Build a one-page digital marketing strategy that’s clear and effective. Includes a free template to help you get started quickly.
A one-page digital marketing strategy helps organize your goals and ensures you’re targeting specific objectives with clear ways to measure progress. Here’s a look at what you can experience when you spend the time to outline your marketing strategy.
First, let’s review what details and information will go in your one-page marketing plan. While it’s simplified compared to a full marketing plan, it will still require that you sit with your strategy and spend time getting to know market factors.
Key areas of your marketing plan will include:
Every marketing plan should start with your goals and objectives – even if it’s only a one-page plan.
The goals in your one-page digital marketing strategy may vary depending on your business’s growth stage and overall maturity. But the main options for this section include the following.
You need your target audience to know that you exist. And you need to stay top of mind for your customers so that when the time comes, they think of you to fulfill their needs. This is an ideal goal for businesses getting started or looking to expand into new product or service areas and need their audience to learn about that new offering.
Established businesses need to find a way to get to know their audience better. Generating leads provides you the chance to target your marketing toward each specific customer to make that marketing unique and tailored to their needs. But to do that, you need to build a lead generation vehicle.
This is the primary goal most businesses list when building a marketing plan. And while it’s easy to understand why, you must have the right type of business to succeed with this goal, such as an e-commerce business. And you should have completed the earlier stages of building brand awareness and generating leads.
Some marketing plans focus solely on retaining the customers you already have, and for good reason. It costs far more to go out and attract new customers than it does to re-engage and retain existing customers. This is a good goal for an established business where you haven’t seen sales from customers in recent years or need to encourage your customers to remember why they purchased from you in the first place.
Businesses with good brand awareness can announce a new product using a marketing plan. But if it’s your first product, you likely should start with brand awareness first so customers understand the value you bring.
Businesses that are successful in a specific area of the market but looking to expand into new markets can use a marketing plan to do so. This will require building brand awareness in this market segment, but it would be different from starting from scratch in building that brand awareness.
The most thorough method for getting to know your audience is to create buyer personas for each audience segment. But in lieu of that, you can simplify it with an audience overview.
Write one statement about each of the following.
This can be a short description that states male, female or both, age range, profession or income level, interests, communication preferences, and goals.
Example: Our customers are prominently female – though males are not excluded – who work within the marketing department of small to medium businesses, looking to grow their business through modern digital marketing strategies with a goal of increasing sales 5% in the coming calendar year.
Getting to know what frustrates or pains the audience can help you speak to their needs more completely. You’ll know where they’ve turned for help and where they’ve come up empty in the past. Or what is holding them back from achieving their goals.
Example: The marketing professional has used a marketing agency in the past with minimal success or has struggled with unresponsive freelancers. But their budget is insufficient to hire a full-time marketing strategist, so augmenting their team with an agency is the best option.
Now is your chance to evaluate the best way your business can be the hero in this customer’s story. Take some time to evaluate how you can fill the gaps for this customer and be what they are looking for.
Example: New Light Digital offers an experienced team that knows how to work with marketing professionals to meet their goals within a set budget.
Spend some time outlining who your competitors are. When outlining your competitors, be specific about their strengths and weaknesses as you work to position your business in a different area of the market than those competitors.
Keep in mind that there are different types of competitors.
Direct competitors: These are businesses that sell something just like you. For example, a marketing agency is in direct competition with another marketing agency that services the same industries or niche areas of the market.
Indirect competitors: These are competitors that don’t offer the same products or services but work within related markets. For example, marketing agency that focuses only on reputation management would be in competition with a full-service agency as a business decides what areas of their marketing they need assistance with or what services to outsource. So while the reputation management-only agency can’t compete in email marketing, a business might decide that reputation management is the most important aspect of their marketing strategy currently, and therefore that makes the most sense.
Replacement competitors: These competitors are what your customer might choose instead of you. Replacement competitors can service the same needs as you can but they don’t necessarily fall in the same category as you do. For example, a freelance marketer could compete with a marketing agency despite not having the same bandwidth and flexibility as an agency. But they can provide marketing strategy just the same.
Potential competitors: When your market has space to welcome new competitors but those competitors haven’t yet joined the space, they are known as potential competitors. For example, AI companies that decide to offer the same services as a marketing agency but as an automated service at a lower price than a marketing agency can do it without all the staffing. That is an emerging market that you must always be aware of when analyzing your competitors. It isn’t a current threat, but could become one quickly.
