Digital Marketing Plan Template

What is a digital marketing plan?

A digital marketing plan is usually a concise document every business needs to help them grow. It serves as a roadmap for how the business will leverage digital channels to achieve its goals, reach its target audience, and ultimately drive desired outcomes. A well-crafted digital marketing plan typically covers various aspects of online marketing, providing a structured and strategic approach to harness the power of digital media. Whether you're a marketing manager or the head of marketing, you'll need to ensure you have a solid plan you can execute within a specific timeframe. While many marketers usually plan marketing in three-month chunks, you'll need to break your plan down into monthly and weekly steps as well to take the business to the next level.

Today, we'll give you examples of different elements you'll need to include in your digital marketing plan, so your marketing team will be able to know what is expected of them to succeed.

Define your objective

The journey begins by meticulously outlining what you aim to achieve through your online efforts. Whether it's increasing brand visibility, driving website traffic, boosting engagement on social media, or ultimately converting leads into loyal customers, the specificity of your objectives forms the guiding light for every subsequent step in your digital marketing plan.

These objectives serve as the North Star, providing direction and purpose to your campaigns. By establishing well-defined goals, you not only create a roadmap for your digital endeavors but also lay the foundation for robust measurement and analysis, enabling you to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies and refine your approach for optimal results.

Align your plan with other stakeholders

The synergy between your digital marketing strategy and the broader objectives of other stakeholders is paramount. Your digital marketing plan isn't a solo act, but an integral part of a collective, strategic effort. We want to ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page. So, while you're crafting your strategy, keep in mind that it's not just about hitting your goals but getting everyone else on the same page. After all, when the whole team is in sync, that's when the real magic happens.

The two most important things to do

There are two essential areas you need to cover when building out your digital marketing plan.

(1) Build out a SWOT analysis

SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It's the basic framework you'll need to evaluate and implement a marketing strategy. When you've analyzed the data, you'll be able to see what areas you need to work on to grow the business. A SWOT analysis involves answering the following questions:

Strengths

1. What is our USP?
2. What products are selling well?

Weaknesses

1. How can we improve?
2. What resources are we lacking?
3. Which products are performing the least?

Opportunities

1. How can we reach new customers?
2. How can we expand?
3. What are the gaps between competitors we can use?

Threats

1. What are our competitors doing better?
2. What could threaten our business?
3. Are there any new regulations we need to know about?

(2) Build out a marketing plan calendar

When you're putting together your marketing strategy, the best way to implement it is by putting together a marketing calendar. Break up the goals into quarterly, then monthly, weekly and daily tasks to ensure your team hits the goals to complete the overall mission. This will take a bit of time to execute correctly, and you'll probably need to shift some elements around. But in due course, you should see your digital marketing campaigns come to life much more easily over time.

You might like to separate your digital marketing plan into various marketing channels so each team member will be able to see clearly how the digital marketing strategy will be implemented.

Find out who your competitors are

Do your research and find out who your competitors are via SEO tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs. You'll be able to find gaps in the market to target, and it will help you clearly define the type of content you need to be targeting to reach new customers and keep current customers.

You could also find out who your competitors are by conducting surveys to your audience and checking relevant social media pages.

Understand your SMART goals inside out

Unsure what is the definition of SMART goals?

Specific - well-defined goals

Measurable - specific criteria you can measure towards the goal

Achievable - so that you can reach the goal

Realistic - make your goal realistic

Timely - put in dates so you can reach the goals in a timeframe

Once you understand the purpose behind why you need a digital marketing plan, know who your audience and competitors are, it's time to put your marketing roadmap in place. Make sure your SMART goals are achievable and realistic in the given time frame you have.

Think about your marketing channels and partnerships

You'll also need to consider your marketing channels and partnerships when creating your roadmap.

Promotions and online marketing

You'll need to think about the promotional side of the business and how you'll reach new customers through press releases, event marketing, and even TV ads. You could go down countless avenues in the traditional marketing route if you have the budget for it.

Don't forget that you'll need to have a solid marketing online strategy. You'll need to make sure your business ranks on Google and isn't buried in a sea of other competitors. Identify the keyword gaps in SEMrush and search for high-volume keywords you can rank for using a fantastic and affordable tool like Keysearch.

You'll need to build up a strong backlink strategy by targeting high DA sites so you can build your DA and link juice to the pages you want to rank for.

Paid online advertising is a fantastic opportunity for start-ups who have the budget to get their site seen without building up organic reach. Although it's a good short-term strategy, build your content organically and wait for it to grow over six months alongside spending on paid as well.

A strong contender for your marketing channels should consist of a social media strategy as well. Make sure you optimize your channels with consistency and don't underestimate the value of Tik Tok to build links and gain a large following and more traffic to your site.

Set budgets and plan the financial projections

The next step in your digital marketing plan is to set budgets and financial projections. Your budget will determine how much you can spend on the marketing campaigns you have in mind. You might like to break down the marketing budget into a few sections, such as paid activity, events, outsourcing costs for freelancers/agencies, and marketing software.

Create a digital marketing plan template

Once you have a finalized digital marketing strategy in place, you'll need to build it into a concise document your team and other stakeholders can access. Using an authoring tool to create your digital marketing plan can significantly streamline the planning process, providing a structured and collaborative platform for teams to work together seamlessly. Here's how you can effectively leverage an authoring tool like Coassemble to craft a comprehensive digital marketing plan:

1. Centralized collaboration: This is a space where your team members can collaborate in real-time. This feature facilitates efficient communication and ensures that everyone involved in the planning process is on the same page.

2. Seamless content creation: Our solution comes equipped with features for easy content creation. Whether you're outlining strategies, describing target audience personas, or detailing specific tactics for each digital channel, we simplify the content creation process with intuitive interfaces.

3. Accessibility and flexibility: your team can access your newly created digital marketing plan from anywhere, promoting flexibility and remote collaboration. This accessibility ensures that updates can be made in real-time, regardless of team members' physical locations.

4 Customization for specific needs: Tailor the digital marketing plan to suit the unique needs of your business. Our platform allows for customization, enabling you to add sections, modify templates, and adapt the structure to align with your specific objectives and industry requirements.

Track engagement and metrics

We don't want you to build an excellent digital marketing strategy and be unsure who has seen it. When you use Coassemble to develop your plan, you'll be able to track the engagement and check who has seen it, and gauge what they have clicked on. This valuable data, which is easy to use, will give you the insights and metrics to improve and update your marketing plan in the future to ensure digital marketing success!

Keep it up to date

Putting together a digital marketing plan isn't the end of the road but rather a crucial initiation. Once established, it serves as a dynamic framework, ever-ready for refinement and enhancement. This continuous improvement cycle transforms you into a proficient marketing planner, ensuring that your efforts are not only recognized but also consistently effective. So, remember, the completion of a course or plan marks not an end, but the commencement of a journey towards perpetual optimization and success of your marketing activities.