Digital marketing success starts with a plan, but before you can draft an official document, there are some questions that need to be answered.

What Is Your Competition Doing?

Performing a competitive analysis to see where you stack up against key competitors in regards to digital marketing optimization is the first step in developing your marketing plan. This will give you key insights into how your competition is reaching your target audience and where you need to improve.

How Will You Differentiate Yourself?

Knowing what sets you apart from others in your industry is essential in gaining new business. Leveraging your competitive analysis, you’ll want to develop unique campaigns that are tailored to reach and engage your target audience. Engage your sales and marketing team to develop key value statements that can be used throughout your different campaigns.

Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

Developing detailed buyer personas will help you to create targeted content and address key pain points being faced by your ideal client. Buyer personas not only dive into demographics, they uncover the story of your target audience and provide insights on where and how to reach them.

What Are Your Customers Searching For?

Keyword research helps you identify the terms being used by your audience to search for your particular solution. Although your website and marketing campaigns may target several different keyword phrases, each piece of content should focus on one long tailed keyword. This is an integral part in optimizing your content for search engines.

How Will You Measure Success?

Determining which statistics are the best indicators of your success will depend largely on the goals of your company, but there are some specific KPIs that can be applied to any digital marketing campaign. Leads, MQLs, SQLs, website visits, blog views, email open rates and social engagement are very telling when evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

What Are Your Revenue Goals?

First determining the current revenue being generated through digital efforts and then shaping a plan that both meets your budget and revenue goals will provide you with your most telling statistic, return on investment. Digital marketing efforts can take time to develop, so it is important to set measurable, attainable expectations and allow the process time to produce.

Once you have these questions answered, you can begin to determine which tactics you’ll leverage and start to build a formal marketing plan.