Create a Simple Digital Marketing Plan

1. Introduction: hi there, and welcome to how to create a digital marketing plan. My name is Tamara Buds, and I'm a marketing and e commerce professional. With over 15 years of experience, I've worked with companies of every size, from small startups to large Fortune 50 retailers and international manufacturers. I now focus on brand management and digital marketing for small businesses. In short, I help people like you create marketing and content strategies that helped other businesses . I'm glad you've made this investment in your brand and in your business I'm here to help. So if you have questions along the way, be sure to let me know. You can let me know either here within the course or via email at info at Silver Shade group dot com. In this course, we will cover the importance of having a digital marketing plan the elements of your digital marketing plan. How did you? The right marketing strategy and platforms for your business? And then you'll create the content calendar that you'll use for execution Together. These create a digital marketing plan that you can use to help grow your business both online and off. So let's get into it and talk about why you should create a digital marketing plan for your marketing efforts 2. Why Create a Digital Marketing Plan?: So why I create a digital marketing plan? Well, your digital marketing plan will serve as the guide for your online marketing efforts. If you plan well and create a strategy and guide that you can follow, it will be simple to execute and track your marketing content on a regular basis. That way, you could ensure your messages. Connect with your customers. When you're creating your digital marketing plan, you'll consider how and where you want to interact with your customers and how often by writing it out in a formal plan, you could create both an easy to follow road map and a trackable, measurable guide that you can use to set digital marketing metrics for your business. The benefit of that tracking and measuring your marketing efforts is that you'll be able to match trends in your business With trends in your marketing, you can map them to individual channels to determine what is working best for your unique business and niche. That information will be very helpful to direct your large scale marketing and your product launch projects, but it can also help you decide when to change your marketing mix when to push a particular channel and even went to make those small improvements to your marketing or add spent. When you leverage your digital marketing plan, you can account for seasonality, region ality, lot spikes and any other time that you expect to see slower or better sales. Your digital marketing plan should include four sections. Your overall strategy. A tactical action plan for each did a digital channel that you plan to use, and a list of topics or focus areas for your marketing messages. And finally, a content calendar to help you track and implement your plan. Now that we've covered the importance of having a digital marketing plan and the sections that you'll include, let's start building that plan. In the next lecture, you'll choose the strategy for your digital marketing. 3. Choose a Digital Marketing Strategy: Let's choose your digital marketing strategy. We start with the strategy section of your digital marketing plan because that will direct most of your decision for the other sections of your plan. Your strategy section will have two basic parts. A goal and a plan. Your goal is the primary objective that you want to accomplish using digital marketing, and the plan is how you will accomplish that goal. It is possible to have more than one objective, but you should have no more than two or maybe three. If you spread your focus to sin, you'll dilute your marketing efforts, and you will not be able to connect with your audience the way that you intend to. When you choose your goal, think about the best case scenario for your business. Do you want to build brand awareness? Do you want to bring people to your physical location for your store? Get specific if you can't. For example, if you operate an e commerce website, your goal may be to increase the traffic to your website, or it might be to increase the conversion rate among website visitors. Each of those goals listed could increase sales. However, each would require a different approach to creating content and marketing the website. Think about how you want to approach your business and which goal works best for you, no matter what goal you choose. You also need a plan in order to achieve it. Your plan should expand on your goal and includes some of those outcomes you hope to achieve as you execute your marketing plan. What do you want digital marketing to do for your business? If you currently sell through both an e commerce and retail distribution, and your goal is to both increase brand awareness and increased sales through your e commerce website. Your strategy plan might be to create a brand presence online that replicates the product shopping experience at one of your best selling retailers. Figure out what you can do through online marketing to accomplish the high level strategical that you set for your digital marketing. In the next lecture, we'll talk about your digital marketing channel options so that you can create tactical action plans for the channels that you decide to use for your business. 4. Create Action Plans By Channel: Now that you've identified a strategy for your digital marketing plan, you can choose the channels that you want to use to act on your strategy. Start by making a list of the channels where you want to do business online. Both paid and free include your website, your email newsletter and any social media platforms you want to leverage. Plus any other media outreach you want to dio, including bloggers or podcasters, and you're paid activities. Your website and your email newsletter are the only two channels that are not negotiable. You must have both in order to ensure the success of your digital marketing, and the reason is your website in your email newsletter are both 100% within your control. Social media is never guaranteed. If Twitter or Facebook shut down tomorrow or change the way they do business, you'll lose all of those followers and the connections you've made with Um, no matter what happens with any social platform or any particular email or website provider , you'll still own the content on your site and your email list and content for each category or channel on your list at 5 to 10 things that you can do that will help you leverage that platform to execute your strategy, and it should read almost like a checklist for your website. Start with tracking and content improvements. If you do not already check your website. Visitors start today seriously posits video and set up tracking Right now, now that you've implemented you're tracking, you should also fix broken links, misspelled words and make your other simple improvements. These simple fixes do not take long to complete, and there are tools out there that will help you find them. What's the simple fixes? Air done? You might also want to rewrite your content at a block and create a sales page for your website. Prioritize the website activities on your list based on the current state of your site and the areas that will help you convert the largest group of customers and potential customers . Sometimes small improvements will make big differences for your site. After each change, check your analytics. Make sure things are moving in the right direction. You should see an increase in traffic, higher conversion rates and higher average order values. If that applies to your business. Next move on to your newsletter how Can you improve your newsletter to better relate to your audience? Get better open rates? Do you write on a regular basis? How is your open right? Test different times and days of the week until you find the best time and day to send your newsletter. Change