Having a digital marketing plan is no longer a luxury, it is a NEED! Today it is no longer enough to focus solely on traditional channels, which, apart from being more expensive, are gradually losing reach with the public. Digital marketing came to revolutionize the communication strategies of a brand. We must know that the needs and preferences of users have changed and this forces us as a company to evolve the marketing strategies that used to work for us. Did you know that only in Mexico there are 66 million Internet users active in Social Networks? Incredible! Don’t you think? Well, if that weren’t enough, there are 88 million people connected to the internet worldwide.
Can you imagine how many people are waiting to hear about your products or services?
The world is changing. Evolve! The first step is to develop a correct Digital Marketing Plan. And yes, here I will explain the stages of a digital marketing plan.
A digital marketing plan refers to a document, where each of the objectives (SMART) of a company must be written, the planning of strategies and the actions that will be carried out in order to meet the objectives set.
STEPS TO MAKE AN EFFECTIVE DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN
1º Analyze the current situation of your company.
2º Define your Objectives (SMART)
3º Identify your Buyer Persona
4° Define Strategies and Action
5º Evaluation and Optimization.
Analyze the current situation of your company
In this section of the document you will have to define the most important points to consider in your digital strategy. We have to take into account the internal and external situation of the company, benchmarking is a very good tool to know where we are compared to the competition.
Perhaps these questions to make a marketing plan will help you better define the current situation of your company:
Do you have an online presence? Does your competition have an online presence? Is your website optimized? Are your social networks active?
Is your current situation perfectly defined? Very well! Now the next step is to define your goals.
Define your goals
Within the previous point you will have noticed certain points of improvement, right? Now it’s time to define your goals, and this can be a bit complicated when we don’t have a clear base of what we really want.
Do not worry! I explain how to make them easily and quickly.
One of the characteristics that an objective must meet is that it must be CLEAR, CONCRETE and CONCISE. But that is not all, a methodology must be carried out to write them. I am talking about the SMART method, which is an acronym in English made up of the words:
SPECIFIC: Answer the question What do you want to achieve? Increase sales?
MEASURABLE: Your goal is to increase sales. How much do you want to increase?
ACHIEVABLE: Is it realistic? It’s possible?
RELEVANT: Why is it important for your company? Why do you want to achieve it?
TIMELY / A TEMPO: When do you want to get it?
Define your Buyer Persona
First, what is a buyer person?
A buyer persona is a fictional character that refers to your ideal client.
What would your ideal client be like? You must take into account their way of thinking, their way of acting, in itself, you will have to describe your perfect client.
Watch out! You should not confuse the buyer person with your target market, although it is the same theme, they have notorious differences.
What is the difference between one and the other?
When we talk about buyer persona we talk about an ideal customer profile while in the target market we cover a broader population within which several customer profiles can be found (buyer persona)
I share an image where you can better appreciate the differences between these two concepts
Define Strategies and Action.
The time has come to define what we are going to do? The key to creating good strategies is to always keep in mind the objectives that you have set for yourself and think about what actions you have to take to achieve them? To better understand the above, I share this example:
Let’s suppose that our SMART objective is “Increase 5% of sales through the internet during the following month”, one of our strategies can be to create digital campaigns in the different social networks where the brand is located and as an action it would be to take it to the practice.
Evaluation and Optimization.
As a last step we must measure and analyze the results obtained with our marketing plan, see what has worked and what has not. This helps us understand and measure the success of our marketing plan with the goal of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our strategies in the future.
To carry out the analysis we can rely on tools such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics, Google Analytics that will help us understand the results obtained more easily.
I hope this information will help you to grow your business. If you have questions, share them in the comments and we will help you solve them.
We read next Friday.