START Planning Your Digital Marketing Success Plan
Corey Morris is a speaker, best-selling author of The Digital Marketing Success Plan, and the President/CEO of VOLTAGE digital agency.
Since long before digital marketing was called “digital,” it has been a category of marketing that encounters constant change. Whether we’re talking about search engines, social media, automation or AI, the only constant is change.
As companies try to stay ahead of the curve—or, if many are honest, just keep up—it is as important as ever to have a documented, objective and accountable digital marketing plan.
Whether it was being distracted by competing objectives, not enough resources, differing opinions of what success is, poor communication or a number of other reasons, all are painful when they don’t deliver.
To help combat these various reasons and help in an era of even more accelerated change with the emergence of AI, I have developed the START planning framework to develop what I call a digital marketing success plan. I feel so strongly that I have written a book on the topic openly sharing my framework and application.
There are five key steps to creating a digital marketing (success) plan.
Strategy
The first step is all about getting everyone on the same page, defining the goals and determining what return on investment looks like. It is important to fully define terms, challenge assumptions and know what is working and what isn’t.
Get your ultimate goal down to a simple slide or paragraph that everyone understands and agrees with. This will be something you carry forward in each step of the planning process.
You also want to take an opportunity to understand what you currently have. That means auditing and taking a deep dive into business intelligence, web analytics data, CRM data and other performance information that you have at your disposal. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is important before you start exploring tactics and new options.
Tactics
In this phase of the planning process, keep your defined goals and strategy from the first step in mind and put everything on the table.
This is the time to use best-in-class projection tools to explore all avenues to reach your audiences in the customer journey and to see how they might work to complement other channels or be direct drivers of ROI. Those tools could include channel-specific tools like Google Ads Planner, Facebook’s ad planning tools, Semrush and more.
Remove biases that you or anyone in your organization has. Those could be based on what has worked in the past (or what hasn’t), what people on your team assume doesn’t work for your industry, specific marketing channels that you or your team may personally not enjoy, etc. Having an open mind is important to make sure we don’t rule out something that would be impactful. This stage in the planning process is where you want to evaluate everything as this is the cheap time and place to do it.
Application
With your defined strategy and solid set of tactics, it is time to define the assets you will need to implement the tactics. Note the word “define,” and not “create,” at this juncture.
The application phase is about documenting the details of necessary assets to apply your strategy and tactics. That could include your website, landing pages, content, creative, ads, email templates or more.
Resist the temptation to start designing or creating here. Just document and get through the planning process, and then put resources toward creating.
Review
With all of the work up to this point focused on ROI, how you’ll get to it and the assets you need for implementation, you can’t skip over measurement and how you’ll tie it all together.
Attribution continues to be a challenge for digital marketing. Despite Google’s scrapped plans to remove third-party cookies, privacy laws and reforms are still making it harder to get a full picture of attribution.
No matter how great your reporting platform is, off the shelf it doesn’t do everything you need it to for measuring all-in digital marketing ROI. By default, it can’t know in-house staff, software, or outside agencies or consultants’ costs.
Factor in aspects of ROI that reporting tools don’t offer through custom data if you can import or configure it. With enterprise-level systems, you might be able to simply customize or create new reports that roll up to what the C-suite desires. In smaller organizations or lower budget situations, you can work with Looker (or similar) to create a dashboard and feed in budget numbers for categories like staffing, software, overhead and outside costs.
Transformation
The final step of the planning process makes everything actionable. In transformation, you plan out resources, timing and the implementation of tactics.
Plans can get off track when a resource is unavailable, when one goes over budget or by emergent distractions. Use resource or project management tools to your advantage. Get things planned out, set budgets, and set expectations. Build agility into your process and enough checkpoints to make sure you can adapt the plan and revisit when necessary.
Conclusion
The START planning process is an organized way to work through your first-time or annual digital marketing planning process. A completed plan could be in a slide deck, collection of files or other type of document.
If you’re getting started (cheesy pun) with digital marketing, you have the opportunity to work through this process in a linear way—which I recommend. Give yourself 90 days to work through it.
If you have some (or a lot) of digital marketing active and in the wild and know that you need some or all of the START planning phases for your organization, you can implement them alongside your current work.
In any situation, I strongly recommend getting fully aligned on what the ultimate strategy is and the goals that you want to achieve. Make sure everyone who is on your team or is a stakeholder is on the same page. A great test is if you can define your strategy in a few sentences or a paragraph. Once you can do that, the rest of the phases require work but should flow well. Happy planning!
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
link