There is no doubting that digital marketing is becoming ever more important to the success of your business; but actually knowing what to do and where to begin can be rather confusing and overwhelming. Before you even think about any kind of implementation, you should put together a simple digital marketing action plan.
Why create a digital marketing action plan?
Many businesses approach digital marketing without giving much thought to what they are actually doing. It’s all too easy to throw up a website or a Facebook page and simply hope for the best!
Before you begin, it is important to get clear on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts and then set out a realistic plan for achieving your goals. By putting together a simple strategy, you will be able to take focused action and therefore be much more likely to be successful.
Do your research
The first stage is to gather as much information about your customers as you possibly can. Who is your target audience? What do they do and what motivates them? Most importantly, where do they hang out online?
Set an overall digital marketing objective/goal
The next step is to decide on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. Your overall goal might be something like:
“Generate 50 new leads each month and convert at least 20 of those leads into new customers.”
Decide on your digital marketing channels
Based on the information you now have, you can then decide on what digital marketing channels you will use to achieve your goal. For example:
- Your website
- Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
For each channel/campaign, you should set a specific objective and key performance indicator. For example:
- “Increase website traffic by 20% before the end of December 2017”
- “Add 500 new subscribers to our email newsletter each month and convert at least 20 of them into paying customers”
- “Generate 200 new leads from Facebook advertising in the next 30 days”
Plan your actions
You should set out exactly what you are going to do – each day, each week, and each month. Make sure that these actions are realistic and manageable so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
Closely monitor results
It is important to closely monitor and measure your results, so you need to decide on exactly how you’re going to do that. As an example, website traffic can be tracked through Google Analytics, or your email marketing might be tracked through your autoresponder service (e.g. MailChimp).
