1. Know What You Want (& Set the Objective)
Nail Your Mission:
·
Define your business’ overall
mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your
grand plan.
·
Answer this question: what is the
overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for
example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for
computer parts in Europe)? This is your mission.
Set & Measure Your KPIs:
·
Get specific with your KPIs by identifying
the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.
·
Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing
your previous digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a
positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting
your expectations too high.
·
Identify a method to help you measure each
of your KPIs – for example, will you use Google
Analytics to measure your
conversions, your individual social media analytics to track engagement or a
tool like BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content
marketing?
·
Here’s a handy KPI template for you to
steal: (Insert goal, e.g. ‘Increase traffic’) by (insert figure)% in (insert
number of months).
·
Before you begin planning your KPIs find out which metrics matter most to
your CEO.
2.
Analyse Your Past (& Learn From Your Mistakes)
You don’t
have to (and shouldn’t) go into the planning period in the dark. Analysing your
digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures can help focus you on
setting the best KPIs for your business. You, therefore, might want to complete
step one and two together.
Choose a
time period you’d like to analyse (it’s best to set this time period as the
same length of time you plan for your new strategy) – for example decide on
whether you’re going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month.
How to Analyse:
·
Determine the time period you would like to
analyse and set your Google Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.
·
Try out Google’s
Benchmarking Reports in your
Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.
·
Don’t forget to analyse your competitors’
strategy too – create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities (you
can use SEMrush to identify the SEO strategy of a
competitor, i.e. what keywords are driving the largest volume of organic
traffic to their website. It can also be used to compare the organic and paid
traffic of different websites so again quite useful to see how aggressive
they’re being with their paid spend.)
·
Ask yourself this question at regular intervals:
is there anything else I need to analyse that I haven’t thought of before –
e.g. should I be testing the times I post my content or the types of images I
use?
3.
Remember Who You’re Talking to (& Speak Their Language)
Don’t let
the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know
who your audience are (at least we hope you do) but sometimes they’re the first
thing a digital marketer can forget amidst the KPI setting, budget fretting and
channel selection.
You’re not
going to make this mistake – not this time. Instead you’re going to put your
audience at the heart of your strategy, cater to their emotional needs and
satisfy their deepest desires. How? Through the creation of well fleshed out
and well thought out personas, of course.
Develop
Useful Personas:
·
Start with the basics and note down all the
demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender
and location.
·
Then dig a little deeper and Identify the
problems you can help your target persona solve.
·
Delve into their emotional desires, goals,
aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick
(think about their conscious and unconscious desires).
·
You can dive deep into the ‘Audience
Reports of your Google Analytics
account to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex,
career, etc.
·
When creating your personas this is the
perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them – these
will be the influencers your strategy should target.
4. Identify Your Means (& Stick to Your Budget)
Three things
are important for identifying your means: these are your budget, your digital
channels and your team (or people). It is important to take stock of all of
your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period.
For example,
now is the perfect time for creating an audit of your existing digital channels
and to decide whether you’re going to outsource specific sections of your
digital marketing and whether you need to set budget aside for a new hire or
two.
How to Identify Your Means:
Your Budget:
·
Define your overall digital marketing
budget.
·
Look at the historical data of what has
worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality
leads at a low cost?)
·
Decide whether you will use paid promotion
(for, example Adwords or paid ads on social media).
·
Allocate a specific portion of the budget
for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion (delve into your
Analytics to help you assess the most cost effective digital channels with the
largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click).
·
If a certain element of your paid promotion
strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit it and invest the
allocated budget figure into the channel that’s bringing you the best results.
Your People:
·
Look at your current team and assess what
you are capable of achieving (be realistic here and ensure that no-one will be
over stretched or over worked).
·
Identify whether you need to hire more
people and whether you have the means to do so.
·
Decide whether all of your digital
marketing activity will take place in house or if you’ll need to outsource some
elements to a third party agency.
·
Get each of your team members to review
their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for their future
strategy (the more autonomy your employee has in their role the more they’ll be
on board with your new plan).
Your Channels:
·
Review your current digital marketing
channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in
any new ones (this depends on where your customers are and the time you have
available).
·
Clearly articulate what each digital
channel is trying to achieve.
·
Make sure you have at least one KPI
attached to each of your digital channels.
5. Make the Plan (& Don’t Stick to It)
‘Create a
plan and don’t stick to it? But, but, what do you mean?’ Before the panic sets
into the most organised of digital marketers let me explain…your plan is never
going to be perfect from the outset. Not every assumption you make is going to
be correct.
And although
you’ve taken every care to craft a carefully constructed plan based on a set of
insightful assumptions and analysis you still can’t predict exactly how your
customers will behave. It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and
monitor your strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.
Create Your
Digital Marketing Calendar:
·
Try creating your timeline using Google
Calendars – that way you can share it with your team members and allow them to
edit it where necessary.
·
Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create
and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.
·
Document the digital channels needed to
ensure the success for each campaign.
Review Your
Strategy & Identify Changes Needed:
·
Create a measurement and monitoring plan
(this should fit in with your KPIs).
·
Check the success of the individual
elements of your strategy at continuous intervals.
·
If something is not working (i.e. you’re
not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try
to identify what is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or
the taglines you’re using for your ads?).
·
Revisit your previous analysis, personas
and budget allocation and try something new.
·
Create a clearly defined KPI for your new
venture.
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