Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to design a strategic plan that, once implemented, will enable your digital marketing goals. As mentioned, ensure at all times your goals and digital marketing plan connects with the overall strategy of your business.
We typically divide the strategic planning phase into three parts: evaluation, creation and implementation. Let’s look briefly at these two parts.
a) Evaluation
Start by conducting a situation analysis of your market, an analysis of the internal and external factors that may impact or enable your goals. Then feed the key findings into a SWOT analysis, that lists the inherent Strengths and Weaknesses of your business and external Opportunities and Threats that may impact your digital marketing strategy.
Your SWOT analysis can take between a few hours and hundreds of hours to formulate. Either way, it’s vital and needs to be done. You can do it yourself, or hire an expert digital marketing strategist to facilitate this process.
b) Creation
It’s now time to create a strategy that plays to your strengths and identifies external resources that need to be acquired to achieve your goals. Your strategic plan needs to present factors such as the following:
- how your digital strategy positions your business in the market
- what activities, in priority order you need to undertake to achieve your digital marketing goals e.g. social media marketing, SEO, with costs
- how you will measure the progress of your digital plan
- contingencies
c) Implementation
The successful implementation of your strategic plan is critical – getting it wrong is very wasteful. Ensure all your activities have goals that directly connect with the overall strategic goals of your plan and that each activity is ranked in priority order. Ranking your activities helps you understand where to prioritize your time – as a general rule of thumb, priority activities should get the most focus.
Focus on the rocks, not the sand
Watch the video below. We like to use the rocks, pebbles and sand analogy to highlight the importance of focusing your resources on the activities that will have the biggest impact on your goals (the rocks), rather than getting distracted by less important matters (the pebbles and sand).
Also bear in mind the implementation of a digital marketing plan is dynamic – digital marketing changes constantly! So be ready to adjust your plan and re-prioritize your activities if something is not working or if a new opportunity is presented.
Finally, put in place user friendly processes and the right organisation structure to enable your strategy.