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Create a Powerful Marketing Plan for Your Business to Win in 2021!

Digital Marketing in 2021

Your 2021 digital marketing plan should be a detailed description of the full extent of your planning and digital marketing for business campaigns or actions. 

With so many changes in the business world just in the past year, driving increased website traffic through SEO, 2021 is a perfect year to establish or revisit your digital marketing plan.  Such a plan provides a detailed roadmap on things like:

– Short, medium and long term business goals.

– Strategies for achieving your digital goals.

– What methods and channels you will use.

– Plans of action and how they fit into the big picture.

– What resources will you invest and what your budget is. 

– A timeline and roadmap for the full plan.

Philip Kotler, a guru of modern marketing, described the best digital marketing plan as a guide;  “to document how the organization’s strategic objectives will be achieved through specific marketing strategies and tactics, with the customer as the starting point. It is also linked to the plans of other departments within the organization.”

Why is Digital Marketing Necessary?

New and existing businesses must improve their website functionality and online marketing capabilities to maximize marketplace presence in the coming decade.  Increasingly your potential customers are turning to search engines to shop, to become informed, to find services and solutions to needs and problems.  Storefronts and traditional marketing, though still helpful in overall the overall approach, are no longer as vital for reaching new customers as they once were.     

Creating Your Marketing Plan to win in 2021!

1.Conduct a Situational Analysis of your business using the SWOT model.

A SWOT analysis is simply an external and internal analysis of your business.  Businesses that want to grow need to examine their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of their business and of the larger market, customers, competitors, etc.

2. Decide on your Digital Marketing goals for the coming year.

These goals will guide all your actions as you implement your digital marketing plan.  They should be clear, memorable and actionable.  Using the SMART Goals framework will help you decide which goals meet these essential criteria.

For example: 

Not a SMART goal:  Our company will increase the number of visits to our website.

SMART goal:  Our company will increase website visits to 20,000 per month over the next four months.  And in order to get there we are going to do A, B and C.

3.Define your Marketing Strategy

The next question you must answer is, what are we going to do to achieve our goals? One of the key trends in digital marketing has been personalization.  This trend moves away from herd mentality and one brand fits all, instead your website allows your brand to communicate with your particular audience in a crafted and personalized way. Because of this trend, as you define your strategy for carrying out your plan, keep a few factors in mind:

  1. Create your buyer persona.  Know your target audience.  Know their needs, wants, tastes and preferences and know where and how you are meeting their expectations.
  2. Positioning: Discover how you are going to connect with your target audience based on your unique value proposition and practice creative use of the optimal channels for reaching your audience.
  3. Content strategy: How will you create and disperse content that effectively attracts users and creates a memorable brand experience?  This strategy involves using tools such as keyword research, content calendars and social posting.

4.Digital Strategies and Tactics

Working from your value objectives the next step is to begin utilizing key strategies such as social media, web optimization, SEO strategies, email marketing campaigns, CRM, Paid Media advertising and others to optimize your exposure.  These technologies, as well as, Marketing Automation tools are critical in allowing you to automate your marketing campaigns, personalize outreach, collect information about your customers all of which will maximize your efficiency, effectiveness and success.  

5.Measure your results and KPIs

It is not enough to design and implement your very own best digital marketing plan.  One of the most important steps you can take is careful analysis of your results. Analytics will help you measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing for business.  Secure an effective data visualization system that gives you real-time results.  These results will help you identify and implement corrections, new opportunities and improvements in real time.      

Conclusion

If you are wondering how to increase business through digital marketing keep these steps in mind as you create your digital marketing plan for 2021.  Don’t leave your business future to chance but take advantage of the many ways technology can boost your presence in the digital marketplace.  Remember too that effective use of technology will empower your own best digital marketing plan by creating personalized, automated and successful marketing campaigns with plenty of data to keep your plan on course through simple corrections, improvements and opportunities.  Revisit these steps frequently to stay on track with your digital marketing plan in 2021 and beyond.

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