How To Create a Digital Marketing Plan

4 Ps of digital marketing

1. Process

The digital marketing process starts with planning and ends with reviewing the marketing project or campaign. The process is a series of steps that allow digital marketers to:

• Identify customer needs
• Define your value proposition
• Analyze market opportunities
• Outline marketing objectives and business goals
• Create marketing campaigns to reach their target audience

Tip: Keep detailed records of each step and decision for future reference so your team can learn from each process and continuously improve.

2. People

To create engaging digital marketing plans, you must accurately define the customer persona in your buyer journey. You must stay open to understanding the people who buy your product or service. 

Consider the customer’s experience at every touchpoint in your marketing efforts. Your goal is to reach your audience, create value, and build trust. 

Remember, a positive user experience:

• Fosters loyalty
• Strengthens brand reputation
• Enhances customer satisfaction

You can use case studies to refine your messaging and products based on real-world examples. By placing people at the center of your digital marketing plan, you prioritize the needs of your audience and the team executing the strategy. 

“People” also includes the internal marketing team and other stakeholders. Ensure you carry everyone along in your marketing progress by sharing regular, relevant updates.

3. Platforms

According to Statista, there are 5.52 billion social media users worldwide, with 63.8% of the world’s population being social media users. 

Different digital marketing platforms attract different types of people. For example, you can find the Gen Z market mostly on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, while baby boomers tend to prefer Facebook and Linkedin. To develop an effective digital marketing strategy plan, consider the digital platforms to invest in and build your audience.

Internal platforms like your company’s project management software or marketing automation tools are also essential in creating effective digital marketing plans. 

These software tools help to:

• Track user engagement
• Streamline repetitive tasks
• Enhance collaboration between teams
• Automate workflows to keep campaigns on schedule
• Document and track every step of the digital marketing planning process  

Using the right platforms and tools means the technology handles administrative tasks, so your team has more time to focus on strategic decision making and creating more impactful and efficient marketing campaigns.

4. Performance

Gathering and analyzing the performance of your digital marketing plan and activities is crucial for long-term success. Create a schedule and system for reviewing past campaigns with your team to gain data-driven insights about your efforts. 

Also, ensure your digital marketing plan and performance metrics are aligned and relevant to your organizational goals. You can use digital marketing analytics software to gather current data and stay ahead of trends.

Steps to create a successful digital marketing plan

A good digital marketing plan helps transform your marketing strategies into actionable tasks and activities. Consider using digital marketing plan templates to outline and capture critical tasks, timelines, requirements, and resources needed.

Follow the digital marketing plan steps below to set your team up for success:

Step 1: Define your marketing goals 

Having a clear goal before creating a marketing plan will save you lots of time and mistakes. A goal helps you create a digital marketing plan outline and break it into tasks and activities. 

The best way to define your goals is by using the SMART goals framework. SMART means:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

Undefined goals have ambiguous targets such as “increase sales” or “get more customers.” SMART goals are more specific, e.g., “Gain 1,000 new leads in 90 days.”

Step 2: Create your marketing plan budget

The next step is to create a budget based on your marketing strategies. The budget is another aspect of a digital marketing plan that needs clarity early on. Knowing your budget limit ensures you maximize every dollar and don’t overspend on non-performing marketing campaigns. You can allocate a budget to each phase of your campaign. 

Here are areas to allocate budget for in your marketing plan:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content creation
• Paid advertising
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Analytics and tracking tools

If you’re a small business owner with a limited budget, you can focus on marketing channels with low entry costs. While your total budget may be a hard limit, the amount allocated to each marketing channel should be dynamic to enable testing and iterations based on performance. 

For example, if you notice your Facebook ad campaigns produce higher ROI than influencer marketing, you may choose to reallocate your influencer marketing budget to spend more on Facebook ads.

Step 3: Build buyer personas to define your ideal audience

According to a HubSpot survey, 21% of marketers said one of their primary goals was to get a better understanding of their audience’s needs. 

Once you’re clear about your goals and budget, creating buyer personas to segment your target market is the next major step.  

A buyer persona is a fictional character a company creates through research that outlines different characteristics of potential customers. An accurate buyer persona will help you create highly targeted marketing campaigns. 

