For a while now, digital marketing is the driving force behind the success of virtually any business that cares about approaching the online audience. Adding the fact that more than 94 percent of overall organic traffic is generated through Google, it’s clear that focusing your attention on digital marketing is of utmost importance for the achievement of your business goals. Since online advertising includes taking into account multiple aspects like SEO, social media, all sorts of data analytics and metrics, we have decided to share the most important steps you should take in order to devise an effective marketing plan.

Face yourself

Before the audience could learn more about you and what you have to offer, it’s important to take a deep look into external and internal factors that influence your business. One of the best ways to conduct a comprehensive analysis of your company status is to perform SWOT analysis. This is a system that allows you to learn your company strong points, weaknesses, and opportunities, which you can utilize to your advantage.  You can check it out here (no registration or login needed): 
https://xtensio.com/swot-analysis-template/

SWOT analysis allows you to learn about your business environment, what it has to offer and what challenges you could be facing. In addition, it also allows you to learn how certain aspects of your business or product can become a threat to the success of your project, as well as the upsides that will allow you to outmaneuver any competitors.

Find your goal

Once you have analyzed your situation, taking into account both internal and external factors, it’s time to think about what you wish to achieve with your marketing campaign. However, when you set your goal, it’s important to be as specific as possible in terms of what your goal is. It’s not enough to say “I want to generate more traffic to my website”, your goal should include a more detailed construction.

There is an interesting framework that you can use to create an elaborate goal and it’s called SMART, which stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

This means, your goal should sound like more than just a vague idea, it should sound more like “I want to increase sales by X percent in Y months using A, B, and C”.

Create consumer persona

Since your budget is one of the key constraints of your marketing endeavor, it’s important to be effective and not to waste any resources. The good news is, digital marketing allows us to focus our attention only to those internet users that really matter to our business.

Target audience segmentation allows you to learn who you want to reach, what your audience likes, how they use the internet, what they expect from a brand, basically all the elements you could require so you could create personalized content that will hit just the right people. Furthermore, it could also help you with deciding what type of content you wish to deliver to your audience.

Content strategy

Depending on your budget, manpower, and talents you could decide to create content internally or look for an outside source of content. If you opt for an external content creator, it’s important to make sure you made the right call. Investigate the best option, per example search google for “grademiners review” if you have a specific option in mind or “custom essay writing help services reviews” to see what users have to say about different options. Anything you do, all the efforts you make can all be emphasized or brutally diminished depending on the quality, quantity, and distribution of content to your target audience. To make sure you don’t make any wrong choices, here are a few tools that could help:

Keyword research – allows you to understand how your audience is searching for similar content so you could place these keywords in your content for SEO improvement.

Social network connectivity – your audience is using various types of social platforms, therefore, it’s important to reach out to them by posting your content on relevant social media platforms.

Content calendar – make sure you have a plan of activities related to your content. It’s important to set deadlines so you could publish in a timely manner. Furthermore, depending on the date of publishing you might want to consider using a different type of content for effectiveness. 

Metrics

Your marketing plan should not be set in stone, mainly because somewhere along the line you might have made a wrong decision or simply because digital marketing is constantly changing due to the developments in technology. Therefore, as you put your plan in motion, make sure you constantly measure your results so you can rest assured you are on the right track. In case you are not receiving the expected numbers, it’s time to analyze your plan and decide what you have to change in order to get back on track.

Conclusion

The five steps we shared with you are not a shortcut to success, rather a guideline that you should follow to make your own plan work. Digital marketing requires a lot of personal attention, even with most advanced software solutions that the market has to offer. The most important piece of the puzzle, however, is the quality of your product or service, which you can only display more effectively with a well-constructed and immaculately executed digital marketing plan.

Author Bio:

Lauren Adley is a writer and editor at Rushmyessay UK, Thesis Writing Service, and My Assignment Help. She is dedicated to her family, work and friends. She is keen on reading, playing the guitar and traveling. She is interested in educational, marketing and blogging issues. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.