Published July 2, 2024

/ Updated October 30, 2024

What To Include In A Digital Marketing Plan Template

Many businesses that succeed online usually have a documented digital marketing plan.

According to our research, planning and documenting your digital initiatives increases your odds of success by 414%. It also makes you 7X more likely to report success.

Your plan is your success roadmap. It’s a reference point for your marketing efforts, keeps your team aligned, makes team members accountable, and lets you track your progress.

Rather than build a plan from scratch, this article will outline what you need in an effective digital marketing plan template.

Document Your Digital Strategy With These Templates

There’s tons of advice packed into this post. Make execution easy with these templates:

User Persona Template
Marketing Strategy Template (Excel and PowerPoint)
Content, Social Media, and Email Marketing Templates (PowerPoint)

Using these resources, you can tailor your digital marketing strategy to the most relevant channels and tactics:

How to Populate A Digital Marketing Strategy Template

A digital marketing strategy template is only as effective as its content. If you put in the time to create one, you will set up your business for success. Here are the elements to consider when filling out your template:

Create A Buyer Persona

Your template should begin with who you want to target.

Defining this person will make your digital marketing strategy effective. So ask yourself, who is my ideal buyer? What is their income? What are their preferences?

When establishing a picture of your buyers’ persona, tailor it to your offer by identifying:

Who uses your solutions?
What problems prompt your ideal buyer to find you
Where you can find your ideal buyer online
What users expect from your solution
User demographics like age, gender, etc.

These insights help you know the desires of your buyers and figure out what will make them buy.

To find your ideal buyers, you can do customer interviews or track trends within your contacts database (your email list or CRM). Another good way to start is by evaluating info of your current customer. For instance, when I consider my current customers, here are what I find:

Location: United States
Company revenue: $6.5 million to over $50 million annually
Customer titles: Marketing manager, VP of marketing, Founders
Age: 28 to 50 years old
Customer background: Highly talented and digital savvy. Wants to free up their time for more important tasks. Relies on trusted communities to hire the right people. Gets educational insights from industry podcasts and reputable publications.
Goals: To hire a dependable marketer who can strategize and create expert-level content. Wants a marketer who can handle other related marketing tasks.
Challenges: Worked with an agency that promised but under-delivered. Collaborated with several freelancers who didn’t meet expectations. Isn’t generating enough leads from marketing initiatives.

See how a marketer like me can use the above info?

For each customer title, I can create a detailed persona for Mark the marketing manager, Victor the VP of marketing, and Fred the Founder.

Afterward, I can drill down to know the channels used by each of persona. The outcome is an optimized marketing campaign that makes my offer clear to each buyer.

Recommended Reading: Find Your Target Audience and Create a Marketing Persona

Do Competitive Analysis

Analyzing your competitors lets you understand your market position and highlight your competitive advantage effectively.

Use this section to mention businesses with similar solutions that serve customers like yours. This exercise will help you identify what makes you different.

Identify your unique selling proposition (USP): Your USP is your competitive advantage. In a world where the same offers, same prices, and same features blur competitor lines, your USP is your ticket to standing out.
Note your competitor pricing: Pricing is a deciding factor for prospects to proceed with a purchase. Figure out what two or more of your competitors charge. If your price is higher, outline how you’d justify it. How about lower? Outline how you will inform customers that cheaper doesn’t mean inferior.
Evaluate the online presence of your competitors: Follower count and channel engagement metrics are success indicators. If competitors are doing well on a channel, odds are you will, too.
Create better messaging: Stellar copywriting is essential for positioning your product as the best. So check the copy of competitors an aim to create something better. For example, Maude uses clear copywriting to evoke emotion among its adult audience. Its homepage has a simple tagline, “Intimacy essentials: for the bedroom and beyond.”
Assess competitor weaknesses: This will give you insights on what you can swoop on immediately. Competitors may have weaknesses like a poor reputation, low-quality products, or confusing pricing.

Outline Your Marketing Goals And Success Metrics

A great persona and a brilliant competitive analysis will fall flat without SMART goals. SMART means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Here’s an example of a SMART goal for a business promoting its $50 product using SEO and content marketing.

Specific: Attract 10,000 users per quarter with a 5% (500) conversion rate
Measurable: Use Google Analytics to track visitors
Achievable: We have an SEO and content marketing budget of $7,000 per quarter
Relevant: Aligns with the business aim of using cost-effective channels
Time-bound: Quarterly targets allow for regular assessment. This lets us adjust the strategy to ensure progress towards the annual goal.

