Digital marketing tools are easily accessible and, in many cases, even free. But before launching the communication of your brand online, you need a “map” that lets you know where to go and how to get there by correcting the course if necessary. Therefore, today I want to tell you how to create your online marketing plan in 6 steps.
The online marketing plan is essential to guide your promotional actions and ensure that they respond to the objectives of your business. It is not about “being on the Internet”, but using all the tools that online marketing puts at your fingertips to boost your brand and increase profits. Ready to create your plan? Let’s go there!
How to create your online marketing plan in 6 steps
Step 1. The environment: market and competition
The first step to developing a good digital marketing strategy is to understand the environment in which we operate. For this, it is necessary to study in depth the market and the competition: characteristics and trends of the sector, benchmarking of competitors and analysis of weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities. Finally, we must find our USP (“unique selling proposition” or unique commercial proposal): what distinguishes our product and positions it in a unique place with respect to the competition.
Step 2. Hearing
The marketing tools provide many possibilities for audience segmentation, but to take advantage of them it is essential to be very clear to whom we are going. Therefore, the next step will be to clarify who is our target. To find your target online you can use some friendship applications.
Demography is an essential first step in defining the audience, but it is not enough. We need to understand what their needs and motivations are and how they communicate and interact online, in order to define the best channels and communication strategies to reach them. For this, we can take advantage of the multiple tools for digital market studies, more or less sophisticated depending on the budget.
Step 3. Objectives
Once the two previous points have been defined, we come to a key question for the success of our online marketing plan: what do we want to achieve? The online objectives must be aligned with the overall strategy of our business. Some examples may be generating customers for our new product, increasing the repetition and recommendation rate of existing customers, increasing the number of positive mentions to the brand or increasing traffic to our online store.
Step 4. Strategies and creativity
We are ready to move to the center of our plan: strategy and creativity.
The strategy gives us a global vision of the different actions that we must carry out to establish a link with the client that directs us towards the objectives that we have defined, based on the conclusions of the previous points. To organize it, it is very useful to divide the actions according to the different stages of the conversion funnel: as is logical, it is not the same to communicate with someone who has never heard of us than with a regular customer.
Step 5. Sales process
Based on the strategy we have defined, we are going to specify how our digital sales process is. If we can close the sale with an online purchase, it is relatively easy to define a series of steps for which the user has to travel on our website before becoming a customer. If, on the other hand, the characteristics of our business do not allow ecommerce, we will need to define other ways to link sales to our online communication, for example, by generating leads. The reverse phone search should be considered in doing sales process.
Step 6. Loyalty
Once we have managed to turn the user into a customer, comes one of the most interesting challenges of the online marketing plan: loyalty. If we think that it costs several times more to acquire a new client than to keep an existing one, it is clear that paying attention to this part of our plan is very profitable. Do not forget to take advantage of the potential of cookies to know the habits and interests of your customers and offer them what they need most at the right time.
Daryl Green