How to create a digital marketing plan

Whether you're tasked with building your organization's first-ever marketing strategy or simply want to reevaluate an existing one, knowing how to create an effective digital marketing plan is key to building brand awareness and connecting with customers and prospects.

Discover how to create a digital marketing plan and bring it to life in our guide.

Steps to develop a digital marketing plan

Think of your digital marketing plan as a blueprint for building and maintaining your brand's digital presence. This plan keeps your team focused on a strategic goal and outlines the research, audience, channels, and budget needed to achieve that goal.

Follow these steps to develop your digital marketing plan:

1. Define your goals and objectives

All good plans begin with a clearly defined goal, and a digital marketing plan is no different. Since most organizations have several competing priorities, you'll want to focus on the most urgent goal that aligns with your company's top priorities. Make sure your goal is SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and aligns with identifiable key performance indicators (KPIs).

During the goal-setting step, you may also want to consider your brand's position in the sales funnel. Do you want to focus on introducing people to your brand for the first time (awareness), convincing them to choose your brand over others (consideration), or getting them to follow through on purchasing your product or service (decision)?

For example, if your social media pages have recently had high engagement but few conversions, you may divert more resources to the decision stage in the customer journey.

2. Conduct market research

After you've identified your digital marketing goals, you'll want to get a sense of your position in the market. It can be helpful to begin with a SWOT analysis: identify and list your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This may help you identify patterns and determine a focus area for your digital marketing strategy.

Another key piece of your market research is a competitor analysis. Identify your top competitors and analyze their websites, social media pages, and reviews. What are they doing well? What could they do better, and how might your brand fill any customer experience gaps?

3. Identify your target audience and buyer personas

Perhaps the most important step in developing a digital marketing plan is identifying — and talking to — your target audience. If you haven't already, determine the buyer personas you aim to serve. Think of your ideal customer and list their demographics, psychographics, motivations, behaviors, and other information relevant to their relationship with your brand.

Consider conducting surveys, interviews, or focus groups to better understand your customers and prospects. This can also help you determine how to segment your target audience and tailor your marketing to each group.

4. Choose your marketing channels

After you've set a goal, researched your market, and identified your target audience, you can choose the marketing channels you want to prioritize. List the channelsavailable to you and research the average demographics of each. Be sure to consider platform-specific communities or groups relevant to your brand.

Marketing channels to evaluate include:

• Email
• Social media
• Web (organic content marketing)
• Display advertising
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
• Affiliate marketing

5. Set a budget

Once you've built an ideal digital marketing plan, consider costs and return on investment (ROI). For this step, you'll want to communicate with the key stakeholders in your organization who manage budget allocation.

Getting an idea of the available budget is helpful, but it's even more important to have a proposed plan complete with estimated (itemized, if possible) costs and clear goals. During this step, you'll consider any constraints and revisit previous steps in response, if needed.

6. Monitor and measure performance

Once your digital marketing plan is implemented, monitoring and measuring its performance is crucial. Track the KPIs you identified earlier in the planning process and evaluate your data on a set schedule (for example, weekly, monthly, or quarterly). Make sure you can accurately attribute conversions to specific marketing channels so you can share what's working and what isn't.

Over time, you should be able to identify trends in your data and trace wins back to pieces of your digital marketing plan.