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We hope you find it useful when creating plans to make more better use of the fantastic opportunities available from digital marketing. It’s a sample of a wider selection of our advice for marketers including 7 Steps Ebooks; online training courses; how-to-videos and marketing templates. See the full range of content used by our Expert members. Our recent research showed that shockingly, many organizations are doing digital marketing, but they don’t have a strategy. The reality is that digital channels are still relatively new, so many businesses haven’t responded.
We found that a majority of organizations responding now use a planned approach to digital marketing, but many still don’t. Welcome Make sure your digital plan is well integrated with all marketing communications and aligns with your business objectives. 1 Smart Insights Managing Digital Marketing 2014 research report (available to all members) Strategy Recommendation 1 Create a specific digital marketing plan! Create a detailed digital marketing plan defining the digital channel strategy for each major market / proposition to provide focus and direction for the future. Congratulations on taking steps to improve your digital strategy!
We believe that you need to first define a separate digital plan to make the case for more investment in digital marketing and change your approach to managing digital marketing. Then move to a better integrated approach where it’s part of your marketing strategy. Some general advice to keep in mind when planning Start with the customer. Build your plan around customer insights and needs – not around your products and tactics. Digital marketing planning is no different to any other marketing plan, in fact it’s increasingly strange to have separate plans for ‘digital’ and ‘offline’ since that’s not how your customers perceive your business.
However, we’re often required to separate plans for “digital” only based on the way teams and reporting is structured and to make the business case for transformation to digital business so that it can become part of “business as usual”. Keep it flexible. Situations and plans change, especially online, so ensure plans re usable by a clear vision for the year and keeping detail to a shorter term 90-day focus. Set realistic goals. Include specific SMART objectives in your plans but keep them realistic by basing them on insights from your analytics, so they’re easy for others to buy into. Keep it Simple! “Jargon light” is best.
Again it helps others buy into what you’re saying. Creating a structure for your plan Keep plans up-to-date. Review and update regularly. We recommend 90-day planning of key activities and review against analytics dashboards. Knowing where to start is often the hardest thing when writing a digital marketing Lana. So once you have a structure / framework to follow in a table of contents, it’s then almost a matter of filling in the gaps… At Smart Insights we developed the RACKET planning system to help create actionable plans that improve commercial results using integrated digital communications based on marketplace insight and analytics.
Our inbound marketing anaphoric recommends activities and Kips to use in the table for each stage of RACE. 5 Use the interactive version of the RACE Planning framework at http://bit. Lye/smarter to navigate to our advice on our free hub pages for each key digital marketing activity. We have developed hub pages as a ‘one-stop shop’ covering all the key areas of modern marketing. They feature our member advice and the latest guidance and stats from our blob posts to help keep you up-to-date and inform your strategy. Creating a brief, focused digital plan Opportunity.
Quantifiable SMART objectives based on your analytics and market insights. State your assumptions and what informs your objectives. Your plan will be most effective in showing the actions needed if it’s brief. We recommend using the single page summary shown on the next page. For each part of RACKET use this table to summaries the key points of your plan: This template is structured using RACKET digital marketing planning system, but you will also find PR Smith’s COSTA@ planning tool which we cover in the next section useful. Strategy. Where you will focus your resources and investment to hit your targets.
Action. Managing tasks to implement your strategies. Actions 1. Plan. 2. Reach. 3. Act. 4. Convert. 5. Engage. Strategies Opportunity RACE activity See our digital marketing plan examples downloads for examples of how to create your summary action plans. 6 Recommended resource? Digital marketing strategy toolkit templates for Expert embers Develop your strategy using our Digital marketing toolkit templates to prepare a customized plan. Amend the unbranded Word, Excel and Powering templates to create a plan for your business or your clients’ businesses. ONE.
PLAN Create a digital marketing strategy Opportunity: Review marketplace and set objectives There are 5 key activities to define your digital opportunity through marketplace analysis: or 1 . Set objectives and review performance using summary dashboards and Kips or 2. Customer insight summarizes in customer persona and customer journey maps or 4. Review influencer and intermediaries r 3. Benchmark competitors or 5. Audit brand strength with the marketplace Strategy: Create digital strategy or Select target market segments and persona. Define digital targeting approaches.