How to START building a modern digital marketing plan
It doesn’t take a lot of sentences to cover the number of disruptions in search marketing in the season (or era?) that we’re in.
Right now, Google is rapidly changing organic and paid search, causing excitement and confusion. New AI Overviews, leaked information and potential OpenAI search engines are creating distractions in our careers. Additionally, changing privacy laws and attribution challenges add to the complexity.
With so much happening, it can be overwhelming to keep up. It’s crucial to have a clear plan linked to your strategy so you don’t get distracted by new trends like AI or ignore changes and fall behind. While “plan” may sound boring, it’s essential for a solid digital strategy.
To help with the topic, I recently published my first book, “The Digital Marketing Success Plan.” In it, I go into granular detail with personal stories, processes and “how to” content centered on what I call the “START” planning process, and I will unpack those five steps to follow.
1. Strategy
The first phase of START planning is strategy. This is where you understand the business’s current state and what goals to reasonably set and achieve with digital marketing.
Here, you’ll tackle everything, including setting goals, mapping marketing metrics to business outcomes and reviewing all past marketing efforts and our expectations before proceeding to the subsequent phases of the planning process.
In some companies, this step is completed with exhaustive research, business intelligence data and financial information backed up end-to-end through CRM or other platforms.
In other cases, businesses started adding digital marketing channels to the mix over the years (with good intentions) but don’t have all the dots connected for attribution and ROI.
Regardless of where your company is on the scale, there’s never a better time to ensure that all levels, teams and stakeholders are aligned on the end goals for digital marketing (and maybe marketing more broadly).
Then, you can work backward from there when you explore all possible tactics and ways to achieve your defined goals and strategy overall.
2. Tactics
The next phase is tactics. This is where you explore all potential avenues to reach goals, map out business outcomes and be open-minded about how to achieve them.
You’ll evaluate all potential channels and networks (e.g., SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn sponsored content) you can leverage using leading research and estimation tools to uncover opportunities to reach our target audiences.
This is how the strategy comes to life. You never want tactics to “be” the strategy or be more important than the strategy. These are the actions that drive us toward meeting and exceeding our goals.
You also have to consider your own biases toward certain channels based on your experiences, expertise or personal feelings about them.
In some cases, LinkedIn may beat Google Ads. Or, programmatic display is required to support the customer journey in a hidden way you don’t realize.
Be open to exploring all channels and opportunities, and do the necessary research and projections to ensure they align with your strategy and goals.
3. Application
The third phase of the START planning approach is application. This is the time to map out the assets, large and small, that you need to get our house in order – or to build it.
Develop the inventory list you’ll need for all desired or defined tactics. This includes creating ads, graphics, webpages, copy and other necessary assets for a successful campaign.
At this point, it is tempting to start creating new ads or landing pages or examining your creative with a defined strategy and set of tactics.
I will warn you to stick with identifying things at this stage and not start creating new things. This is where many great strategies get stalled out, and plans don’t come to fruition.
Getting the assets you need to launch or amplify your plan requires time and money. Suppose you dive right into designing or creating new things without properly identifying what you’re doing and connecting back to the “why” (Strategy and Tactics phases). In that case, you can do some expensive things quickly or push out the launch of your plan indefinitely.
4. Review
The fourth phase is review. Here, you’ll define the aspects needed to manage and measure the successes and provide accountability for the plan.
That means creating performance measurement dashboards and systems tied to the ultimate ROI equation, roll-up performance, channel performance and resource measurement.
At this phase, you’re also setting up our project management system or aligning resource planning platforms to manage the work. Ultimately, you’re arriving at the benchmarks, budgets, reports and roles overall.
This phase may seem obvious, but I have seen a number of systems over the years, including dashboards and resource managers. Some are totally custom, and others are right out of the box.
No matter what, they often miss out on tracking a full picture of digital marketing ROI and leave gaps that have to be filled with assumptions or cross-checking investment numbers by a CFO.
You don’t want gaps and want to make sure that our systems account for the full cost of digital marketing. That includes internal people, contractors, agencies, software, advertising spends and possibly more.
If you aren’t accounting for those, then you could have rough meetings with the C-suite or investors down the road when they don’t see the full ROI that you might be calculating.
5. Transformation
The last phase of START planning is transformation. In this final phase, you schedule the tactics so they stay subordinate to the overall strategy.
You’ll craft a comprehensive calendar of tactics, optimization processes, agile strategy and reporting cycles. You will also map out the milestones, flights and content pushes, experiments, tasks and assignments overall.
Again, you might have a long history of SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing, email marketing, programmatic and more. You might have some great success stories in them or even with integrated, cohesive results. I love hearing those stories!
However, I would challenge you to consider that if you’re seeing positive results, they have likely come from focused efforts and not sporadic drop-ins to manage and see it through.
Regardless of your position, make sure you have resources planned, tactics and action plans scheduled and control of the plan.
Things will happen in your company, like new products/services, new audience focuses and new competitors. Things will also happen, such as new industry tech, changes in search engines, AI emergence and more.
Have a documented plan that also allows for agility and enough flexibility to be revisited and adapted at multiple levels so it doesn’t get obsolete or abandoned just a few months into the effort.
START your way to digital marketing success
Whether you follow the steps in START planning or adapt them to your own strategy and planning process, I strongly encourage you to revisit your current plan. Make sure that it is objective, specific, actionable and accountable.
A plan isn’t a plan if it is in one person’s head or if it is understood differently by multiple people. Things are changing really fast. Have a plan that can keep you on track, adaptable and up to date with changes.
My key goal is to ensure that you make wise, ROI-driven and accountable investments, whether you’re a business doing digital marketing or an agency doing it on behalf of your clients.
Google, software, agencies and employees will get paid or take your money whether your digital marketing is working or not, and I hope that you see success in your digital marketing driven by a solid plan.