to meeting the needs of your customers and achieving your business goals. It should include all tools and channels you need to use to make you effective and see big returns for your business

I’ve listed here 6 of the most important features of a digital marketing plan structure and there will be some I have left out, but they are not standard for all industries and businesses I work with.

1. Research online target market

Use online tools to research into your market and identify the needs and wants of the groups that are of most interest to your business. Some tools to use include Google Keyword Planner for keyword research, Alexa to understand visitor demographics and competitors’ performance and Google Trends to monitor trends in your industry.

2. Study competitor strategy

The first thing to do as part of your competitor strategy is to identify all businesses that have similar offers and that target the same customers, and then visit their websites to assess their offers. You can glean a lot of information from competitor websites regarding their online marketing strategy and then use Alexa to understand their visitor metrics

3. Set goals and objectives

Set realistic and achievable online goals for your business, that are related to your overall mission. An ecommerce business for example could have sales and conversion objectives that it tracks in Google Analytics and builds key performance indicators (KPIs) for.

Your objectives should also be time-related and you should have a sufficient budget to ensure that they are achievable.

4. Create digital marketing strategy

Now that you know who your target customers are and what their needs are, have developed unique product offerings and have researched your competitors and their offers and have created your online objectives, it’s now time to create your promotional strategy.

This is about choosing the online channels that you want to advertise on, like pay per click advertising and social media, and the tools that you need like Google Adwords and Twitter to promote your products and services.

5. Create your budget

Your budget is an important part of your digital marketing plan structure and it covers the financial resources that you need to implement your strategy. So all the promotional tactics should be listed in your budget including the cost of each of them and then a total cost for the lifetime of your digital strategy should be provided.

6. Report on performance

Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can keep track of the performance of your online campaigns and report on the most important metrics for your business. Analytics is free to setup and comes with some great features like:
• Segmenting your visitors
• Creating goals and events to track actions like purchases and downloads
• Links with Adwords, Adsense and Google Search Console
• Multi-channels reports to track the paths visitors take to conversion
• See the best traffic sources
• Monitor the performance of campaigns and adjust accordingly

Summary

The digital marketing plan structure above is an effective way to plan your online marketing presence and achieve the mission and goals of your business. Contact me to discuss your requirements and if you need help creating a digital marketing plan and with online advertising.