It’s the planning time of the year.
With just a few weeks and days to spare before the new year’s marketing efforts kick in, it’s time to take a close look at your digital marketing plan and maximize its potential as a key growth driver for your business.
Successful marketers don’t just repeat their previous year’s efforts. They treat each year as a new opportunity to build brand awareness and gain customers based on what’s worked in the past.
As you try to do the same, consider these eight things when crafting your digital marketing plan for your business in the upcoming year.
8 Digital Marketing Plan Considerations
1) Learn From Past Mistakes
When it comes to digital marketing, you have to be brutally honest.
Simply repeating what you did last year or operating based on hunches about what worked will not be enough. Instead, you can only succeed if you learn from and build on your past mistakes.
Start with a simple SWOT analysis that helps you identify your digital strengths and weaknesses. That should lead to a more in-depth look at items that worked and areas that still need improvement.
Take the guesswork out of the equation and instead use your past work as a learning opportunity.
Additionally, tune out the noise and the damaging marketing myths that other people online may perpetuate. Identify the experts in your field and those who have demonstrated success to follow and learn from to avoid making mistakes in the coming year.
2) Treat Every Year as a Baseline
Every year starts with a growth goal.
You want to increase your reach, maximize your audience awareness, and gain conversions. But not everything you do works out, and it’s important to adjust to the reality you’re in as of the time you build your plan.
Your digital marketing efforts and business situation might have progressed or regressed from last year. You might have added new product offerings or tried to enter a new market.
Your updated marketing plan should be tailored to the current reality, using the year in the rearview mirror as a baseline for what lies ahead.
3) Take a Closer Look at Your Audience
Every marketing plan needs to include a comprehensive look at the audience you’re trying to capture.
At the same time, you should not just roll over your audience definitions and insights from previous years into your new plan. Just as the strategy as a whole needs a closer look, so does your target audience.
An evaluation of what did and didn’t work should always be done with audiences in mind.
Building a new plan is also an opportunity to dig deeper. By providing insights, motivations, and pain points, you can create buyer personas beyond location and demographics.
4) Don’t Forget About Your Competitors
The competitive environment is never static.
Over the past year, new firms may have entered your space while others exited. The competition you already know may have shifted strategies or target audiences. As you build your digital marketing plan, include a section on your competition that reflects this new reality.
Competitive research can be multifaceted, ranging from simple qualitative analyses of other companies’ social media accounts to in-depth keyword research for Google ads.
While the larger environment is already part of any SWOT analysis, getting specific on your closest competitors helps you better understand it in detail.
5) Set Your Goals and Timeline
No digital marketing plan is complete without goals, which should guide everything you do in the current year. These goals should be based on all of the above factors, but they also need to be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
Goals structured this way are far more than just a way to evaluate your digital marketing efforts at the end of the year.
They also help you set benchmarks, allowing you to track your progress toward achieving them throughout the year and enabling you to make adjustments where needed.
6) Build Your Channels
Part of your digital marketing plan should be an exact outline of what digital channels you focus on most in the coming year. No business can successfully build a presence on every social media network, search engine, and content platform. Instead, you need to prioritize.
Again, simply repeating last year’s initiatives is not good enough.
Instead, analyze your efforts on each channel and compare them with your audience’s needs and preferences.
This will help you eliminate some channels that just didn’t work while adding new opportunities you may never have considered.
7) Designate Evaluation Times
The potential of the right goals is magnified once you consider how you can use them to track your progress.
As part of your digital marketing plan, you should formalize how you intend to measure your efforts throughout the year to stay on track for achieving and surpassing your core goals.
These evaluation teams may be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or all of the above.
Regular check-ins allow you to make corrections that range from minor to major, avoiding potentially costly mistakes or money sunk into advertising efforts that don’t work.
8) Choose Your Team
Do you know who will be working on executing your plan and achieving your goals?
Write it down. Distribute key responsibilities to anyone in your business who works on or is connected to your marketing efforts.
That might include a project manager, specialists for each area, and more.
The key is setting both responsibility and accountability standards.
A RACI chart could be a great tool for making sure that everyone involved in the larger marketing effort knows exactly what they’re doing and what they should be aware of.
Ready to Build a Better Digital Marketing Plan For The Coming Year?
Building a digital marketing plan is complex, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. The above steps help you break down the process into digestible steps, optimizing your efforts in building a better marketing plan.
You don’t have to do it alone, either. Especially when it comes to choosing your team, outsourcing the bulk of the work might actually make sense. Of course, you need the right partner, which is where we come in.
Contact us for help building and executing a great digital marketing strategy for the new year and beyond.
