Developing
an Online Marketing/Digital Marketing Plan
There are lots of ways
of marketing online but even when using “free” services like Twitter, Facebook
and LinkedIn you are still spending time and resources. With the different
methods of marketing, diverse audiences and ways to market to them, an online campaign
in a way needs more planning and better oversight than more traditional
marketing campaigns. From experience, I have broken a Marketing Campaign into 6
parts with an additional section on the tools to use.
1.
Define your customer
2.
Define your objectives
3.
Design/Create Content
4.
Create a Messaging Calendar
5.
Define your Measurements
6.
Execute your Plan
Supplementary: Your Tools of choice
1. Defining Your Customer
The more you understand
about your customer/potential customer the more you can use language they
appreciate, market where they spend their time offline and online and design a
product that they’ll want. Digital Marketing allows you to use the same basic
message in different online “channels” and with slightly different messaging so
it fits the context. There are lots of ways to research customers or potential
customers.
Survey existing
customers
Online Surveys
A simple method is to
use the Forms option in Google Docs to do an online survey and ask your
customers for some information on their motivations, who they are, what
websites they look at. You could also use Surveys.ie, PollDaddy.com and
SurveyMonkey
Record them
With permission use
audio or video to record your customers describing your products and services
or your competitors. Notice the language they use, the metaphors and how they
use your product which could be quite different to how you use it. There are
plenty of value for money portable mp3 recorders and video recorders available
these days
Read your existing comms
Look at sales and tech
support emails, blog/website queries and phone queries to see what questions
are being asked by people. If you are a new company, see what people are asking
of your competitors publicly on forums, Twitter, Facebook etc
Questions worksheet
These are questions that
you should be able to answer yourself so that you can then understand your
relationship with customers/potential customers.
Describe your company:
(In the space of a Tweet 140 chars)
What story about your
company can be spread by others?
What are the touch
points between you and your customers?
What is the emotional
reward if a customer uses your product?
What other product or
services do your customers use that are complimentary to yours?
What websites do your
customers/potential spend time on?
What words/phrases do
they use on these websites to describe their needs that you can fulfill?
Where does your website
rank for those words/phrases?
Who are the most
important people online that influence your customers/potential customers?
What do you need to do
to get mentioned by these people?
Who links to you and
your competition?
What traditional media
outlets can help with online coverage/reputation for you?
What do they need from
you to spread your story?
Tools:
Google Adplanner will
tell you where people go online, traffic to websites these people go to and
other websites that your potential audience go to. “People who visit
IrishTimes.com also go to RTE.ie” is what you can get back.
Google Alerts allows you
to run searches and get results back by email when you, your industry and your
competitors are mentioned online.
2. Defining your Objectives
What are your objectives
for your digital campaign?
Some examples:
Website:
Increase traffic to your
website
Increase your ranking on
Google for certain phrases
Sell more products
More time on your
website spent by customers
Sell more of a
particular product over others
Get more links to your
website
More items/articles
shared via FB or Twitter
Get ads to be cheaper
and get more clicks
Blog:
Get more blog comments
More links to blog posts
More shared blog posts
Facebook:
Get more fans on your
Facebook Page
Increase conversion rate
Increase more
interactions per post on your Facebook Page (Likes, Comments)
Get more people to look
at specialist tabs
Sell directly from
Facebook
Send more traffic to
your website
Twitter :
Get more followers
Get more
mentions/replies
Get more RTs
Send more traffic to
your website
LinkedIn:
New contacts
New introductions
New leads and companies
met
Reputation:
Change perception of
your company from negative to neutral, neutral to positive
Get more mentions of you
on Twitter, Facebook, Web – discussion forums, blogs
These are general
objectives. If you have not done any marketing online before then it is hard to
say “We want 100 new fans per day” or “1000 new sales in a month” so ideally,
create proper objectives a month or two months in to measuring.
