Why Build a 90-Day Digital Marketing Plan?
If you are just starting up a small- to medium-sized business or just beginning your marketing journey, a 90-day digital marketing plan is pivotal to not only get up and running but to provide a framework for future success.
Here’s the thing, though. Even established small- to medium-sized businesses should consider a 90-day digital marketing plan.
Marketing Plans Are Important
The digital world is in an ever-changing state of flux. Your competition is trying to ride the next wave ahead of you. You don’t want to be left standing on the beach because your marketing plan is outdated. Anytime you introduce a new product, service, or feature, it’s time to re-evaluate and refashion your digital marketing strategies.
Even if your product or service mix hasn’t changed, it’s always a good idea to refresh and build on what’s working, drop what isn’t, and improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
Why You Should Plan for a 90-Day Period
A 90-day digital marketing plan provides a reasonable timeline for most small businesses to put some strategies in place and see if they gain traction. Moreover, if the strategies from those 90 days don’t pan out as planned, you can learn from what’s not working and turn around some new strategies for the next 90 days. The ultimate goal is to build an integrated digital marketing strategy that sets you up for long-term results.
With so many channels and strategies available, it can be difficult to determine what works best for your business. This blog provides a digital marketing plan template to help you set measurable and achievable goals.
- Identify your target audience
- Identify your competition
- Establish goals and KPIs
- Select digital marketing channels
- Develop a content strategy
- Set a budget
- Implement A/B testing
- Evaluate progress
- Gather and evaluate results
- Rinse and repeat
In addition, our digital marketing plan template organizes these activities according to 30-60-90 day segments.
First 30 Days of Your Digital Marketing Plan
Roughly the first 30 days of your 90-day marketing plan is basically a learning period, a way to get a better understanding of your business value proposition and the best way to communicate that value position to your potential customers. Many of these steps are interrelated and are performed in concert with one another.
If you’re just doing a refresh of your existing marketing strategies, you’ve already got much of the groundwork already covered and just need to account for any changes in your assessments or market conditions.
Identify Your Target Audience
Who are your customers? Identifying your target audience is basic marketing 101. As part of this identification, determine which digital channels and messaging most closely correspond to the interests and preferences of your target audience.
Consider how your products and services align with specific demographics such as age, gender, income level, and location, as well as psychographics such as interests, values, and habits.
Develop customer personas that represent your best potential buyer(s). By understanding the needs and challenges of a fictional buyer, you can identify how your products/services address their pain points and attract their interest.
Identify Your Competition
Who are your existing as well as potential competitors? What are their strengths? What are your competitive differentiators? In what digital channels are your competitors most active and seem most successful?
If your competitor is active on a particular marketing channel, you can either try to take advantage of that channel’s existing market or look at other channels where there is less competition but can still reach your target audience. Or, do a combination of both.
SEMrush has a great competitive analysis tool you can try for free.
Establish Goals and KPIs
What are you hoping to achieve in your 90-day digital marketing plan? Set KPIs (key performance indicators) that are specific, measurable, and relevant to your business and your target audience.
Examples of KPIs might include:
- Increase website traffic by X%
- Generate X number of leads
- Boost social media engagement by X%
- Improve conversion rate by X%
Select Digital Marketing Channels
Based on your target audience and goals, select the most likely successful digital marketing channels. Examples include:
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Email campaigns
- PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns
- Organic search optimization (SEO)
- Mobile app advertising
- Affiliate marketing
- Video marketing
- Online public relations releases
- Blogging
Focus on the channels that will reach your target audience and align with your goals.
Develop a Content Strategy
High-quality content is essential to any successful digital marketing campaign. Develop a content strategy that aligns with your goals and marketing channels. This might include blog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, infographics, or videos. Create a content calendar to ensure consistent messaging and timely delivery of content.
Set a Budget
Your budget is determined in part by the digital channels you select. If your digital campaign relies heavily on PPC ads, for example, estimate the number of customers you need to reach your revenue goals for the next 60 days. Your PPC budget is the number of clicks you need to pay to get to those customers.
Keep in mind that cost-per-click tends to fluctuate depending on the targeted keywords and areas, the platform being used, and the type of ads you are running. You don’t want to spend more than you make from your PPC campaigns; fortunately, real-time metrics can help you adjust and reallocate resources if that becomes the case.
According to HubSpot, 9% of your overall company revenue should be allocated to marketing with a slow growth spend of 2% to an aggressive growth spend of 21%.
The Next 30 Days of Your Digital Marketing Plan
Once you have your plan in place, it’s time to put it into action. Monitor your KPIs and adjust your strategy as needed. Be sure to track your results to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Use analytics tools to gain insights into your audience and refine your marketing strategy accordingly.
Implement A/B Testing
A/B testing is essentially a way to compare two versions of a digital marketing campaign to see which performs better. It is not a one-and-done tweak. You have to keep running tests and you can only change one thing at a time.
For an email campaign, as an example, you send identical content (that’s the A part), but you use two different versions of subject lines (“B” part) to see which gets a higher open rate.
When you achieve a good open rate, then you want to test something else that can be improved, which is typically the clickthrough rate. So changing the verbiage of the button or color would be your next A/B test to run.
A/B testing enables you to identify specific improvements, so you can apply them across the board, learn from them, hone your campaigns, and improve ROI.
Evaluate Progress
In tandem with A/B testing, monitor the data analytics generated by whatever digital channels you are using, as well as any independent marketing audit tools. Analytics such as Google Analytics provide insights into user interactions to evaluate engagement with your campaign and if you are on track to achieve the goals of your marketing campaign.
By tracking user interactions with your digital channels, you’re able to tell when and where they come across obstacles or which tasks they fail to complete. If you see they are encountering problems or are not reacting in the ways you anticipated, you can look for ways to solve them.
If you are looking for a more full-circle insight into your campaigns, channels, website, and user interaction then we recommend HubSpot to close your sales and marketing loop.
The Last 30 Days of Your Digital Marketing Plan
Here’s where you sit back and see how the fruits of your labor blossom.
Gather all results and begin to evaluate the success of achieving your stated goals. Equally important, take a close look at what isn’t quite working as expected and determine why you fell short and how you might overcome these obstacles or handle them differently for your next campaign.
Above all, now that you’ve completed your 90-day digital marketing plan, determine what goals you want to achieve in the next 90 days.
Tag Marketing Provides the Foundation for 90-Day Digital Marketing
If all of these seem a little daunting, we at Tag Marketing not only feel your pain, we can cure it. We specialize in helping small- to medium-sized businesses formulate and implement their 90-day digital marketing plans to achieve success.
We are a digital marketing agency you can trust and grow with. Book a quick consultation with Carmen Taglia to discuss how we can help with your next 90-day digital marketing plan.