When you create a business plan, you should treat it like a plan of care for one of your patients or clients. Below I am going to show you how to take that knowledge you have from client interactions, and apply it to your digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing allows your marketing dollars to stretch further and not only save you money, but provide you with consistent growth. The most consistent growth is achieved by relying on an expert to analyze your data to best influence your audience.
Creating a Business Plan
The first step to getting the most out of your digital marketing strategy is to create a yearly marketing plan. December is National Write a Business Plan Month, which makes complete sense as it is the last month of the year, and therefore is the best time to create the new plan for the year to come. Creating a marketing plan gives you a direction and a means for testing out what topics are the most effective. They should also be supported by content you release on your website and vice versa. That being said, a yearly marketing plan is subject to change, and should be altered accordingly when new information and analytics arise. Below you will see an outline of an example marketing campaign.
Business Plan Themes
You will want to create an overarching theme for the year, a theme for each quarter, and a theme for each month. This will help you to stay on track and focus on your message that you want to portray yearly, quarterly, and monthly. This also gives you a chance to think about your target audience, and their preferred channels (such as a website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google, Press Releases, a blog, or Email Marketing Software) to reach your audience. These channels can be used as an organic form of social networking. Keep in mind that you will need to tailor your platform and message to the age and demographic you are trying to reach.
Not sure which topics to choose? A digital marketing expert can help you select the topics that can most efficiently take advantage of your expertise and work as an advertisement for your services. Below you will find the marketing plan I created for a physical therapy company I worked for back in 2018, to give you an idea of what a finished product looks like.
Formulating a Post for Your Channel
Which posts are the most successful will depend on a variety of factors; your platform, frequency, product or service, audience, time of year, status of the stock market, etc. will all factor in to the most successful type of post. The post types I have found to be most successful are personal, inspirational, funny, or informative. It’s important to execute a variety of these (sometimes in the same post) to increase engagement. The one thing all these posts have in common is that they bring value to your clients, and they should all have a call to action.
Now let’s look at formulating a post that matches all the criteria for success. If you look at the photo below, you will see a post I created in January for the same physical therapy company. The annual theme was move, the quarterly theme was start the year off right, and the monthly theme was creating healthy habits. The post uses a photo that was free to use and share commercially, (without this consideration you could face legal repercussions). The post also encourages audience interaction. This was scheduled to go out on social media at the most optimal time for interaction based off the platform’s analytics; generally the best time to post will depend on your platform.
Analyzing the Data
Now that we have created a marketing campaign and a first post, we can analyze our data. All social media and search engines have analytics, and all campaigns should be altered to appease that particular analytics program. Google, for example, values site creditability, so the more credible links you have associated with your page, the higher you appear on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
On Facebook, you can break down the posts by page likes (how many people liked your page over the last seven days), post reach (how many people saw all the content you posted over the last seven days), and engagement (how many people have liked, shared, or commented on your posts over the last seven days). My personal favorite is post reach, because it gives you an overview of how many people saw content from your page and how they interacted with it.
You will see the spikes and valleys in activity for Facebook interactions. Post reach breaks these graph points down into the total reach, positive interactions, and negative interactions. This will help you focus on the content that is most popular with your audience, in addition to which kinds of posts might be hurting your performance.
For someone without SEO experience, these patterns can feel like you are reading a different language and are hard to interpret. Basically, what I do is analyze the data for patterns and use those to translate and create, or advise you on, your next post. Without taking into consideration what post-types perform best, you are ignoring data that is crucial to your success online and preventing your business from reaching its potential.
Conclusion
To truly create a great campaign one needs to be able to create and execute a plan, analyze and interpret data, manage relationships, perform Search Engine Optimization, create an updated website, a structured blog, use Email Marketing Software (EMS), develop revenue retention methods; the list goes on.
Follow my blog for the next article that goes over the best revenue retention methods for 2023! If you would like to learn more or schedule a free consultation to find out the most efficient way to execute your strategy, click the button below.
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