3. Content Creation
In this new phase of
communications where earned media is the game then you need to not throw about
“We’re great, buy our stuff now please?” messages but instead become a
publisher and advertiser. Creating something of use that can perhaps be reused
or resent to people. We live in an age where content creation is a democratic
idea but so is distribution of it. If you create good content then maybe the
community you’re in online will spread it much further and it has more power as
it comes from a person they know.
What do you want to get
out of this?
If you’re going to
invest time and resources creating content you need to be very certain what
your endgame is. You need to figure out that if you are going to change the
copy of your website, write some blog posts, work on status updates on Facebook
or Twitter, that you are doing it for a purpose. For your business. What is
that purpose? With your content, is it a way of showing off your authority, is
it a case study of how you helped someone out, is it a direct way of making
sales, is it a discount on goods, is it information that shows you care about
the wider community?
Who are those you want
to energise?
Forget demographics, ask
yourself who are the people you want to create good content for and as a result
of good content, they interact with you and even help spread the word? Who
exactly is the market for your products and services and what do they like online,
on blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums etc.? Use the likes of
the Facebook Ad system to figure out the volume of the people you are
interested in interacting with and increase that by perhaps 30% for overall
Internet numbers.
Themes:
After figuring out what
you want from working in an online media and who the people you want to work
with are then you need a properly considered plan on when and what to send out.
You can’t be doing anything adhoc or randomly. Unstructured might be more fun
but a plan keeps you on message, allows you to measure how well you’re doing
and makes people more comfortable and familiar by the fact you are interacting
them on a regular basis. Themes could be a week long education initiative, a
week of special offers/discounts, a week of tips on how to use your products
more efficiently etc. Themes allow you to be repetitive with your overall
message without using the same enforcing updates again and again.
Tweak their bits, get
reactions:
Interactions here are
key. They might be weak emotional engagements but you every comment on a blog,
every reply or ReTweet on Twitter, every comment or the weak but effective
“Like” on Facebook is someone taking time out to react to your content. Not job
done but certainly a recognition of sorts to what you’ve done. So figure out
what people like by past experience or see how they presently interact with
their friends on Twitter and Facebook, what content gets them going and see can
you provide content like that. Getting interactions too might be as simple as
asking for them. Solicit opinions with your content, go away from the broadcast
type telling of news and lecturing. Ask on Facebook, blogs, Twitter: “What do
you think?” “What do you think should be done?”
Update daily, measure
weekly:
On a weekly basis,
evaluate how your content plan is going. Comments on the blog posts, links to
the post. Interactions on Facebook using the Insights option. Views on your
YouTube video, links to the video on YouTube. To start with you’ll be in prospecting
mode, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. From that you’ll become more
experienced with this, making it easier to gear up and plan well in advance and
having much better knowledge what will work based on what worked before. The
Insights tool especially will tell you what age groups and genders are being
responsive and which are not which should give you crucial data on what to
change and what to keep.
Content Curation:
Knowing what people
like, you can be the one that acts like a mini-newsfeed for them. Summarising
industry news, interesting blog posts, showing videos they might like etc.
Think of the daily papers they have on Newstalk or Morning Ireland, can you do
the same with websites that apply to your area? The Fluffy Links blog posts I
write – http://www.mulley.net/category/fluffy/ are one such example of content
curation.
Zeitgeists
Budgets, breaking news,
elections, Apple products, volcanoes – They all impact people and all give us
the opportunity to share our take and our authority on issues. Also, when you
think about it, the marketing for these events has been done by the media
already so it’s a nice opportunity to tie in to something relevant if you also
have something relevant to add to the mix.
Tools:
Google External Keyword
Tool will allow you to predict potential traffic for keywords in your content
as well as suggest other words and phrases to use with your content.
4. Messaging Calendar
Communications and
Marketing Calendar
In Media, PR and
marketing, knowing what events are coming up can be quite important, as is
coordinating within your organisation when to send out your different
communications. When does your marketing start for a product and when does it
end, when do you do press for an event, what day will that press release go
out, does it clash with anything internally and any event externally? We all
know the Government trick of burying bad news with their news dumps on a Friday
evening but the date and time of all communications is important for an organisation.
