Digital Marketing Skills, Digital Marketing Strategy
8 Steps for Building and Executing a Strong Digital Marketing Plan
Krista Neher
Jun 27 2019
As you execute digital marketing or evaluate the effectiveness of any marketing – your website, email, Facebook page, ad campaign – you’ll want to evaluate it against the lens of whether or not it is helping you achieve your plan.
There are eight steps to building and executing a strong digital marketing plan.
Listen – Listening is the first and most important step – some say it is unexpectedly the most valuable step in this process! Take some time to look at your competitors, other industry players, and your target audience. The biggest challenge in growing your business with digital marketing is to have good ideas and execute them with excellence, and this step will help with both of these.
Marketing Strategy – Clearly define your goal, strategy, and objectives so that you have a clear idea of how your efforts will contribute to your bottom line. While this may seem obvious – grow sales, gain donations, increase registrations, etc. – clearly defining what drives your goal will add focus and effectiveness to your execution.
Target Audience – The more clearly you define your target audience the better results you will get. Digital marketing allows us to use precision marketing to reach the exact right person at the exact right time with the exact right message. The challenge is knowing your audience specifically and intimately enough to execute this.
Content – While content is ultimately a part of the execution of each channel, it’s usually helpful to determine the content that your audience is interested in the upfront. Crafting compelling content that breaks through digital clutter is key to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Tools – There are TONS of digital marketing channels and tools that you could use – websites, Facebook, email, CRM, etc. The key is choosing the right tools to meet your business objectives and focusing your efforts smartly.
Implement – Implementing with excellence can make or break your success. Often with digital marketing, the devil is in the details, and maintaining excellence and using best practices is key.
Track and Measure – For all the focus on digital marketing reporting and data, most of us still don’t spend enough time looking at our results or using available data to inform our choices and improve our efforts over time.
Adjust – Adaptability is the key to success and, as marketers, we need to change our mindset. When something is executed the real work is usually just beginning. Paying attention to performance and improving over time is key to growing your success in a changing digital ecosystem.
Check out our online Digital Marketing Strategy course for a more in-depth look at creating a digital marketing plan that gets results.
