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The competition is fierce and therefore your marketing plan should be bold. Still, it is easier said than done. To help you garner a great market share, leveraging a good digital marketing plan cannot be avoided, at least not in the present decade. Creating a digital marketing plan goes beyond creating a website and having an active social media presence. For a winning digital marketing strategy, you need to plan, execute, manage and optimise a variety of digital focal points to guide your target audience down the marketing funnel. 

Brands that ace their digital strategies in the first go, start their marketing journey by having a plan in place. History is evidence that a good digital marketing structure involves short-term plans, long-term strategies and step-by-step tactics to achieve business goals. Therefore, you must organize your digital marketing plan using an unbreakable structure. 

All you need is a structured digital marketing plan that can guide your audience from the awareness stage to becoming advocates for your brand. We’re here to help you find a structure that will hand-hold you while creating a digital marketing plan for your business. 

Structuring A Digital Marketing Plan In 2022 

Irrespective of what product or service your brand is about, a structured framework for your digital marketing plan will help you see the returns on your marketing investments. Here’s what you need to follow: 

Action-Oriented Goal-Setting 

Assuming that you have thoroughly researched the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and its market, an action-oriented goal setting is the first wire in your digital marketing plan. You can take the help of a digital marketing agency to help you with this. 

The advantage of having a goal-oriented action plan is that you can measure your marketing investment outcomes. Moreover, it keeps you away from making efforts that have chances of giving futile returns. For example, let’s say you are a car service center operating in India. Your quarterly goal would be to acquire X number of leads through various marketing channels. Using this number as your base, you will need to invest both time and effort in creating an action plan for your digital marketing strategy that is directed toward your quarterly goals. 

Here, you may want to list down your action and goal in the format below: 

Digital Channel	Action	Goal
Paid Advertisements	Directing readers to click on advertisements.	To gain 20 bookings in the first month through ads.
Earned Media	Using Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram to share customer reviews.	Get at least 50 customers to share your offerings through word-of-mouth and promotions.
Owned Media (Website, Blogs)	Creating a highly-optimized website and publishing 10 articles a month.	To increase website traffic by 15%.

Once you have a goal-oriented action plan, the next step is to measure the performance of these actions on a regular basis. However, this does not need to be a part of your digital marketing plan’s framework. Though, it needs to be monitored on a regular basis to take calculated steps. 

Determining Your Marketing Strategy 

With regular monitoring of your action plan to attain goals, you can determine a digital marketing plan that works for your business. It is common knowledge that no two businesses are exactly the same and therefore, need tailored efforts to meet their marketing goals. Therefore you need to analyze your digital marketing reports on a regular basis. 

Taking the above-mentioned example of your car service centre, you may learn that owned media such as blogs and social media posts work for your brand but paid media does not give you as many returns. Therefore, you can invest in social media marketing services and content marketing through blogs.

The next step here is to create a long-term digital marketing strategy for the channels of communication for your business. Each strategy should be backed by an end goal. This will help you effectively guide your customers down the marketing funnel. 

There’s A Tactic For Each Trend 

The next step in creating the structure for your digital marketing plan is to define the tactics you want to leverage. You already know which marketing strategy works best for your business and therefore learn how you can sustain the digital marketing plan using tactics. 

Since your end goal is to bring a potential customer down the marketing funnel from awareness to conversion, you need to incorporate well-defined tactics that you will use at each step of the marketing funnel. 

In the previous step, you have come to know that owned media works best for our car service centre and therefore, all your digital marketing efforts need to be focused around the particular channel of communication you have chosen. 

Your tactic, in this case, could include publishing 10 articles on 3 different platforms on a monthly basis. Performing regular market research to see what your competitors are writing about and publishing content on similar lines with additional value-added points that your competitors may have missed out on. When it comes to finding tactics, the possibilities are endless in sustaining your digital marketing plan. 

Optimize & Quantify Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Now, you have identified your marketing strategy and also executed tactics to attain your business goals. The final wire that forms the framework for your digital marketing plan is your KPIs. Evaluating your tactics is a practice that goes hand in hand with determining your next course of action and therefore has a direct impact on your KPIs. Your performance indicators will give you insight into how well your digital marketing tactics are performing based on data. This data will redirect your marketing efforts to areas that need to be optimized and improved. 

Without optimizing your tactics, it may face the uncertainty of being unable to cope with marketing trends and as a result, your brand may fall behind in the competition. Take Google’s new Algorithm for example. If you are counting on publishing content on a  regular basis, you will need to optimize your KPIs based on the expectations of not just your customers but also search engines.  

Follow these steps while creating your digital marketing plan and find yourself leading your industry. The key is to take one step at a time and approach your business goals using the above digital marketing plan framework.