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1. Situation analysis. Where are we now?
Understanding your online marketplace
The immediate, or micro-environment
A. Our customers
B. Our market
C. Our competitors
D. Intermediaries and potential customers
Wider macro environment
These are the big picture strategic influences,
Understanding your online marketplace
The immediate, or micro-environment
A. Our customers
B. Our market
C. Our competitors
D. Intermediaries and potential customers
Wider macro environment
These are the big picture strategic influences,
2. Goal-setting. Where do we want to be?
Setting useful, actionable objectives
Setting useful, actionable objectives
3. Strategy. How are you going to achieve the goals?
Setting a meaningful strategy
A. Targeting
B. Positioning
C. Proposition and the marketing mix
D. Brand strategy
E. Online representation or presence.
F. Content and engagement strategy.
G. Acquisition communications strategy
H. Conversion strategy
I. Retention communications strategy
J. Data strategy
Multichannel integration strategy
Setting a meaningful strategy
A. Targeting
B. Positioning
C. Proposition and the marketing mix
D. Brand strategy
E. Online representation or presence.
F. Content and engagement strategy.
G. Acquisition communications strategy
H. Conversion strategy
I. Retention communications strategy
J. Data strategy
Multichannel integration strategy
4. Tactics, action and control
Tactics
Control
Create measurable KPI’s to align against objectives and stay on track
Governance
Tactics
Control
Create measurable KPI’s to align against objectives and stay on track
Governance
5. Executive summary
Digital Marketing Planning Template
First things, first...
Digital marketing planning is no different to any other marketing plan, in fact it’s increasingly strange to have separate plans for ‘digital’ and ‘offline’ since that’s not how your customers perceive your business. However, we’re often required to separate plans for “digital” only based on the way teams and reports are structured and to help the transition to digital - before it becomes “business as usual”. A common format helps align your plan to other marketing plans!
Some general advice to keep in mind when planning
★ Focus on building a plan around the customer - not your products and tactics
★ Situations and plans change, especially online, so ensure plans are usable by having a clear vision for the year and keeping real detail to a shorter term 90-Day focus
★ Make plans fact-based and state assumptions, so they’re easy fo
r others to buy into
r others to buy into★ Jargon light is best, again it helps others buy into what you’re saying
★ Keep plans up to date - monthly is more than enough
★ There isn not a perfect plan, what’s needed changes according to each business!
Creating the general structure
Knowing where to start is often the hardest thing when writing a digital marketing plan. So once you have a structure / framework to follow in a table of contents it's then almost a matter of filling in the gaps...
At Smart Insights we recommend the SOSTAC™ structure developed by PR Smith, Dave Chaffey’s co-author of Emarketing Excellence. This is a great framework for business, marketing or digital marketing plans since it's simple and logical, so it's easy to remember and to explain to colleagues or agencies.
Each of the six areas help in separating out the key strategies, for example customer acquisition, conversion and retention.
That’s the intro, you’ll want to delete this bit! In the other sections we have provided headings to help structure your strategy, with prompts to help your thinking in italics which you’ll also want to delete.
About this document
We’ve created this since we’ve been asked so many times for it when giving training courses and consulting.
It’s created by Dave Chaffey and Dan Bosomworth of Smart Insights. If you want to check back for updates, you can find this document on our site at:
This is an early draft and we would like to keep improving it, so please feedback with your thoughts and suggestions for improvement: info@smartinsights.com.
Where do I find more information on digital marketing concepts
If you’re not familiar with some of the concepts we introduce in this template, naturally, there’s more info online.
In particular, you may find this digital marketing benchmarking spreadsheet useful for benchmarking your current capabilities. The spreadsheet supports Dave Chaffey’s report on Managing Digital Channels for Econsultancy which goes into more detail on different areas of strategy development and channel governance.
You may also find Dave Chaffey’s book Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice useful since it goes into much more depth in all these areas.
