In this guide you will learn:
- The basic components of a detailed marketing plan
- How to use the GET Digital Marketing Plan Template
- Setting your Marketing Objectives
- Ad Planning (writing copy)
- Post Campaign Performance Analysis
Start by Downloading the Free Digital Marketing Plan Template Here:
Planning Your Digital Marketing Campaign
It can be overwhelming getting started with a digital marketing campaign. With so many options available, it can be hard enough to boost a Facebook post without hyperventilating (we know, we’ve been there). The main concern for everyone is always “Will I get a return on my investment?”. There is never a guarantee that you will get a return on your investment but one thing we can guarantee is that if you don’t plan, you won’t see a return.
The biggest and most common mistakes we see in advertising, all the time, are messaging and calls to action that are unclear. As an advertiser, all you need to do is tell me what you are selling, and how I can buy it. That’s it, but this simplicity seems to get lost all too often. Our digital marketing plan template is a tool that can help you avoid these major mistakes.
Your marketing plan is a step by step guide to help you stay on your marketing path and stay on target towards your marketing goals. It is a tool that will help keep your messaging clear, and your call to action laser focused. So how do you plan a digital marketing campaign? Start by downloading our free template here and follow along as we walk you through the GET Digital Support Marketing Plan Template and detail how you can plan for a successful digital marketing campaign.
Pre-Planning
Your digital marketing plan starts with your business, what is it that you do and why is it special or unique? This will help you determine what angle to take or how to position your product or service with your target audience. Speaking of your audience, if you have completed Customer or buyer personas, take a look at those and ask: “what problem am I solving for my customer?” Next you should consider, in detail, how your customers can purchase this product or service from you? Is it online or in person? Is there a buy now button or a form to fill out? It’s important to be specific here. The point of this exercise is to think about your call to action. If the easiest and most effective way for them to buy is online then focus on that. Don’t distract customers with 10 different ways to buy because, well, it’s distracting.
Additionally, it’s great to know who your competitors are. Look at what they’re doing and how they do it. This may help you get better ideas for your digital marketing campaign.
We also want to think about seasonality. Does it make sense to try and advertise your product now or wait for an expected opportunity. For example, cross country skis would be best advertised before and during the winter season. Then there might be great opportunities for a spring clearance sale. However, you would probably not want to spend a huge amount of advertising dollars on a cross country ski campaign in the dead of summer. So ask yourself, when is the best time for you to run your next campaign?
Targeting
Next, who are you targeting with this campaign? New customers or existing? What are the demographics of this target market? Gender, age group, location. What are your customers’ habits, and behaviors? What do they like and dislike? Again, if you have followed our guide to customer personas, then this information should come quite easily.
Marketing Plan
In the planning section, is where your advertising details start to come together. First there is your marketing objective. You want to detail what it is that you are trying to sell. Here is where we get laser focused and detail not only what we want to sell but set our goal of how many or how much we want to sell. This could also be to increase revenue by 10%. It could be to drive sales through your website or even new email subscribers.
Next you want to consider where you should be advertising. What social media platforms, websites, or apps are your customers using? It is important to do your research to ensure that you’re connecting with the right audience.
The start and end dates of your campaign are also important to write down so that you have a target date to kick things off and it keeps you accountable. We always suggest setting an end date because we have seen far too often, clients who forget that a campaign is running and it runs beyond the point of being relevant and worst of all, ends up costing a lot of money.
Lastly, you want to consider what is your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? Meaning, how will you know if you have achieved your goal or if your campaign has done well. Your KPI should be tied to your objective. So if your objective was to sell 100 coats on your website then your KPI should be online coat sales.
Budget
By setting a budget, you can help yourself to not go over spending. Once you have decided what platforms you would like to advertise on, decide how much to spend on each one. Remember, you can experiment and make changes if you find after 2 weeks or a month one platform is performing better than another.
You may also have to budget on ad creation. Can you create your ads yourself or do you need to hire a graphic designer or a photographer to help? If you decide to create your own ads, do they reflect your brand? Ask for someone else’s opinion if you have doubts about your creativity.
Ad Planning
It’s important to note that this guide is a tool for many uses so some fields, especially in the Ad Planning section might not apply. For example, Facebook does not use keywords so if you are just doing a Facebook/Instagram campaign then keywords are irrelevant. However, our goal here was to provide a tool that will help plan almost any digital campaign.
That said, keywords are important when planning your Google Search Ads. These are the words and phrases someone would type into google to find out more about a business or product. The keyword planning tool from google is the best way to plan out your keywords. The best thing to do is plug in your own landing page or even a competitor’s website and google will provide you with a variety of relevant keywords that you can add to your campaign.
Next you want to consider an Ad theme. We have this in our template because most advertising platforms create campaigns in a hierarchy starting from Campaigns that have Ad groups, which then have Ads. Think of your theme as an Ad group and you can copy and paste this Ad Copy Version as many times as you need to create multiple Ad group themes or just multiple ad versions.
Once your keywords have been decided, you need to come up with headlines. We recommend coming up with several for planning dynamic ads. These are ads that allow for a variety of headlines and body copy and the platform algorithms will put together the most effective combinations based on keyword searches or user profiles. The headlines we recommend being 30 characters max that need to speak with your audience and tell them what you are offering to catch their attention. Pro tip: try to add as many keywords into your headlines as you can.
Your body post describes your offer by providing benefits in more detail. These can be 90 characters in length. You also need to decide on an action or “Call to Action” you want your customers to take in order to get the sale or make the donation or whichever action you would like them to do. Call to actions can be “Click here”, “Register now”, “ Donate Now”. Once you have caught their attention with your copy, you want to close the deal with the call to action.
Performance
This is why we love digital marketing, for the data! How did your ads perform? Check up on your ad performance weekly, however give your ads some time before you start to make changes. Go back to your marketing objective and check your results with this objective in mind. Then on your next marketing launch you can look back to what worked and hopefully spot some opportunities on ways to improve your performance going forward.
