What Makes a Great Digital Advertising Plan?
With so many people spending most of their time online, it makes sense that digital advertising is now an essential time and money investment for companies. Digital advertising has become increasingly more complicated compared to the earlier days of the internet. With so many avenues to choose from, it’s hard to know which digital channels will best suit your company’s needs. Having a website and buying banner ads is just not enough to grow your business anymore.
It’s easy to start throwing dollars at various digital channels, such as social media or email campaigns, without a defined plan. However, this can lead to wasted time and money with little return. Having many options to choose from when deciding where to put your advertising efforts can be overwhelming.
The good news is your company can determine a good path with a solid digital advertising plan. Based on audience stats, the plan can determine which marketing avenues will suit your company best, develop a digital marketing timeline, and implement an organized digital advertising plan that will have a strong return on investment. Your full-service digital marketing experts at InnoVision list the important steps in forming your company’s successful digital advertising plan.
Define Your Company’s Digital Advertising Goals
Creating a digital advertising plan means determining your company’s objectives. Then, you must list the steps you will use to achieve those objectives and define a strategic timeline to implement each step along the way. The first step to making a sound digital advertising plan is listing what your company wants to achieve from this plan.
When setting your objectives, be sure to include specific numbers to achieve and define specific timelines with which to achieve those numbers. Make sure your goals are both achievable and specific enough to know whether the goal was reached successfully. Setting goals that are too vague makes it difficult to know if the plan is working.
Follow the SMART goal process when setting objectives. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific (S), Measurable (M), Achievable (A), Relevant (R), and Time-bound (T). Sticking to a SMART plan when creating goals helps make those goals both achievable and measurable.
For example, setting a goal to “increase click-through traffic” is vague. There is no defined timeline or measurable number to determine if the plan was successful. Instead, try defining a specific timeframe and a measurable number of click-throughs to determine the plan’s effectiveness. “Reach 120,000 click-throughs in the next six months” is a SMART goal with a defined timeline and a measurable number to determine the plan’s effectiveness.
Know Your Target Audience
Before choosing how best to reach your target audience, you must define who your target audience is and understand how your audience best absorbs information. For example, if you sell jewelry to small businesses, you may consider certain ad campaigns that would reach small business owners. If you sell jewelry to large corporations, then your target audience would be the purchasing divisions of large corporations, and your ad campaign would look very different than an ad campaign targeting small businesses.
You may find that your target audience is both small businesses and corporations. Maybe you sell various products to multiple audiences. This is great information to note when developing a digital advertising plan, as you can have multiple campaigns for each type of audience you are trying to reach. Start by defining each audience segment, and for each segment, create a persona of the customer to fully understand how to reach that audience type from their perspective. Once you understand your customers, you can create ideas around what will connect with their needs and desires.
Determine Your Company’s Digital Advertising Plan Budget
It’s necessary to define up front how much revenue you want to put toward your digital advertising plan. This budget should be flexible and will ebb and flow with your results. If you define a certain budget for a channel that hasn’t paid off in returns but another channel has paid off or is even better than expected, then flex your budget to move toward the successful channel and consider eliminating the one not working.
For example, if you have put some of your budget toward a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and some of your budget toward social media, but only your PPC is paying off, then consider putting more funds toward PPC. Modify your social media campaign depending on returns.
Choose Your Preferred Digital Channels Based on Target Audience
Once you know your audience segments, have created personas to get to know your audience, and have defined a budget, it’s time to choose the digital channels where you’ll advertise. When choosing which digital channels will work best with your digital advertising plan, determine where your audience spends most of their online time. If you are targeting a younger audience, you may consider social media platforms, such as Instagram, and using influencers to reach your audience. If you are targeting small business owners, you may consider using LinkedIn instead. After defining your digital channel, you can then focus on creating content geared toward that channel.
Create a Marketing Timeline
Having a 12-month timeline is a great way to stay on track with your advertising plan throughout the year and helps keep you accountable for each deadline as well. Delivering online content consistently each month will help keep your company visible to your audience. Start with breaking your year down to monthly goals and make sure to keep goals attainable.
Analyze the Results of Your Digital Advertising Plan
Analyzing the results of your digital advertising plan is essential in helping to define which strategies were successful and which were not. Having measurable goals helps analyze which plans worked and which should be eliminated. Having a flexible plan will allow you to move your budget to those channels that provide a better return.
If you would like help with your digital advertising plan, contact our experts at InnoVision today.