Depending on the defining attributes of your buyer persona, you may group them by demographics, interests, goals, or other relevant characteristics.

You can also group your buyer persona based on: 

• Age 
• Gender 
• Location
• Income level 
• Education level 
• Occupation 
• Family status 

These will help you create marketing tactics that speak directly to their unique needs and preferences.

Step 4: Analyze your competitors and market position

Conducting industry and competitor analysis before developing your digital marketing plan is beneficial. It helps you identify your biggest competitors, their market share and position, and the strategies they use in their digital marketing campaigns. 

Ask yourself:

• Which keywords are they targeting?
• What strategies do they use to build brand awareness?
• How do they engage with customers and respond to feedback?
• Which marketing activities seem to drive the most engagement?

These questions will help you gain a well-rounded view of your competitors’ strategies and identify potential gaps or opportunities in your own approach.  

You can also carry out a SWOT analysis of your product and your competitors’ offering to discover what your company’s strengths and weaknesses are. Analyzing your market position within your industry helps inform what product benefits or features to highlight in your marketing language and what your content should focus on.

Step 5: Choose which digital marketing channels to focus on

The digital marketing channels you choose should depend on your marketing goals and your target market’s online behavior. You may decide to focus on building owned and earned online marketing channels, lean towards paid search ads for wider reach, or try a hybrid of both.

For example, you can use:

• Email marketing to send welcome notes for first-time buyers
• Webinars to host product demos 
• Social media marketing to share user-generated content  
• Content marketing to publish blog posts 

Many companies operate an omnichannel digital marketing strategy, taking potential customers on a buyer’s journey through several platforms. For example, using short-form videos on TikTok to get customers’ attention and then leading them to your Instagram page, where you have testimonials and reviews from previous buyers, showing social proof. 

With a clear and consistent call to action in your Instagram bio and post captions, you direct potential buyers to your website, where they finally decide to purchase your product. 

Choosing the right digital marketing channels allows you to meet your customers where they are and engage with them on their terms before selling them your product.

Step 6: Set defined metrics to review and improve performance 

A digital marketing plan is only as good as the results it produces. Data-driven marketing campaigns are the most practical way to get the best results from digital marketing efforts.

Establish relevant metrics and KPIs to monitor performance and track the progress of your digital marketing campaigns once you begin. 

Tie in metrics to tasks assigned to your team. During the project, gather essential data such as:

• Revenue
• New leads
• New subscribers
• Click-through rates

Remember, data insights are only fruitful when you test and use them to optimize your initial digital marketing plan.

Step 7: Get stakeholder buy-in

Armed with information about your goals, customers, market, competition, marketing channels, and metrics, you’re almost ready to translate your marketing strategies and ideas into a well-laid-out plan. 

The quickest way to do this is to use digital marketing plan templates to sketch all your marketing plan and project requirements. Share this draft with key stakeholders and decision makers to gain buy-in before making the plan more concrete. 

You should also share the rationale behind your digital marketing planning process decisions. Get feedback from your team and stakeholders, and then improve your initial digital marketing plan draft. 

Step 8: Break marketing projects into actionable tasks

Now you’re ready to develop your digital marketing plan with due dates and tasks assigned to specific team members or external collaborators. Remember that drawing up a marketing plan is not a one-and-done deal. Observe your marketing environment and make changes to the plan as needed. 

Now that you have a digital marketing plan, you’re ready to start implementing it. Allow some wiggle room for trying new ideas and switching from tactics that aren’t working. Using marketing project management tools like Wrike provides a bird-eye view of your marketing campaigns and projects.

Build and execute a digital marketing plan in Wrike

Launching a new campaign across multiple digital channels? As we’ve mentioned, creating a marketing plan requires clear organization, teamwork, and efficient task management. That’s why digital marketing agencies like ComaAG use Wrike’s project management software to streamline every phase of their marketing strategy.

With Wrike, you can:

• Create custom workflows to organize your digital marketing strategies
• Use dashboards to visualize campaign progress  
• Build a content strategy with a premade marketing template
• Generate custom reports to track key metrics
• Automate repetitive tasks like approvals and status updates

Bring your team together in Wrike and execute a successful marketing plan for your product launch.