Category Archives: Digital Marketing Planning
Digital Marketing Planning – 10 Tips to Ensure Your Company Is Covered!
What’s the number one reason for failure of digital marketing plans?
Leaving key online marketing channels out of the equation? Maybe.
What about focusing too much on paid advertising and neglecting organic/earned visibility? Again maybe.
In my experience however the number one reason for digital marketing plans failing is that the proper KPI measurements are either not properly understood or agreed before hand and if they are, the correct tacking/analytics are not configured correctly to report on performance.
Of course one of the reasons for this is that the people who hold the power don’t get what you’re trying to do with the plan in the first place. They don’t understand digital, not their background, been promoted beyond their capabilities for one reason or another. So lets try and put together a digital marketing template that enables you to shine in a manner that everyone understands – even those non digital folks who hold all the power – you know who I mean!
So what does a sample digital marketing plan look like? What are the basic components? At a high level the components might pan out like this…
- Display Advertising Plan
- Paid Search Plan
- Organic Search Plan
- Affiliate Advertising Plan
- Email Plan
- Social Media Plan
- Mobile Plan
- Content Strategy/Plan
- Align all your media touch points in terms of tracking so that you can fully understand attribution across all channels – really important and not always that easy, especially when factoring in offline…
- Ensure that your Search Marketing Plan is aligned with your Search Engine Optimization plan so that you can test your target keywords for efficiency, and work on the most efficient keywords in terms of conversion. Failure to align these plans results in your company paying more for keywords and losing share of voice on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) on Google/Yahoo/Bing
- Work out a re-targeting plan at both the keyword and website placement level with one company. Primarily a top of funnel channel, display re-targeting should also be treated like a Search campaign and you should put focus on optimizing those websites that deliver the best conversions.
- Voucher Strategy – more geared to transactional businesses, but you need to work out where vouchers are best placed. What channel delivers the best ROI and what type of voucher works best in that channel. Most likely affiliates will be the best channel for this strategy, but Search can also be a good driver for online vouchers – watch that margin though!
- When it comes to mobile and your website, the best strategy is to have one URL that will render appropriately on both desktop and mobile/tablet sites. It also reduces the time/effort your SEO guys need to put into building authority for different sites.
- Ensure that offline advertising is easily converted to online. One of the best ways to do this is to use QR codes, but makes sure that when the QR code is scanned into that smart phone, that the destination website will render correctly for a mobile experience!
- Don’t over do email! Sending people how have opted into your emails 1000′s of offers/deals every week is not going to have the impact you desire. Pick and choose your email deals and play around with different types, e.g. educational, transactional, brand building…etc
- Ensure you stay on top of your display and affiliate partners to maximize your ROI – remember its your business, nobody is going to care quite as much as you do – squeeze those partners for optimal performance.
- Measure daily – things change so fast out there that you need to keep on top of performance on daily basis – leaving it to weekly is going to cost you money!
- Last but not least – Test Test Test – one of the main differences between those who win big and those that merely survive is that testing should be core in all your marketing channels.
So how do these tips translate into that digital marketing plan we spoke about at the start?
Next post will break down key KPI for all those major channels…
What about your experience with digital planning? Any top tips you’d like to share?