There are many different ways of online marketing or digital marketing where you spend a lot of money to promote your products and brand. You run advertisements on different online channels in order to reach out to your target audience. But when you are using “free” services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube & Instagram and want to digitally build your brand for Free you need a Digital Marketing Plan designed for Success.
With various marketing methods, diverse audiences, and ways to market to them, a digital marketing campaign requires more planning and better oversight than traditional marketing campaigns.
Below we will discuss five parts of developing a digital marketing plan which paves your way to success.
Create Buyer Personas
The more you try to know and understand about your buyer/prospective buyer the more you can use the language they understand, showcase your products and interact with them where they spend their time online and design a product that they’ll need, or solve a problem through your customized service offer.
The best part of the Digital Marketing plan is that you can tweak your marketing messages and marketing communication for each of the channels you would use in a way that fits the context. The messages can also be tweaked according to the buyer personas.
But, the important point is to create buyer personas first. We have earlier discussed this topic in great detail “Create Buyer Personas for Marketing Success”.
But here again, we will walk you through the ways through which you can research buyers or potential buyers.
Feedback from Current Customers
Taking feedback from your existing customers is one of the best ways to understand their actual needs, their satisfaction level with your products, services.
And the data from the customer feedback actually gives you great insights to improve your marketing communication, improvise your services or products to meet the customer needs.
Below are a few ways in which you can get your customer’s feedback.
Online Surveys
The easiest way is to use the Forms option in Google Docs to do an online survey and ask your customers for information like their motivations, interests, who they are, what websites they browse.
You could also use Surveys.ie, PollDaddy.com and SurveyMonkey for the online surveys.
Record Them
If your customers allow you then record their feedback in audio or video where they speak about their experiences with your products or services.
These videos and audio can be used to understand their needs, how well your product or service meets their needs.
The videos can also be published on your YouTube channel with their permission. These videos also help prospects learn about your products and services.
Relook at Your Existing Communications
Take a look at sales and tech support emails, blog/website queries, social media queries, and phone queries to see what questions people are asking.
If you are a new company, see what people are asking of your competitors publicly on social media websites, discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc., and prepare your products, services, and marketing communication strategy accordingly.
Questionnaire
You can also prepare a questionnaire and try answering them yourself, which will make it very clear for you to how to serve your customers better.
This will also help you make your communication and customer relationship strategies with your current customers and prospects.
Below are the questions which would give you a clear idea about your brand positioning, product positioning, etc.
- Describe your company in 280 characters. (Elevator Pitch)
- What story about your company can be told and spread by others?
- Which are your customer touchpoints with your business?
- What is the emotional reward if a customer uses your product?
- Which are the alternative products or services your customers use?
- What websites do your customers/prospects spend time on?
- Which words/phrases do they use to reach these websites?
- Where does your website rank for those keywords/phrases?
- Who are the influencers who can influence the buying decision of your customers/potential customers?
- How you can approach and convince an influencer to spread messages about your product, brand or services?
- Who are the influencers your competitors are using to spread their messages?
- Which media outlets, PR publications, bloggers can help with online coverage/reputation for you?
- What do you return to them to spread your story?
Tools:
Alexa.com can also tell you about your traffic sources, the demography of your website visitors, which are your competitor websites, which keywords are searched on google to land on your website, what is your websites global and national rank, which websites are linking to your website, and much more, which gives you ideas about your customers, their needs and expectations, and how to attract more customers.
Google Alerts allows you to get an instant alert on the keywords you choose right in your email.
Google bots keep running searches across the web and when they get results for the keywords you have chosen to monitor they automatically send you an email with the links to the pages, websites where that keyword was used.
Similarly, you can monitor the competitor by adding his brand name in your Google Alerts.
Define Your Digital Marketing Objectives
Marketing is always about achieving something, and it’s not worth it if you don’t measure the results of your marketing campaigns. So, first of all, clearly define your objectives for your digital campaign.
Below are some examples, how you can define your Digital Marketing Objectives for aligned with your digital marketing plan regarding your online digital properties.
Website
- Increase 20% organic traffic on the website by end of the calendar year
- Get better rank position on Search Engine Result pages for certain keywords by the end of the financial year
- Sell 10% more products in the last quarter of the calendar year
- Increase the time visitors spend on the website by 2 minutes
- Get more backlinks to the website
- More items/articles shared via FB or Twitter
- Generate 15% more leads on the website in the last quarter of the calendar year
Blog
- Get more blog comments
- Add more useful links to blog posts for the benefit of the readers
- Get more social shares on the blog posts
- Drive newsletter subscription from blog
- Get more leads by offering “ Free eBook” downloads
- Increase the blog readership by 10% in the current calendar year
- Get 10,000 more fans on your Facebook Page by the year-end
- Increase engagement rate by at least 10% in the next six months
- Get more people to sign up for the webinar through Facebook
- Sell directly from Facebook
- Send more traffic to your website from Facebook through daily posts and offers
- Get 10% more followers
- 5% more mentions/replies
- Try to get more Retweets
- Send more traffic to your website
- Develop new contacts
- Create a prospect list from the contacts to communicate and engage with
- Generate 200 new leads and convert them into customers/partners
Reputation Management
- Change the perception of your company from negative to neutral, neutral to positive
- Get more mentions of you on Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, blogs, digital PR websites, News, etc.