Digital Marketing Strategy Plan - table of contents
1. Situation analysis. Where are we now? 5
Understanding your online marketplace 5
The immediate, or micro-environment 5
A. Our customers 5
B. Our market 5
C. Our competitors 5
D. Intermediaries and potential customers 5
Wider macro environment 5
These are the big picture strategic influences, 5
2. Goal-setting. Where do we want to be? 7
Setting useful, actionable objectives 7
3. Strategy. How are you going to achieve the goals? 8
Setting a meaningful strategy 8
A. Targeting 8
B. Positioning 8
C. Proposition and the marketing mix 8
D. Brand strategy 9
E. Online representation or presence. 9
F. Content and engagement strategy. 9
G. Acquisition communications strategy 9
H. Conversion strategy 10
I. Retention communications strategy 10
J. Data strategy 10
Multichannel integration strategy 10
4. Tactics, action and control 11
Tactics 11
Control 11
Create measurable KPI’s to align against objectives and stay on track 11
Governance 11
5. Executive summary 12
Always start with the customer, their characteristics, behaviours, needs and wants. You should consider:
• Ideal customers - characteristics summarised in named personas are useful to get started, think about demographics, searching and product selection behaviours and unmet needs - detail here is very useful to talk about “What would John do.. or think about...”. Also consider what your data tells you in regard to your most profitable, and potentially profitable customers
• Market description - Focus on actionable needs and trends - are you meeting them, what are they - this insight us useful for other teams and you should find out what other teams know, what exactly is growing in the market, is there evidence you can draw from
• Benchmark against competitors for your customer personas and scenarios against the criteria given in the strategy section, in particular their marketing mix.
• Review customer use of different types of sites which may influence their decision for example, search engines, specialist news sites, aggregators and bloggers
• Social - how have consumer attitudes changed?
• Legal - checking your online marketing activities comply with privacy and online trading laws before problems arise
• Environment - is your approach ethical and sustainable
• Political - can you take advantage of government funding schemes
• Technology - review of the latest technology
F. Our own capabilities
Once you have looked outwards (often missed), only then should you turn inwards and look at your own capabilities.
In particular, you may find this digital marketing benchmarking spreadsheet useful for benchmarking your current capabilities. The spreadsheet supports Dave Chaffey’s report on Managing Digital Channels for Econsultancy which goes into more detail on different areas of strategy development and channel governance.
G. Internet-specific SWOT summary
Include a digital channel SWOT which summarises your online marketplace analysis findings AND links to strategy. In a large organisation, or for a more complete summary complete a SWOT for:
• Customer acquisition and conversion and customer development
• Different brands
• Different markets
• Different competitors
You should be as specific as possible in your goals. We recommend these should be:
• SMART - see the definition at foot of http://www.smartinsights.com/about/
• Define what the R is in ROI for you - it will likely be monetary but don’t forget digital marketing can be more than that
• Divided into key digital strategy areas of customer acquisition, conversion, customer development and growth - this is important to ensure you’re covering all of the areas
• Broken down into short, medium and long-term goals
• Align goals to the business and marketing goals
You may find this whitepaper that Dave Chaffey presented at E-metrics in 2005 useful: http://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C4-Strategy/Identifying-Objectives/
More recent updates are in Dave’s books.
The key elements of digital strategy involve revisiting and aligning the main thrust of your marketing strategy in an online context, make sure you draw from other plans, if there isn’t one then use these headers. Don’t get drawn into the details at this stage. That’s the tactics.
But you may want to summarise the essence of some or all of the digital strategies below. - how are you going to leverage the potential of digital marketing to your business, and how does that meet the objectives. This is about your approach only, not the detail.
Consider breaking it down as well, it’s often easier to explain in smaller, bite-size chunks, this also helps when it comes to tactics which should hang from the strategies below:
• A company’s online customers have different demographic characteristics, needs and behaviours to its offline customers. It follows that different approaches to segmentation may be required and specific segments may need to be selectively targeted though specific content and messaging on your site or elsewhere on the web. This capability for “micro-targeting is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing.
• Specific targeting approaches to apply online described in the book include: demographic, value-based, lifecycle and behavioural personalisation.
How do you position your online products and services in the customers mind?
• Reinforcing your core proposition. How do you prove your credibility
• Define your online value proposition. This should flow from your positioning and be what the customer sees immediately when they interact with you online.
• Define these in key messages for different audiences, e.g. prospects against existing customers, segments with different value you target.
Think about the digital marketing mix - how can you provide differential value to customers through varying the 4Ps online through Product, Price, Promotion and Place and how can you add value through service. And don't forget what PR Smith calls the Eighth P of "Partnering"
Particularly if you sell online, you will want to explain how you will modify the marketing mix. For example:
Product. Can you offer a different product range online. How can you add value to products through additional content or online services.
Price. Review your pricing and consider differential pricing for online products or services.
Place. Identify your online distribution issues and challenges. Should you create new intermediaries or portals or partner with existing sites?
