How to Make Your Digital Marketing Plan the Cornerstone of Your Growth

Creating a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your business can be hugely beneficial, helping to focus your efforts, optimize your resources, and generally work more efficiently. However, your digital marketing strategy will only be effective if it has been universally embraced by your organisation.

For your digital marketing strategy to be effective, everyone in your organisation must be onboard. Your team should all be working towards the same goals, communicating the same strategy, and using your marketing channels to engage with your customers in a consistent manner. How many times have you gone into a restaurant, loved the experience and asked the staff for their Twitter handle so you can tweet about it? Argh! To think that some staff members won’t know the answer to that question. Such a missed opportunity!

So, it goes without saying that if you’re a reasonably sized company, try and get as many people as possible involved in the design and execution of your digital marketing strategy. Let your team be heard and take on board their ideas and feedback – especially from frontline staff who are in contact with your customers on a daily basis. Publish your digital marketing strategy in an internal location where everyone can find it and provide regular progress reports at weekly team meetings. Invite everyone to be a part of your company’s digital growth strategy, asking for contributions to your company blogs, articles for your newsletter or at the very least, retweets, shares and comments on your company’s social posts.

Here are a couple of other ideas to help make your digital strategy an integral part of your company’s growth plans.

1. Make  It Practical & Easy to Implement

Incorporating a strategy into your business on a practical level will be a lot easier if you draft it with a practical focus in mind. When writing or revising your strategy, deal in specifics and precise ideas. Set concise goals with defined metrics, and then stipulate exactly what steps you intend to take in order to reach those goals. The more practical, specific and detailed these plans, the easier it will be to implement them. In short, the closer your digital marketing plans come to reading like a step by step guide, the better (providing the substance behind the guide is comprehensive, of course).

2. Define Who’s Doing What

No matter how big or small your organisation, it’s incredibly important to ensure that all tasks and responsibilities from your digital marketing strategy are properly accounted for. That means ensuring you’re clear about who’s doing what, when they’re going to do it, and when they’re going to complete it. Ensuring that task owners are suitably motivated, incentivised and equipped to carry out their tasks is equally important. How many times have you been promised blog posts by a team members that never materialised? Or requested metrics and reports that were never delivered because everyone assumed someone else was doing the tracking?

Where more than one person is involved in delivering your digital marketing strategy – as they should be – get organised, because this is exactly where a good many digital marketing strategies fall apart. With multiple individuals on the team, coordinate your efforts, minimise duplication, and where there’s ambiguity or overlap, highlight the issue and iron it out. Then make sure that everyone involved has looked over the plan, understands it, and is happy with their place in it.

3. Keep Improving your Digital Marketing Strategy

Implementing a digital marketing strategy isn’t a short-term process. Once it becomes part of the way your business works, you must implement a process of continuous improvement. No strategy is perfect at first execution, so incorporate regular reviews and a development process for continuous improvement and optimisation. This is all the more important because the digital world is very fast-moving and best practices soon become old news. For instance, last year’s Panda 4.1 update to Google’s algorithm radically altered criteria for SEO-friendly content. Some businesses lost up to 90% of their search footprint in one fell swoop. A content strategy update then made the difference between rebuilding their position or pouring effort into channels that were no longer profitable.

Together Everyone Achieves More

As a business owner, it’s impossible for you to undertake every business task yourself. It isn’t entirely necessary either. Pool your resources together, and as long as you’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, aka your centralized digital marketing strategy, your combined efforts will help drive your digital marketing plans further and will almost certainly amplify your results.

Have you got any digital marketing disaster stories. Please do share your experiences, we’d love to hear from you.