When setting your goals, it helps if you include digital marketing KPIs. KPIs like impression, click-throughs, traffic, and engagements let you track progress toward specific goals. For example:

If you want to increase brand awareness, you can measure impressions per post
If all you’re doing is collecting leads now, you might not need to care about conversion rates, yet.
If your focus is on conversions, you could care more about your returning visitors than new visitors.
If you’re looking to boost your sales, then there’s probably nothing more relevant to you now than your conversion rate.

Choose Your Marketing Channels

List the marketing channels you can use to raise awareness, educate customers, nurture and convert leads, and build trust and loyalty.

These channels can include social media, email newsletters, a blog, a podcast, your website, or a YouTube channel. To avoid spreading your business thin and not hitting your goals, select a few marketing channels based on your goals, budget, customer research, and competitor analysis.

Have A Comprehensive Budget

Set aside a specific amount for executing your marketing plan.

If you’re a new brand, don’t complicate things by using multiple channels. Conduct research to find a few of the best channels and focus on them.

When creating your budget, account for all costs. This can include podcast production costs, agency fees, marketing software subscriptions, etc.

For example, if you want to grow using SEO and content marketing, do not budget for just content. Consider link building, too. Why? If your competitors have built strong link profiles, you won’t beat them with just good content. You’d need a comparable or stronger link profile to displace them.

Identify The Tools You Need

List and briefly describe the software you’d use to market your product on the chosen channels. These can include:

Social media marketing tools
Email marketing tools
Blogging software
Marketing CRM
Video software
Design tools

Plan To Measure Results Of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

Before launching your digital marketing strategy, you need to plan what comes next.

How often will you check that you’re hitting your KPIs? Every two weeks? Every month? Document it! Allocate the tracking of this task to yourself or a team member and set a reminder in a content calendar.

This helps you know the goals on track and those that are falling behind.

For instance, in the goal we mentioned earlier, we plan to attract 10,000 users per quarter and get a 5% (500) conversion rate. Every month, we can check if we get at least 2,500 users and a 1.25% conversion rate. If we don’t meet these, we need to figure out why, document it, learn from our experience, and optimize the campaign. On the flip side, if we achieve our goal, we can do an audit to know what’s working and double down on it.

Outline Your Digital Marketing Plan In CoSchedule

A simple way to share and execute your digital marketing plan is by using the CoSchedule Marketing Calendar.

30,000+ marketers use CoSchedule for resource allocation, collaboration, project tracking, publishing, and many more. You can also use it for all-things social media, email, events, blog posts, and podcasts.

CoSchedule Marketing Calendar provides total visibility of all your marketing in real-time. Add your projects, tasks, ideas, social messages, and more to have everything in one central location. The best part? You can start using the CoSchedule Marketing Calendar for free.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan Template?

A digital marketing plan template allows you to execute a focused and measurable marketing action plan. Below are two reasons you need one:

To have a tailored marketing roadmap

A digital marketing plan template documents the direction of your marketing efforts, states your goals, and how you intend to achieve them. It helps you navigate the array of online marketing options available to you.

Imagine one of your goals is to increase brand awareness by 30% in 6 months. Your template will include specific steps like Facebook advertising and PPC campaigns. With a template, you’ll avoid executing plans or using channels unconnected to your short-term and long-term marketing and business goals.

Recommended Reading: How to Organize a Marketing Roadmap in 5 Simple Steps

To evaluate the ROI on your marketing efforts

By including metrics like cost per acquisition, return on advertising spend, and customer lifetime value in your digital marketing plan template, you can easily measure the results of your marketing efforts. The template helps you document how much goes to each marketing channel so you can measure it against the revenue generated.

This allows you to refine your online marketing strategy by reviewing or eliminating poor-performing channels and identifying those that perform well. For example, if email marketing has a lower average cost to get new customers (CPA) and higher long-term customer value (CLV) than Facebook advertising, you can reallocate funds to email campaigns.

Take Advantage of the Right Strategy

Overall, setting up a well-defined and well-structured digital marketing strategy can be all about three things.

Your persona. Your current goals. Your intuition.

When you know who you want to reach and serve, everything else should fall into place. Your persona almost single-handedly defines what you should do and how you should act.

What gives you direction are your current goals. Without focus, you can’t even begin to choose a digital marketing tactic to use, much less a set of them.

Finally, your intuition needs to guide you and keep your balance — a balance between maintaining what you currently do and changing up plans when the time calls for it.

To be honest, any marketing success just goes back to pleasing your chosen persona. And if that person has changed, it’s up to you to evolve with them — or refine your target persona.

After all, the power of a digital marketing strategy is not in the plan itself. It’s in the ability to reach and emotionally connect with the target buyer.

Recommended Reading: Online Reputation Marketing: 7 Solid Tips for Social Media