Digital Marketing Planning
Integrated Marketing Planning
Planning is the essential element in translating the business and marketing strategy to the work load of the company, to deliver the companies value proposition to the market. An effective digital marketing plan includes making the right decisions to provide a logical sequence to follow to ensure inclusion of all key activities of development and implementation. Objectives, key initiatives, major events, seasonal considerations, and workload capacity all must be considered as inputs to the planning process.
Netnotic Marketing has been helping it's customer work through the Digital Marketing Planning Process for over a decade. We can help you get from "We need to accomplish this" to "We have a plan to be successful". Inputs to the Planning Process include your overall business strategy, a SWOT analysis, analysis of the consumer decision cycle as it applies to each market segment. The process will lead to key decisions on how we will communicate your competitive advantage to your market segments, eventually resulting a detailed schedule for implementation.
The Case for Planning
With an Integrated Marketing Plan, your employees will have a a map for achieving their Marketing goals. Direction, objectives and actions will be planned and communicated. Strategy is an intentional set of plans and budgets so that you know what you want to accomplish and know how you are going to execute your plans. The overriding goal is the launch of a digital marketing campaign drive a continuous cycle of improving results.
An Integrated Marketing Plan must take into account the requirements for people, technology and budgets. A well developed strategy can only be successful when the resources to execute the plan, to implement the marketing tactics, is in place,
People
Plans are initiated by people, executed by people and evaluated by people. Role of marketing employees starts with the formulation of the strategy and detailing of plans. Planning process may be a top-down or bottom up approach. At the VP or Director level there will be the need to ensure the marketing strategy and plans to execute the strategy are in alignment and support the business plan.
Critically important is the role of creative development. The value of imagination is the ability to craft a campaign message that helps your target market understand and appreciate your value proposition.
From the direction setting objectives will come plans, campaigns, tasks, and design requirements, the workload of getting the job done. The organization must have an adequately staffed marketing team to carry out the execution of the plan, or contracts with consultants who fill specific roles. Skill and experience
Technology
Within a digital marketing plan, technology choices can occur at three levels. The first is in-house technology choices to support work activities. The computer hardware and software needed to handle the day to day tasks of marketing duties. The second is the choices made regarding the platforms on which your content and media will be posted for public viewing. What website technology will you choose, a Content Management System or a custom html site? What social media channels will you choose to manage? The third type of technology choice will be how to manage and utilize customer records. Will you invest in a CRM system, in marketing automation, or will you cobble together an ad hoc set of tools to manage leads, prospects, customers and outbound campaigns?
Budgets
For each choice made regarding people, technology, and for every campaign, there must be resources available to support the work, to pay for the tools. Some organizations allocate their marketing budget as a percentage of projected revenues. Others as a percentage increase or decrease from the previous year marketing spend. In this manner, the percentage should be representative of the desired growth objectives. If the company has aggressive growth plans, then it will need to invest in the lead and sales generation of Marketing. If the company plans to enter new markets, then sufficient dollars need to be allocated, often more so than may be required in an established market.
Pulling Your Plan Together
An Integrated Marketing Plan will pull together the requirements for people, technology and budgets and layout a schedule, a detailed plan that puts the wheels of marketing in motion and drives the business towards its objectives. One way to view a marketing plan is to break the many activities into campaigns.
For each campaign, there must a end objective stated, the business reason for the campaign. These objectives need to be defined essentially as how much of something will be achieved by when. These are the Key Performance Indicators. It may be to raise the brand awareness by 10% in market segment X. It may be to generate 1000 new customer prospects in geographic region Y. Or it may be to Improve the Search Visibility of pages A,B, and C by 25% on Google. For scheduling purposes, there should be a start and end date for the media elements of the campaign, that is, when the campaign elements begin to reach the target market. Prior to this, the design requirements schedule must specify what is to be developed, by whom, and delivered by when. After the launch of the campaign, results need to be monitored and decisions made on adjusting campaign elements. Post campaign, an analysis should be completed with explanation of what results where achieved, why, and key learning for future campaigns.