How to make a digital marketing plan
Once you know the main strategies, it’s time to put them into practice and create a digital marketing plan!
The first step in doing this is setting clear goals and then outlining the actions necessary to achieve them.
For example, if you want to increase the sales of a new service, increasing the number of qualified leads can be a good goal.
With that, and taking into account your buyer persona, available resources, and competitors, it is possible to describe the actions necessary to achieve the objective.
It looks complex, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there are a few steps that help structure a good marketing plan:
1. Definition of objectives and goals
What do you hope to achieve with a digital marketing strategy?
This question should guide all of your work. Without a clear objective in mind, you will hardly be able to structure what are the next steps to take or understand if the strategy is working or not.
For example, if your brand is still getting started in the online market and does not have a digital presence, your goal may be to increase traffic to the website.
You can then describe specific goals and sub-goals that can help drive more traffic, such as posting weekly content to the blog, spreading social media posts, investing in sponsored links, etc.
When deciding what your goal is, keep in mind that it must make sense for your business model and must be achievable and measurable. Any mistake in the definition can damage the whole strategy.
2. Choice of KPIs
With the goal set, it’s time to choose the indicators responsible for measuring the success or failure of your strategy.
The KPI or key performance indicators are responsible for measuring whether a strategy or action is working and help the brand achieve its goals.
For example, if your goal is linked to higher organic traffic, a valid indicator is the number of visits to your blog or website.
Remember that these indicators should make sense for your business since all the next steps will depend on them.
3. Creation of buyer persona
For your marketing plan to work, it is not enough to have well-defined objectives. It is also necessary to know the user profile you hope to achieve in order to detail how the actions will be implemented.
It is for this reason that the creation of the buyer person cannot be left out of your strategic plan. Also known as an avatar, the buyer persona is a representation of your ideal buyer and brings together demographic and behavioral characteristics, such as gender, age, position, consumption habits, hobbies, lifestyle, and challenges faced.
With this data, you can define the best tone of voice to interact with the audience, the best tools, the content format, the most efficient design, among other details that are important for the success of your strategy.
To create an avatar, run away from speculation. If you already have an online audience, use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to get access to real data about your audience. It is also worth analyzing the audience of the competitors and even doing some research with your target audience.
4. Choosing the most appropriate strategy
With your buyer persona defined, the next step is to choose and describe what strategies will be developed to achieve the objectives.
As we’ve already shown, there are dozens of marketing strategies that you can implement in your business. But the choice must be made very carefully.
In order not to make a mistake in this step, take into account your goals and the person’s profile, choose the strategy that best suits the audience you want to reach and that can most help you achieve your goals.
5. Creation of the action plan
Now that you know which marketing strategy to implement, try to structure it in detail. It is important to define the best content formats to be created, the volume and frequency of production of these materials, and the distribution channels.
Then it lists all the resources needed to complete these tasks and the deadline for completing each one. Organize everything on an editorial schedule or calendar so that the entire team has access to this data. But don’t get too attached to deadlines or budgets. Your action plan can and should change depending on the circumstances. Therefore, update it when necessary.
6. Measurement of results
Last but not least, it’s time to track the results of your marketing strategy.
Do you remember that one of the criteria for choosing an objective for your strategy was that it was measurable? This helps determine if results have been achieved and if any process needs to be improved.
Every time you complete an important task or action, evaluate all the figures, compare them with previous results, and identify areas for improvement. In this way, it is easier to repeat the successes and avoid the mistakes made.
Digital Marketing Metrics
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that it allows you to closely document, monitor, and evaluate whether all actions are giving the expected result. Something that traditional marketing does not allow.
Therefore, you or your brand can make more assertive decisions, based on real and safe data.
When evaluating the performance of your blog or website, for example, you can evaluate one of the following metrics:
- Unique visitors: the number of people who access your page;
- Sessions: the total set of interactions, such as views and clicks on the page, for a user;
- Organic and paid traffic: number of sessions originated from search services or paid campaigns;
- Bounce rate: percentage of users who make a single visit, without interacting with the page;
- Conversion rate: the relationship between the number of visits and the number of conversions made;
- External links: number and quality of links from other domains that lead to your website or blog.
However, these are not the only digital marketing metrics. There are dozens of them and it is important to choose the most suitable one for your business.
ROI
The ROI is one of the most important metrics in digital marketing. Indicates the profitability of the actions that the company puts into practice.
In summary, the ROI calculates the return obtained based on the investment made. This indicator can also reveal the total losses that your business has had with any investment.
The general ROI formula is:
ROI = (income – investment cost) / investment cost
For example, a company had a turnover of $ 100,000 in a given year. In the same period, the investment was $ 10,000.
Based on the formula, it is possible to conclude that the company’s ROI was 9. That is, each dollar invested generated $ 9 in profit.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
CAC is a metric that indicates the investment made by the company to win a customer.
For example, if the same company in the previous example invested $ 10,000 to prospect customers and gets only 10 customers, it will have a CAC of $ 1,000.
Monthly Recurring Income (MRR) and Annual Recurring Income (ARR)
These two metrics go together and help predict the revenue generated by the business.
Especially useful for those who work with SaaS (software as a service), this metric allows evaluating the performance of companies that sell products with a wide range of prices or whose payment is recurring. By calculating monthly or annual recurring revenue, it is possible to identify growth patterns in the company’s revenue more reliably.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
As the name implies, this metric shows how much the company has spent to generate a new lead, in much the same way as CAC. This metric is extremely important since lead generation is one of the most important goals of a digital marketing strategy.
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Unlike the CAC, in the CPA, the acquisition is defined by the business itself, according to its objectives. It could be a new contact or a qualified lead, for example. One tip is to compare the CPA with the revenue generated by each acquisition. Therefore, if the CPA is higher than the acquisition revenue, it is a sign that the strategy is flawed.
Churn and retention rate
Although nobody likes to lose customers, it is essential to know how many people do not use your products and services. Retention is calculated using the total number of customers at the beginning and end of a period along with the number of new customers. A) Yes:
Retention rate = [(Clients at the end of the period – new clients) / clients at the beginning of the period] * 100
The retention rate is always equal to 1 – the churn rate, or churns. That is, these two metrics basically represent the same thing.
For example, a business starts the month with 150 customers and ends the period with 175. Meanwhile, the company gained 35 new customers and had 10 cancellations, resulting in an additional 25 customers. As a result, the retention rate in the period was 93.3% of clients, with an abandonment rate of 6.7%.