one thing at a time so that you contract them and determine what is working best for your business. Detailed the steps that you can take with your email newsletter on your action plan. Next, move onto social media. Which platforms will work best for your business? What will you share on social media? If you have a visual business and want to share vivid images, you should be looking at an instagram and Pinterest account. Make a list of the types of images and posts that you'll use that will make it easier to create your content calendar. You'll also want to develop a regular schedule for your social media. With a bit of planning, you can work ahead of schedule and really lover to your calendar to post similar and images around a topic each day, week or month. Consistency in both timing and topic will help your audience relate to you and trust in your brain where you're already engaging, you'll be able to do paid media as well. Create a list of the actions that you need to check for each social media account. Once you have a solid list of those free channels, move on to the paid channels. How will you promote your business on social media? Will you pay for Facebook ads? Will you promote pins on Pinterest? You'll only want to pay for channels where you're engaged with your audience anyway. Don't expect to promote on a channel where people cannot already find you. You won't get the results you want. Next. Do you plan to run pay per click ads? How often? How much do you plan to spend on these efforts? Think about how you can use paper click toe. Augment your other efforts to get in front of your already engaged customers and potential customers. Note these on your action plan. Finally, we got to your other media efforts. If you plan to reach out to bloggers, create a list of block types that you're looking for and the steps that you can take to find them, who is their audience How many visitors did they get? What do they have in common? Start with a detailed list to make it easier to find block partners and weed out the gloves that just aren't the right fit. If you're gonna work with bloggers, you should have a fairly standard email that you sent is a request for partnership and a fairly standard no thanks email that you sent to the bloggers that just aren't the right fit. Once you have an action plan for each digital channel, you're ready to determine your marketing content topics and how you create them with your content calendar. So let's cover that in the next lecture. 5. Define Weekly Themes and Create a Content Calendar: Now that you've identified a strategy and created action plans for each channel, you can define your weekly themes and create a content calendar for your business. Your content, themes or topics will help you create messages for your audience and built authority and credibility with both your audience and search engines. Your list of topics will be used to create your regular content and should include the areas where you want your brand to be seen as an expert. If you sell baby products, perhaps you want to be an authority on all things sleep or feeding or anything else for babies. The topics you choose to write about or cover in your content will also help you choose who you want to partner with. When you decide to do those blogged partnerships or even brand partnerships, perhaps you want to work with other baby brands or bloggers. You can leverage the topic list you create for both your own internal content and what you develop with others. You'll want to create a running list of at least 20 topics so that you have enough for daily or weekly themes or a group of themes that you can use across your website, your emails, your social media channels and those partnerships. Start with a list of at least 20 topics that might make the cut and then weed out the ones that do not provide enough information at this time to support an entire week's worth of marketing, then add more topics as needed. Just because something doesn't make the cut now doesn't mean you can't use it. Leader. Your topic list should be a fluid document that you edit on a fairly regular basis. You can always add and delete ideas. Is the market changes or even as your own brand evolves over time? Once you have your topic list, you can use that list, plus your channel action plan to help you develop your content calendar. Your content calendar should be an editorial calendar that shows each digital marketing channel and how you plan to use it to promote, build an increase awareness about your products, services and brand. Each day or a week, you can use a spreadsheet tool or a notebook or, frankly, anything to create your content calendar. Whatever you use, make sure it's something that you'll actually check, fill out and report back to in order to measure the success of your campaigns and projects . If you use a notebook, just record the topic every week. Make a note of the day and the digital marketing channels that you plan to use how often you plan to post how often you plan to share on each platform. If you're blah goes up on Tuesdays, make a note to publish your pre written blawg every Tuesday at eight AM, shared on your various social media channels on Tuesdays and repost. Anything that you have plant of your email newsletter goes out on Wednesday. Make sure to relate the weekly Blawg post and refer that back to the website. If it makes sense for your newsletter again, the tool doesn't matter. The planning is what matters within that planning. Give yourself some flexibility. Create a bonus post that you may or may not need to use each week. That way, if you have something running that gets a really negative response or gets no response at all, you can change that out to your flex post. You can also move things around or topics from week to week. If you see a change in the market or some big national news disrupts your posting. If there's something going on in the world that relates to your business, you might need to talk about that. Or it may completely shut down your social media because you want to be respectful of the environment that you're operating in. Be mindful of the calendar and be mindful of the market organization is definitely the key to success in digital marketing. Once you have your weekly theme or topic, you can build each post around your topic, and you can easily work far in advance and spend much less time on the day the actual posts go out. If you have seven INSTAGRAM posts ready to go on the day of, it's only going to take you two minutes to copy and paste that information into the actual app, you should not be scrambling on the day your messages go life right all of your copy in advance. Create all of your content in advance. Choose your images in advance, then check your marketing messages for consistency with your brand and your overall seem in order to set yourself up for success. Over time, I cannot stress enough how important planning is for your overall digital marketing success . Use your content calendar. You should be referring back to it as often as needed in order to be successful in your digital marketing. 6. Wrap Up: Congratulations on creating your digital marketing plan. I hope you use your plan to help you create marketing messages and content that connects with your customers. You should review your digital marketing plan every few months to ensure you get the maximum benefit for your business and for your customers. You can repeat the entire process outlined in this course or just for visit the execution aspects if you know your strategy is still on target. If you do have any questions about any of the course materials, please contact me here or via email again. That's info at silver Shade group dot com. I'd be happy to talk you through a particular aspect of your plan or just go through some of your digital marketing options. Thank you for joining me, and I hope you enjoyed the course. If you did, please leave a review. If you struggled, please shoot me an email and let me know how I can help. Thanks