4 Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Plan
1. Set Goals & Objectives
The first step to creating your digital marketing plan is understanding what goals and objectives are essential to succeed.
“Companies often have multiple objectives, and you’ll need to prioritize and balance these goals,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “Often these goals are tied to the overall strategy of the company.”
For example, if you don’t work at a big-name company, you may want to focus on brand awareness. If you’re a market leader, you may want to expand your target audience by highlighting a new or revised product or service.
The best way to determine your company’s objectives is by identifying its challenges and opportunities throughout the customer journey, which has three stages:
- Awareness: Introducing customers to your brand or product to address a problem they have
- Consideration: Making customers aware of your brand or product while they evaluate alternatives
- Decision: Using information gathered during the previous stages to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions
“Which stage of the funnel you focus on and how you allocate your budget across different stages depends on the specific context of your brand and where you feel is the greatest barrier for your growth,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
Your company’s strategic decisions hinge on which customer journey stage they pertain to. For example, to increase conversion rates at the consideration stage, you could allocate more resources to producing targeted, personalized content.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Your digital marketing strategy is only effective if you know who you’re trying to attract. That’s why identifying your target audience—the consumers most likely interested in your products or services—is the next step to crafting your digital marketing plan.
To determine your target audience, collect data related to:
- Demographics: General information like age, gender, and occupation that help you make implicit assumptions about customers
- Customer behavior: Behavior patterns related to your products or services, such as purchasing history and website interactions
- Consumer motivations: Primary motivations when making purchases, such as convenience, value, or status
You can use your insights to employ tactics like segmentation—organizing your customers into groups.
“While you can try and market a product to everyone, consumers have different needs and preferences,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “What appeals to one group of consumers may not appeal to another.”
By segmenting your customers, you can provide personalized experiences—even when their needs or market conditions shift.
3. Define Your Value Proposition
Once you know who to target, you can communicate your value proposition.
“If you want to convince consumers to buy your product, you need to give them a compelling reason to purchase your brand instead of a competing brand,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
To start, you need to know your:
- Target audience
- Unique value
- Competitive set
- Justifications for brand value
You can then combine these components into a value positioning statement:
According to Digital Marketing Strategy, you can analyze your value claim’s validity and potency using the three C’s of brand positioning:
- Consumer analysis: Understanding your target audience’s behaviors, needs, preferences, and motivations.
- Competitor analysis: Evaluating your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and market position to enhance your strategy.
- Company analysis: Assessing your value proposition, capabilities, resources, and performance to identify areas for strategic improvement.
Effective brand positioning requires being faithful to your value claim and ensuring it’s feasible and favorable.
“As you work to create a value proposition, remember: A brand’s position is not just defined by the brand itself,” Gupta says in the course. “A brand co-creates its position with its consumers as they interact with each other and react to emerging cultural trends.”
4. Establish Metrics
Metrics are critical to your marketing plan. Without key performance indicators (KPIs), it can be difficult to tell whether it’s effective.
Common marketing KPIs include:
- Impressions
- Click through rate
- Conversion rate
“At the simplest level, you need to measure what you set out to achieve with your marketing objectives,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “And certain metrics will be more relevant for specific stages of the funnel.”
For example, you can focus on metrics like impressions—the number of times your brand-specific content was displayed—to determine your strategy’s effectiveness at the awareness stage.
With a well-crafted digital marketing plan, you can use metrics to optimize your strategy as priorities shift throughout the customer journey.