- Persuade the customers to write reviews about the company and their experiences with the brand
- More focus on PR, and issue press releases for the events happening in the organization
These are all general objectives, but if you have done digital marketing before for your company based on the data you can put in specific numbers to achieve through the digital marketing campaigns. Create proper objectives, or S.M.A.R.T Goals, and keep measuring your progress periodically.
Content Creation
Content is the reason people go over the internet and everyone loves and appreciates great content.
The key to success is to create great content that your users love to consume and share. And this should be your top priority in your entire digital marketing plan.
Define Your Content Objectives
When you invest your time and money in creating content make sure it is of great value. Define your objectives that you want to get out of your content.
Before you start to create your content whether it is for a social media update, a new page on the website, or an update to the existing content, or an article on your blog, make sure it has some purpose.
Purposeless content is not going to give you any benefit or maybe the results you don’t want. For instance, if you write a case study then it should clearly show how you solve a problem for your client or business, or the community.
If you are writing an eBook for your prospects and customers make sure it has a purpose and is really beneficial for your customers and prospects.
Who You Are Creating Your Content For?
Before you actually start to create your content first ask yourself whom you are going to create your content for. What sort of content would be good for them, which they would like to engage with and then share it with their friends and community?
When you will figure that out, you will understand what content your audience would like, perhaps they would like to be a video content on a quick help guide for the product they use. Or a well-written step by step guide to open a bank account and start saving their money.
Content Themes
The next step after you figure out what content you are going to create and for whom is when you are going to publish that content. What would be the theme of your content?
For example, you can’t keep pushing a discount offer throughout the year, or you can’t keep your social media channels share only product information throughout the month. Because people want a variety of content, you need to have a content theme.
A content theme gives you a clear idea of what content should be ready by that time. If you stick to your content calendar, you won’t miss out on the opportunities to engage with your audience.
The content theme could be built around the education initiative, special offers/discounts week, tips on how to use your products, which your users find interesting and useful.
When you work theme-wise you cover everything without mistakes and also it helps you avoid repetition of the content and messages which your users don’t like at all.
Ask for the feedback and opinions of your users as well, that helps you create a two-way engagement with your customers and prospects.
It will help you understand their needs, behaviors, motivations, and much more. You can use that information in building your marketing strategy to attract and sell them.
Update Daily, Measure Weekly
It is very important to measure the impact of your actions, content, and social media activities.
When you measure the number of likes, number of shares, number of website visits, number of blog readers, number of newsletter subscribers, video views on your Facebook or YouTube channels, number of comments, nature of comments, etc., you get a clear idea of what your users are liking and then you should focus on creating similar content which is more useful for your users.
Tools:
Google External Keyword Tool: This tool predict potential traffic for keywords in your content as well as suggest other words and phrases used with your content. Based on the recommendation of the tool, you can create your content.
Tracking & Measurements
The most important part of the digital marketing plan is to measure the results.
If you can’t measure the results of your marketing campaigns or marketing efforts, it’s all waste and you will never know what could have been done better or what went wrong.
So, after you have defined your objectives, content plan, and your audience, then you should also think about the measurement.
The best way is to measure before and after the campaign. Keep an eye over the statistics so that you can know what is happening in your digital marketing.
Tools:
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools will tell you about traffic to your website, keywords used, search engines, what webpages are doing well, or doing badly, where they are visiting your websites from.
Where your visitors exit your website, how many of your website visitors complete a goal like filling a form, downloading an eBook, signing up for a webinar, or signing up for a newsletter subscription, etc., can be easily tracked by the Google Analytics.
Bing Webmaster Tools will tell you the number of links to your website and what pages are getting the most links, where your website visitors are located, demographics, interests, duration of their visits.
Facebook Insights
Facebook has “Insights” feature for the business pages. You can measure total Page likes, interactions, growth rates, loss of fans, which posts are getting higher engagements, etc.
You can also see in almost real-time the number of times your content has been displayed in the news feed of people, percentages of male, female fans following your page, their age, country, city, languages they speak, etc. The data can be downloaded in excel.
Instagram Insights
Instagram also offers insights for business profiles. It shows similar data like Facebook.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter has a built-in analytics tool that shows you the insights on your business page.
You can also run a search on http://search.twitter.com for your Twitter name, website address, product names, etc., and bookmark the search.
You can record daily mentions, follower numbers and Twitter Lists will allow you to segment your followers if you use them.
This will help you in getting the best out of your digital marketing plan using twitter.
Execution of the Digital Marketing Plan
When you have everything in place, now is the time you would want to execute your digital marketing plan.
Using your Marketing Calendar and Content plan, execute your overall plan as decided.
However, it is significant that you keep improvising your content and advertisings as and when required to get better results.
