It doesn’t matter if you have an in-house marketing team or if you are hiring a digital marketing service to fulfil your marketing goals. At the outset of every year you should always create a checklist or a To-do list for the year. As a company or entrepreneur, we may not always know exactly ‘how’ to do what we want, but we do know ‘what’ we hope to achieve.
Using a checklist for the upcoming or the current year for digital marketing paves the way to expansion. Here is a 7 point checklist to aid your digital marketing campaigns on the path to victory.
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1. Create a digital layout for the year
If you are working on the assumption that digital marketing is the only way to achieve improvement in your brand awareness, sales, and results, you should document all your marketing goals for 2018. You can also treat this as a roadmap document to plan your marketing for the whole year.
Depending on your industry, you can add details like target persona, marketing goals, budget, competitors, team details, and team responsibilities etc to this roadmap.
2. Buyer Personas
Define your target audience in detail so that you can create ads, campaigns and promotions while keeping your buyer’s persona in mind. Doing this well will help your buyer understand what they can benefit from your product or services.
Creating a model of your buyers including behavior, emotions etc are a vital step in the digital marketing process. Analyze your brand from the point of view of a buyer; a good design helps to build buyer trust. A good brand story helps to create an emotional attachment to the buyer.
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3. Social Media Channels
There are a number of social media channels today and there are multiple ways to make your content perfect for each one of them. If you are new to social media marketing, then try to avoid jumping on all social media channels at once. Initially, try to focus on a few channels only.
Even if you are not new, analyse which channels will benefit you the most and also analyse your last years results. That way you can narrow down the channels which you want to focus more on, and which ones to focus on less.
4. Outline the budget for the year
Defining and setting the budget for your 2018 digital marketing ad campaigns early will help you to start your planning accordingly for different search engines and social media. The following graph shows the global revenue generated from social media and as we can see, it is growing and will continue to grow in the near future.
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Hence it is very important to set an appropriate budget for digital marketing so that 2018 can turn out to be fruitful for your brand.
5. Avoid early expectations
Remember that digital marketing is not magic – it takes time and you should avoid expecting too much, too early. Yes indeed, there are metrics that can help you analyse your digital performance and measure the results (because in the short-term, some results can definitely be achieved).
Some strategies may yield results soon but some may take their own time. Hence try to be realistic about the time needed and stay focused on your goals. Changing a campaign too soon because of early results can be a big mistake.
6. Measuring and auditing your campaigns
Are campaigns producing the results that you are expecting? Do you have appropriate landing pages for your campaigns? Is your website or app amended for usability and lead generation? Conduct an audit before starting work in 2018. Analytics should be checked regularly to optimise performance, but they have maximum relevance when checked for a longer time duration.
Learning from how your campaigns performed last month is important. Learning from how your campaigns performed over the whole of last year is vital.
7. Marketing plan for mobile, content and local
Mobile marketing plan (optimised for voice-enabled search, AI etc): Trends reveal that users will use voice-enabled searches for most content in 2018. With the evolution of AI, VR etc in apps, depending on the type of your business you will have to make your content tech savvy.
Content marketing plan: Will written content produce better results or will content based on pictures and videos produce better results? Usually, a mix of all types of content works for best results. Once you choose your content types for each channel and campaign, prepare a calendar to maximise their effectiveness over the year.
Local marketing plan: A local Marketing plan helps you get more visibility to your customers when you are targeting a specific location. For example if you are targeting customers in India, you should have a local marketing team or hire affordable SEO services in India for Indian marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Even if you have prepared your own checklist, you can use this one to make certain that you haven’t overlooked anything. Use this checklist and create your perfect plan for 2018 success in your digital marketing campaigns.