Being able to get a quick overview of what is coming up is vital for a busy
organisation big or small. This is where the communications calendar comes in.
Advantages of a comms
calendar
The first advantage of a
communications calendar is that in a glimpse you can see what’s happening
internally and externally over the next few days, weeks and months. Another
advantage is that when external events pop up you might be able to modify your communications
instead of ploughing headlong into the event. Knowing you have buffers around a
planned event brings in a level of comfort and makes you adapt to a situation
while looking professional. You can easily scroll back and look at past events
that worked and didn’t work and gain insight for the next event too.
What type of calendar?
I find Google Calendar
or one of the other web based calendars to be excellent as you can share them
with a group. Having them on a wall works well and maybe even creating an
analog version of the web-based calendar can work but a digital shared version
means no matter where your team is, they can access the data and update it if
needs be. If you do go digital though, make sure to make backups just in case
there are connection issues or data loss.
What should go into it?
Newspapers will have
upcoming events in their business sections such as company AGMs, results
announcements and key Government events like budgets. They ought to go into
your calendar, especially if you think they will dominate the news the day
they’re announced. Over time experience will tell you which of these is
important.
Measure results :
With the calendar in
place you can measure the effects of campaigns days, weeks and months after
they have started and ended. If you add in resources put into the campaign and
the impact of it you can visually see the value of the campaign for you and
clients. Visual clues can often allow you to make better and faster decisions
too compared to looking at data in just a spreadsheet.
Setting up a
communications/marketing calendar seems easy and it mostly is, it’s keeping up
the habit of updating it and making sure everyone else does too that is
important. A calendar is one of the oldest and most basic time keeping devices
around yet all organisations could use a variation of one to become more
efficient.
5. Measurements
Our objectives have
already been decided and based on that, you should choose your measurements.
You should be measuring before and after to make sure any growth is due to your
campaign and hasn’t just been growing anyway without the campaign.
Pre-measurement and post-measurement for specific objectives but as your
campaign progresses you should always be logging in and checking your stats.
Website
Google Analytics and
Google Webmaster Tools will tell you about traffic to your website, keywords
used, search engines, what webpages are doing well or doing badly. A wordpress
blog will tell you traffic to your blog and number of comments
Yahoo Site Explorer will
tell you the number of links to your website and what pages are getting the
most links. It will also rank these in order of authority
Facebook
Your Facebook Page has
“Insights” a stats package that runs in Flash but can be exported to excel. You
can measure total Page likes, interactions, growth rates, loss of fans etc.
Additionally you will
see in almost real time the number of times your content has been displayed in
the news feed of people which Facebook calls “Impressions”. Facebook gives you
a breakdown of your Fans too so you will know percentages of male, female, age,
country, language spoken etc. Facebook will also tell you where you got your
external traffic from, the numbers of views on your main Facebook Page and all
their children Tabs on the Page too.
Twitter
Twitter does not have a
built in stats package so you will need to use a few tools external to Twitter
like Seesmic, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or use Twitter search. You can run a search
on http://search.twitter.com for your Twitter name, website address, product
names etc and bookmark the search. It’s messy but you can record daily mentions
and so on. Your profile will tell you your follower numbers and Twitter Lists
will allow you to segment your followers if you use them.
6. Execution
Using your Messaging
Calendar and Content plan, you and those in your organisation should execute
your overall plan as dictated. However leeway is important so you can adapt as
the campaign goes on. There will be lots of mini-lessons learned as you
progress and you should go with this flow.
Measurement comes back
again as you should measure how long and therefore how much executing your plan
will cost staff wise and this can then be factored into whether your campaign
is of value or not.
Tools we used:
Surveys:
Surveys.ie,
PollDaddy.com and SurveyMonkey, Google Docs Forms
Planning:
Google Ad Planner,
Google Alerts
Content CreationC:
Google External Keyword
Tool
Analytics:
Google Analytics, Google
Webmasters Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer
Twitter:
Seesmic, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck
If you want to be
informed of when the next Social Media Courses/Digital Marketing Courses are, Call
us on 8149996597