Get to know what your profit margins are to better inform how much you can realistically spend on acquiring new customers. This will inform your budget and ensure that you price your products well within the competitive landscape while leaving room for your marketing budget.
To find your profit margin, you’ll review the price you sell your product or service for and then deduct the cost of offering your product or service. That will tell you the profit you earn from a sale.
And while that sounds simple, it’s actually quite complex. That’s because you aren’t just looking at the raw cost of goods to prepare your product. You’re also including more complicated aspects like staffing.
You’ll use your profit margin to determine how much of those funds you can afford to spend on marketing. For example, if you sell a $5,000/month marketing package and pay your staff $3,000 to provide those services, you’ll be earning $2,000 or have a 40% profit margin. Now you can use that to determine how much you can afford to spend on customer acquisition for that product.
If you find that some of your products or services have a profit margin that is incredibly low, you might need to make changes to your pricing model.
The work involved in selling these products and services won’t justify the income. Or you might even find that some of your products are generating losses for your business once you factor in customer acquisition expenses. Now is the time to fix those profit margins or eliminate the product from your offering to fix your overall ROI.
Armed with details about your profit margins on your various products and services, you’re ready to build out your marketing budget.
Creating a one-page digital marketing strategy can be challenging, as it needs to cover everything from your marketing tools, such as Zoho One marketing automation software, to your staffing, whether that be in-house, a digital marketing agency or a team of contractors.
The detail required for a true marketing budget is crucial to optimizing your ROI and ensuring you don’t overspend on advertising or campaigns and find yourself in a challenging situation.
As you outline your budget, look at the ROI you’ve experienced from past campaigns and talk with your team of experts about ways you can optimize those campaigns. Don’t rule out a marketing tactic, such as pay-per-click advertising, until you’ve explored whether the campaign was run correctly.
Pay-per-click advertising – most commonly search engine ads and social media ads – are some of the most misunderstood marketing tactics. That’s because it’s easy for anyone to sign up for an account and start an ad. The platforms won’t tell you ways to make your ads better, they’ll just keep taking your money regardless of your results.
If you forget to check in on them or think they are a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tactic, you could be left with a poor view of these marketing tactics. Or if you hire someone claiming to be an expert but with little know-how in PPC optimization, you might think it’s an avenue no longer worth exploring.
So to clear things up, PPC does work. It is effective, and it can be a big winner for attracting new customers to your business. Don’t count it out until you’ve discussed it further with a truly knowledgeable professional you’ve vetted carefully.
The line items you should be including in your marketing budget include:
Now you’re ready to outline the various ways you’ll reach your customers. Your marketing tactics will include your touchpoints with customers. This is another section of your plan that will be challenging to fit into just one page.
This will include your plan for the following:
The final part of your one-page digital marketing strategy is defining your KPIs to measure success and track progress effectively. You should spend some time outlining how you’ll measure the success of your marketing.
Is it based on growth to your email marketing list, social media following, or website traffic? Or in your phase of business, is it all about lead generation and sales?
Outlining the specifics around how you measure success will make it easier to determine which tactics to keep doing, which to de-prioritize and which to stop altogether.
Some KPIs to consider for your marketing plan include:
Now that you know what should go into each aspect of your marketing plan, you’re ready to download your free template and get started.
If you struggle to complete the exercise, you’re not alone. Even when simplified into one page, writing a marketing plan is complex and requires deep knowledge of marketing and business strategy.
It might be time to partner with a strategic digital marketing partner. If you’ve worked with a marketing agency in the past and had mixed success or no success at all, know that all agency relationships are not the same.
New Light Digital is responsive, strategic, and prepared to help you improve your company’s ROI through a thoughtful and strategic marketing plan. From there, we can help you enact that plan with specialists in websites, email marketing, SEO, content, and social media.
Schedule your free consultation now to learn how we’ve helped businesses just like yours accomplish their goals and realize their potential.
Further reading:
What does a social media manager do and why do you need one? Here’s a look at what these professionals do and how to find a good one.
Email design matters: learn how to craft designs that look great, boost engagement, and drive conversions.
Personalization in email marketing is key to boosting conversions. Learn the essentials and improve your email performance.
No comments