In every business you have, having a plan and knowing what you’re doing is very important. Right before you start your business, you need to have a business plan, so you’ll know your company’s needs, in terms of funds, and on which projects you should focus on.
The same thing happens when promoting your company online. Many people just throw money and use different marketing channels. They are the “Let’s pump money and see what happens.” type of managers. Don’t be this type of manager! Whenever somebody comes to you with a new marketing proposal, you should ask the following question: “How many leads this proposal will generate?”. This is the first question any marketer should be able to answer.
If you are a marketer looking to create a digital marketing strategy or a manager looking into such a proposal, here are the aspects you need to look after:
1. Start from the Objectives
When making a marketing plan, everything happens backward. You need to start from what you are looking to obtain, and according to these objectives, you choose the channels, the budget, and so on.
Let’s say you have an online shop selling shoes and you are looking to create a plan for your digital marketing strategy. First, you need to set up objectives for your strategy, and they should be related to your business objectives.
Long story short, right now, your company has 150 clients a month and the objective for your 1-year marketing plan is to double the number of clients, that’s 300 clients. In terms of revenue, you are aiming for a 180-200% increase.
Experts in marketing from various companies, such as Brill Assignment, Superior Papers, Essay Writing Lab and UK Best Essays, recommend having SMART objectives for your marketing plan. That means your objectives need to be:
- Specific
- Measurable (this means numbers! 300 clients, remember?)
- Achievable (realistic)
- Relevant (don’t try to increase the clothes sales for your shoe shop)
- Time Bound (You need a deadline for your objective)
Choose the Appropriate Marketing Channels
Once you’ve set some objectives, you need to think of channels you could use to reach those clients. For example, for a more generalistic shop, like the one we’ve been talking about, a good channel for an online shop would be Google AdWords and its Remarketing tool.
Alex McCain, lead marketing specialist at Australian Writings Services adds “If you have a generalistic business, and you target the mass audience, Google AdWords is a very popular and useful marketing channel. Even so, for businesses with a smaller niche, such as a cryptocurrency exchange, for example, you should do some digging to find other channels. The social media network Quora might be a good start.”
When choosing your marketing channels, the most important aspect you should keep in mind it’s its ROI, its efficiency. Most channels offer you a simulation of your campaign’s results.
If you’ll use Google AdWords, you will be able to get an estimate on the cost per click of the channel.
Create Deliverables
Once your objectives are defined, and you’ve decided upon the marketing channels you want to use, you need to create deliverables. This might be kind of tricky for a person who’s never done this before.
Basically, you need to create the tasks you need to complete before launching your marketing campaign. We’ll continue the example we’ve had so far: online shoe shop, using Google AdWords, and its remarketing tool.
Deliverables:
- Google AdWords
- Keyword Research
- Creating copy for your ads
- A/B Testing Various Types of Ads
- Creating Campaign
- Remarketing Tool
- Implementation of the Google Tag
- Creating Banners for Google Remarketing
- Writing Copy
- Creating Banner Design
- Implementing the Remarketing Tool
This is a small example of how you should create deliverables for your marketing plan. Paper writing services recommend this kind of structure for you to be able to keep track of your work.
If you think you won’t be able to organize your marketing plan and create such deliverables, you should ask for the help of a writing service specialized in marketing plans.
Make a Timeline for Your Plan & Assign the Responsible
For efficiency, the deliverables need to be placed in a timeline. You need to make sure you don’t waste any time when implementing the marketing plan.
The most important aspect you need to consider is the time estimation of your tasks. You should estimate how long it’ll take to finish them. For example, writing copy for your ads should take roughly 2 hours. You write that value right next to the deliverable and do that to all of them.
Then, taking into consideration an 8-hour work day, you should define the timeline of your tasks.
If there are multiple persons in charge of the marketing campaign, essay writers recommend assigning the responsibilities at this stage of the process. This will lead to transparency and, if there will be any mistakes or delays along the way, you will know who’s responsible for it
You’ve defined your objectives, you’ve chosen the marketing channels you consider appropriate, the deliverables and the timelines are created, now you need to make a budget for your marketing campaign.
According to Ryan March, Chief Financial Officer at an important assignment service“Budgeting your marketing campaign right from the start is your way of making sure the money is well spent. Every expenditure needs to have a well-defined result or outcome.”
When creating the budget, apart from your expenditures with the marketing channels, you need to estimate the costs of the implementation. Here, we are talking about the copywriter who’ll create the text for your ads, the designer who will create the banners for the remarketing tool, the developer who will implement the Google Tag, and the Google AdWords specialist who will create and implement the Google Ads campaign.
Creating and structuring your digital marketing strategy plan, if you’ve never done this before, will be quite difficult, it includes lots of aspects of your business, and they need to be thoroughly organized. You need to be a good mathematician, an avid organizer, a good developer, copywriter, and designer, if you want to create the strategy and implement it by yourself.
If it’s the first such plan you create and implement, I’d recommend you take a look at some examples of how others, more experienced marketers, have created and implemented such plans.