In today’s hyper-connected world, your business can thrive or die based on your company's unique digital marketing plan. Many of your customers will come directly from an online location. Whether this is through a mobile device, a home computer or a tablet, it's important to have a dedicated plan in place for those customers.
To meet the needs of each of these customers, a good digital marketing plan requires a large web of connected digital channels. You need one dedicated platform that integrates all of these aspects. There are quite a few good ones available that you should consider -- think Google, Facebook, HubSpot, MailChimp, etc. Each platform has its uses, so before you dive in, you need to create a plan and use what works best for you.
As CEO of a digital marketing agency, I love watching the plan get created, executed and measured. We find that the best way to build a good online marketing strategy is to break it up into four distinct, actionable steps.
1. Review Your Current Digital Marketing Strategies
Reviewing your current digital marketing strategy can take many different forms. If you're just starting out, this step will be quite simple. However, if your company has planned many digital marketing campaigns in the past, you might be dealing with an endless amount of web assets strewn across a variety of sites. As plans change and these sites cease to be maintained, they can become detrimental to your business.
Try asking the following questions to find all online presences that you currently have:
- What social media sites do we have profiles on?
- Do we have a YouTube channel or any other videos posted online?
- What were our past marketing campaigns? What worked and what didn't work?
Completing this list will create a solid foundation for you to start a new online marketing strategy. Remember that successful websites need to be responsive across a wide array of devices, so check the responsiveness of your current web assets.
2. Create The Plan, And Choose The Team And Timeline
This is the bread and butter of your new digital marketing campaign. Your plan will likely succeed or fail based on how completely it has been developed.
The first thing you should consider is which platform you are going to use. For example, consider HubSpot, Facebook, MailChimp and Google. We use and are partners with all of the above-mentioned platforms, and one of the reasons we love working with them is because they offer teams like ours the opportunity to get certified, giving us a deeper understanding of the features available that can be utilized for each campaign.
Once your platform has been selected, you should choose a team to run your new digital marketing campaign. You need people who will remain dedicated to the plan throughout the implementation and revision stages. They will need to continually track the success of the plan in order to tweak it as needed.
The last step of the plan creation stage is to create a timeline. Set clear goals for your internet marketing team. This should include when web development should be completed by, and recurrent plans for proper search engine optimization across all of your web assets.
3. Execute And Launch The Campaign
Though this step may seem easy, it can take days or even weeks to properly launch your online marketing campaign. You want to make sure that each of your new web assets goes online at the best possible time and that all of the software is working as intended. The majority of digital marketing campaign launches don't go according to plan, or they don't stay on schedule. Be realistic about how much time needs to be set aside for your campaign launch and be sure that you have a mechanism for proper tracking in place. There are plenty of online marketing tools available to help you identify the calls, emails and inquiries made as a result of your campaign.
When speaking with new customers, don’t hesitate to ask how they found you. You should also consider adding surveys to a few of your online assets. This is a great way to track your incoming customer traffic and measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
4. Measure Using Data From The Analytics And Optimize
In the months following the launch of your new digital marketing drive, you need to constantly measure its success through the data from your web analytics. Every good plan that exists today went through hundreds of small changes to get to where it is now. In the world of digital marketing, this is simply the norm. A business that isn't ready to adjust and optimize will have a difficult time creating a successful internet marketing plan.
Don’t allow the growth of your campaign to fall by the wayside and be forgotten. With a team that is dedicated to constantly evaluating the data and adjusting the plan, you can find great success through online marketing and successful search engine optimization.
Next: Take Further Action
Unfortunately, even the best-laid digital marketing plans fail when there's no game plan for measurement and implementation. Even if you do everything perfectly and build the most brilliant digital marketing strategy out there, you're still busy running your business. Use these four steps to create a consistent, smart marketing strategy.
