Where to start with your digital strategy can be tough, and with so much to potentially include, it can be hard to narrow down a succinct plan for yourself and your business. With this in mind, Hatch-a-plan Marketing has put together a digital marketing guide to help you identify the items you need to create a clear, concise plan.

1. Review Your Market Conditions and Provide Context

One thing you need to do is place yourself and your organisation within the context of the market you are working in. This is vital if you are to provide legitimacy and credibility to your plan and is something you should always include. One important point is this:

Never use internal business factors alone to instigate change.

It is much harder to use internal factors to instigate change within a business, as the reason things are as they are is due to the prevailing culture set by leadership, which is incredibly difficult to change. This is particularly relevant for digital marketing, as it is often one of the biggest budget items (and rightfully so!). But try hard to showcase what you are up against and why things need to change. Focus on these three areas to showcase external factors:

Competitors and their spend profile, as well as online performance, which you can find from SEO measuring tools (e.g., AHrefs, SEMRush).
Third-party research papers or reports from legitimate research bodies (e.g., Gartner, Forrester).

Using these can help give you a helpful boost in providing the context for your digital marketing goals.

2. Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics… What’s the Difference and How to Distinguish Between Them

This will be the main focal point for your digital marketing plan. But it is important to know the difference, how they align with one another, and how they look to ensure clarity not only in your mind but also for key stakeholders such as leadership and direct reports, so everyone understands how these elements are carried out. Below is a brief definition of the three and how to construct them:

Objectives - These should be 'end states' and written in a way that shows a 'destination' has been reached and is measurable. For example: "Achieve the largest share of voice for any brand in the sector" or "Transform digital marketing into a net revenue-contributing channel."

Don’t be afraid to be ambitious here, but take stock of the company you work in and don’t make your ambitions so lofty that they are unachievable. For this, I would choose a minimum of four objectives, but no more than six.

Strategies - Now that you have your objectives, your strategies are the 'actions' you are going to take to achieve them. These can be overarching at this stage, but structure your strategy statements around verbs such as 'create,' 'test,' 'develop,' etc. This is a helpful way to visualize how strategies work towards your objectives. Example:

"Develop amazing digital experiences aligned to specific online customer journeys to enhance brand reputation." Or:

"Create quality digital outputs by treating each online channel uniquely to improve effectiveness."

Tactics – Your tactics should contain more detail around your strategies and focus on more specific actions, naming either a channel, product, or customer segment. These statements should get more granular.

For example, referring to the ‘develop amazing digital experiences…’ strategy above, your tactics could be:

"Create specific customer marketing campaigns for our top clients via online bespoke websites containing unique content."

If you combine these three aspects of your plan, you will have constructed the bedrock of your strategy.

You then have to showcase your wider knowledge to improve the context of your plan and how you are going to achieve these things.

3. Evaluate and Assess Your Digital Processes and Capabilities

Writing your objectives, strategies, and tactics is one thing, but if you don’t have the right internal environment—including team capabilities, budget, and tech stack—how are you going to practically achieve these goals?
Be sure to make reference to your team’s capabilities, and be honest in your assessment of whether you need to increase the size of your team or adapt the structure to best achieve your objectives. The time to ask or make reference to this is in your plan at the start of your financial year/planning period. If this structure isn’t right, you simply won’t have enough resources to achieve your goals.
Regarding your tech stack, this is often your biggest expense, but always seek the best combination of internal, external, and financial means to get the right structure to achieve success. Often, the aspirations of what digital needs to deliver don’t align with capabilities, so be sure to get this right to ensure you can execute your plans.

4. Align with Corporate Goals

One absolute must, but often overlooked, is making it clear how your plan aligns with the goals of the company at large. Marketing—and especially digital marketing—is often misunderstood, so making it clear to superiors how these plans will aid in the achievement of the business’s goals is vital. I’ll say that again: IT IS VITAL.
So remember to make plain the links between main company goals such as revenue, top and bottom-line growth, any strategic plays around entering new markets, or new product development (NPD). You don’t have to include every corporate goal, but for those where you see genuine alignment, make sure you spell this out clearly in your plan.

Other things to consider…

There are other factors that you can include within your plan that will be specific to your business. Depending on the company you work for, there may be more sophisticated elements you want to include, such as any segmentation, targeting, and positioning work or any research work you may have conducted, such as voice of the customer (VOC) research.

However, this plan is mainly for those who want a baseline of factors to include. As long as you include these four key areas, you can build on them as you move forward.