Here’s everything you need to know to maximize the return on your marketing investment!

It can be pretty scary to think about your company’s future. The next couple of months, the next year, the next few years, where will you be? What will your profits look like? How can you keep up online? Competition can be worrying, but with a well researched digital marketing plan in place, you’re more likely to succeed in reaching your goals and getting rid of those sleepless nights thinking about your business’ future.

But what exactly is a digital marketing plan?

A digital marketing plan (or digital marketing strategy) is the plan of action that is implemented to help you achieve your company's goals online. It does this through carefully selecting online marketing channels, including paid adverts, social media exposure and many others. All of these channels are used to help increase your company’s ranking on the search engines, visitor numbers, conversions (how many people book in/buy from you) and ultimately your sales. 

So, how do you create the perfect digital marketing plan? One that actually works and provides you with all the assistance you need to meet those conversions?

Analyze Your Current Online Presence

When developing your digital marketing plan, it is important to first carry out both an internal and an external SWOT analysis of your business and it’s online presence. A SWOT analysis looks at the S trengths, W eaknesses, O pportunities and T hreats for your company, competitors and the industry.

You shouldn’t go rushing into the planning stage completely blind, which is why analyzing your digital presence’s past strengths and weaknesses can help you improve your business going forward. 

Some of the questions you should be asking yourself are:

• Is your website customer-oriented?
• How is the customer’s browsing experience? 
• Do you update your blog and products/services often? 
• What is your website’s current ranking on the search engines?
• If you depend on local business what does your local SEO landscape look like
• What is your social media presence like?
• If you’ve already done some online advertising, what worked? What didn’t?

Asking yourself these questions will help you realize what your online strengths and weaknesses are.

Pro Tip: Be brutal. Be honest. Don’t look at your current online efforts through rose-tinted glasses. The more honest and critical you are now, the better your online presence will be in the future. 

Know What You Want 

It’s important to know what you want to achieve for your business. Define what your overall objective is and then match your digital marketing plan to your grand scheme. Think big and work towards what your end goal for your company is. 

Setting and measuring your Success Metrics will help with maintaining what you want for your business. Yes we know everyone talks about KPIs (key performance indicators) but aren't we really looking for success in everything we do? So we’re changing it up and thinking about Success from the start.

• Be specific with your Success Metrics and identify the figures which you want to be held accountable for. Examples are number of leads generated, X number of calls, etc.
• Be realistic with your goals by analyzing any previous digital marketing attempts (this will ensure a positive increase on your current results and help you avoid expectations that are too high).
• Make sure you know what method you’ll be using to measure success metrics (Google Analytics, number of completed online sales for example) 

Pro Tip: Keep every element of your digital marketing plan SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

Choose Your Methods

A few things are important when it comes to identifying the methods most suitable to you, but most importantly you must remember the following four things:

1. Your Budget
2. Your Audience
3. Your Digital Channels
4. Your Team

Your Budget:

• Define what type of budget you’ll have for your digital marketing
• Develop your budget for the long haul, 6-12 months rather than one or two months
• Look at past data to see what has and hasn’t worked

Your Audience:

• Where does your audience hang out online?
• What are they looking for online?
• What can you give them that they actually value
• Are you targeting a specific geographical area or niche within the industry?
• Know your target demographic: where they live, what their income is, what their likes and dislikes are, where they spend their money and where they hang out online.

Your Channels:

• Take a look at what current digital marketing channels work for you. Which ones will you keep? 
• Will you use Google AdWords or Social Media ads, like Facebook or Instagram?
• Write out what each digital channel is going to achieve or what you want it to achieve
•  Make sure you have at least one or two Success Metrics attached to each of your digital channels, so you know if it’s been successful or not

Your Team:

• Assess what your current team is capable of achieving (be realistic to ensure that nobody is stressed or over-worked)
• See if you need to hire more people and if you have the means to do so
• Decide if you’ll be running your digital marketing yourself or if you would prefer to hire professionals to do it for you (this is exactly what Motorhead Digital does, if your looking for a team of experts and you’d like it done right, get in touch! Our team is here to help)

Pro Tip: When assigning roles to your team members, assign based on what they’re good at. There is no point in making someone terrible with figures in charge of tracking Google Analytics. If you’re struggling with certain elements, get professionals in - it will save you a lot of wasted time and frustrated complaints from employees. 

Make A Plan… Build your Marketing Engine and Don’t Stick To It!

Wait What? Before the panic sets in about why we’re telling you not to stick to your plan, just hear us out. Your plan is never going to be perfect and there is always going to be something that will pop up and take you by surprise. Not every estimate or assumption you make is going to be correct - and that’s alright! 

You’ve looked at all the steps and carefully constructed a plan based on highly insightful assumptions and perfectly analysed research. But all of this preparation can’t compare to how your current customers and your target market will behave throughout the year.

Because of this, it’s necessary to continuously measure and monitor the performance of your business’s digital marketing efforts to be able to change things when you need to.

Key Steps To Success

• Create a measurement and monitoring plan that will fit in with your success metrics
• Check the success of all the individual elements of your digital marketing plan at regular intervals
• Take note of what is and isn’t working for you and your business. If something isn’t working for you, isolate what’s wrong and try to identify why it’s not working. By doing this you should be able to change it and make it better
• Revisit previous analysis and budget allocations and try something new with them

By implementing a well-researched digital marketing strategy and monitoring it regularly, you’ll be able to track your success online and know exactly what works for your business.

Pro Tip: The key is to be consistent and have quality reporting so you’ll know what’s happening on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. If you don’t have (or regularly review) reporting on your digital marketing, you will never know what’s working and what’s not.

About The Author

With over 20 years of experience, BARRY ALT combines his passion for everything automotive with his ability to strategize in the digital world to bring you a full-service digital agency just for automotive professionals: Motorhead Digital. Contact Barry at (585) 766-9785 or balt@motorheaddigital.com

As seen on The Shop Magazine