Promotion.Discuss the problems and opportunities of the online communications mix. These will be detailed in the acquisition and retention communications strategies. Review approaches for online promotions and merchandising to increase sales. You may want to include exclusive promotions to support the growth of different digital channels, i.e. Email, Mobile, Facebook, Twitter.
People. Can use automated tools such as FAQ to deliver “web self-service” or should you provide online contact points through Live Chat or Phone Call-back.
Processes. List the components of process and understand the need to integrate them into a system.
Physical evidence. Identify the digital components that give ‘evidence’ to customers of your credibility such as awards and testimonials
Place. The eighth P. So much of marketing today is based on strategic partnerships partnerships, marketing marriages and alliances that we have added this ‘P’ in as a vital ingredient in today’s marketing mix.
Gaining ‘street cred’ online is now paramount to success, how and where are you going to do that - brand favourability follows credibility and trust - what do you understand will be the reasons to engage with your brand, why would they click through - or not - how will you demonstrate credibility online.
This includes your own Web site strategy (one site or four, sub-domains, what are the site goals and how will they be achieved...) and social presence, i.e. timelines for
Which content will feature to gain initial interest, support the buying process (text and rich media product content and tools) and stickiness and to promote return visits (blogs and community). Remember user-generated content too, such as reviews, ratings and comments. You will have to prioritise content types and ensure you devote sufficient resource to it to create quality content which helps you compete. All effective online companies see themselves as publishers!
Outline how you will acquire traffic, what’s are the main approaches you will use? Don’t forget to consider how you drive visitors through offline media and integrated campaigns.
Key digital media channels for traffic acquisition would include:
• Search engine marketing (natural and paid)
• Social media marketing and Online PR (think brand strategy)
• Partner and affiliate marketing
• Display advertising
• Email marketing to leads database
• How does the user experience, which depends on information architecture, page template design, merchandising, messaging and performance help you make it easy for visitors to engage and convert?
• Often neglected, what will be the main online and offline tactics to encourage repeat visits and sales. Again integrated campaigns involving offline touchpoints are crucial here.
• What are your goals in permission marketing and data capture - what/where/how/when/why, what tools and value adds are you going to use. You might alternatively reference these in the conversion strategy.
K. Multichannel integration strategy
• How you integrate traditional and digital channels should run through every section of your strategy since it’s key to success. One way to structure this is to map customer journeys across channels as channel chains.
Tactics are where the rubber hits the road, and so define how you will implement your strategy in the real world - when you’ll do it, with what, your goals for each tactic aligned to the main objectives and how that will that be measured.
Each of strategy sections A to J will need implementation details which you can get specialists in your team or agencies to develop. Remember that with digital, “the devil is in the detail”. The best digital strategies can fail if the execution is poor - search, email marketing and creating a persuasive web design are classic examples of this we see daily.
If there’s only you, create a plan and Just Do It! You have the benefit that you can be more nimble, so can test and learn
How are you going to divide the year up - thinking about campaigns versus seasonal or business focusses, this helps to get the plan actionable. Consider quarterly (90 day) blocks to focus on and ensure objectives, strategies and tactics are focussed on that.
Keep this section light and fact based and avoid too much description repeated in the strategy section. Hang your tactics under the strategic hangers, for example traffic acquisition, so that it’s easy for others follow.
Organize your measuring in dashboards so that it’s easy to summarise and keep up to date against the plan.
Consider KPI’s (key performance indicators) that relate to tactics, strategies and so objectives, sometimes a KPI is an objective, for example a KPI could be weekly total natural search traffic, home page bounce or email open rate. These can be good early warnings to objectives like ‘online sales revenue’ or ‘new leads’ not being met. Plain old Excel will suffice and will allow you to keep the latest results to hand.
The key is that (assuming your objectives were clear, detailed and relevant) you have the headers to site your KPI’s and measure against.
• Consider how you will measure and report using web analytics
• Are there other measurement tools and resources needed
• What is the process to measure and report, for example looking at keyword level traffic daily is not actionable, but home page bounce can be if site changes are made
• Think about creating a KPI summary dashboard
In larger organisations, you have to think about resourcing, i.e.
• Skills - internal and agency requirements to deliver on your plan
• Structure - do you have a separate digital team or can you integrate
No, you’re still not quite finished! After your plan is created, go back to the beginning and create a 1 page summary that a busy, senior executive can understand and believe in!
The same exec summary is useful for PowerPoint presentations should you need to present the bones of your plan, and the ROI. An important part of your role is helping others understand what digital marketing is, and the immense value that it can add to the business.
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