WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, AND HOW TO CREATE A DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN
A digital marketing plan is the who, what, where, when, why, and how of telling people about your brand and business online.
Many of us think of this as creating a content plan for free or organic social media posts as well as digital advertising.
The real goal here is to put together something that you feel confident you can do for yourself or have someone take over for you. You can come up with the most elaborate, brilliant digital marketing plan but if you can’t execute it, or can’t afford to hire a freelancer or marketing agency to do the work for you, it’s just a fun brainstorming exercise.
So what we want to do is see how you can build a plan out in no time that serves as your template for doing great work and repeatedly talking about your brand online.
When you start by being your own hero and raving fan, you give your business the chance to find others willing to join you on the journey.
Let’s Start With What
What we’re doing is putting something, anything out on the internet for the world to see.
This can be writing (also known as copy or content depending on if it sells or tells), it can be videos, audio, or photos. What we’re putting out can be done organically, meaning for free, or we can put a budget behind it to run ads on different platforms.
Typically the best digital marketing plans for small businesses will be a mix of organic and paid media. What percentage of effort you put towards content that can go live on the web for free versus paid ads will depend a lot on the budget you have.
When you’re on a limited budget and can’t run many ads, you’ve got time and effort as your friend in the world of social media.
Although it is helpful to know and add to your plan that with a little understanding of advertising on social media platforms and search engines you can much more realistically scale your efforts by running paid ads.
Your Who Determines The Where
First, decide who on your team is going to be executing the marketing plan (or is it you?). It’s necessary to know who is going to be doing the work because you want to match the work to the skillsets your marketing team has or is willing to work on developing. If everyone runs away from the sound of their own voice, audio is likely not going to be your best choice and so you’re also not going to focus on creating a podcast for your marketing plan.
More importantly than who on your team is doing the work, think about who your ideal client for your business is. This is also called your persona or avatar. Give that persona a name and you’ll always know who you’re talking to when you’re creating content for your digital marketing plan.
If you run a flow shop and Gardening Georgina spends an hour a day on TikTok and the rest of the time looking at beautiful garden photography on Pinterest, you’d want to be putting effort into creating content on those platforms to become part of Gardening Georgina’s online community.
Most social media platforms cater to a particular demographic, primarily age range and what was trendy and new during the teens and twenties for that age range. What platforms are popular is always evolving so instead of counting on what you currently know to be the extent of your marketing plan, do a Google search for “most popular social media platforms” or ask your cool younger niece or cousin what platform she’s spending all her time on.
When’s The Time To Engage
When is much more important for organic content than it is for your paid ads. Most of the time I recommend paid ads run around the clock. Unless a value your brand stands by is not targeting the middle-of-the-night online shoppers. Ads are refined to hit your target persona and so whenever they’re online, they’re online. The message gets out to them when they see it and you ideally want them to see it multiple times.
Timing matters though for publishing your organic content. Typically you want to be active and engaging with people on a social platform at the time that a post of yours goes live. You also want to take into consideration when people are active on any social platform you’re using. Some platforms get more activity during work hours (which goes to show how “busy” people really are at work) and others are active in the evenings and on weekends.
How To Make This All Work
Our how is about how do you possibly manage this? It’s also about how much content should you publish?
Executing on a digital marketing plan takes organization to not turn into an impossible battle. What’s more, when you are well organized with creating content for social media, you create a virtuous cycle of content buckets you can repeatedly go back to because you know there’s interest in them and that they work.
There’s no limit to how much content you should post. Many brands that have positioned themselves as authorities and the most prominent on social media are posting 100 or more individual pieces of content per week.
For a small business, I think that you should strive to post once per day on the platforms you’ve decided are the best for you to post on. This means 5-7 posts per week (if you’re taking weekends off). These pieces of content would be a photo, short-form writing, or video or audio up to a couple of minutes in length.
If you’re going to prioritize long-form content like videos more than a couple of minutes in length, podcasts, or blogs or newsletters 800-1000 words or more, post those long-form pieces 1-2 times per week.
Create 3 or 4 content buckets for your brand.
A content bucket is a topic or idea that your brand is passionate about and something that you want to position your brand as an expert on.
It’s great if you can come up with 3 or 4 buckets but even if you start with just one there are many ways that you can create content for your bucket.
If you’re a local plumber, maybe you only want to position yourself as an expert in plumbing or home plumbing as the topic and content bucket. But over time as you build your brand online and grow a following, you might expand to talking about running a business or growing a team as a tradesperson. The content buckets might also expand to talking about water quality and chemistry, tool reviews for other plumbers, or whatever you want to talk about that’s still adjacent and relevant to the brand.
An e-commerce apparel brand would have a content bucket about their specific apparel but if the brand is interested in the outdoors and adventure sports, it could also have a content bucket on sustainability, environmental news, or outdoor adventure content. I think that as long as you know how the throughline draws back to the core mission and values of the brand and you can explain it clearly, it will make sense to your audience as well.
Different Ideas For Your Content Buckets
Here are some subtopics and prompts for what to write about within your buckets:
Mistakes
Myths
Tips
Inspiration
Personal
Belief Shift
Objection
Social Proof
Promotion
If you’re creating long-form content you can also capitalize on making short-form pieces from it. We’ll talk about this more in future blog posts on the way I like to do a Pillar Content strategy to make it easy on you to generate a ton of content.
Listicle, Story, Observation, Past vs. Present, Contrarian.
Start organic, evolve to paid ads.
Anything that you post organically on social media can evolve into a paid ad. Look for the type of content that resonates. The pieces that get more impressions and generate buzz have a kernel of potential to grow into an idea worth putting money behind. If you’re new to creating captivating copy and headlines for your ads, start with what works organically, convert it into an ad, add a clear call to action, and set a budget to test how it works.
Organizing the publishing of all this content.
This can be a lot of work to do one piece at a time. That’s why it’s very useful to use a social media scheduling platform that allows you to upload your content and plan and schedule it to all the different platforms you want to post to from one tool.
I love using Publer for this. With its media library, calendar view, and planning tools you can schedule all of your content to whichever platforms you’ve selected to work with from one dashboard. It’s the perfect way to be more efficient with your efforts and stay consistent over the long term.
Why Again Are We Doing This?
Stick with the plan once you’ve created it. Don’t change things up constantly but always be willing to improvise or improve as trends change.
