How to develop an effective marketing plan (Example and template)

What is a Digital Marketing Action Plan?

Marketing Action Plan: Definition

A digital marketing action plan is a document designed by companies to develop and implement their marketing strategies. The objective is to "put on paper" your goals, the means to achieve them, and how you'll measure your progress as you execute your marketing strategies.

It's an ultra-important document—once you have it in hand, you'll be thrilled to have it for tracking your digital marketing strategies.

It allows you to describe the marketing initiatives to implement and all the associated steps. Each element is detailed, including expected results, costs, and the responsibilities of each team member.

It also helps keep leadership, stakeholders (if there are any), and other employees informed about the marketing team's objectives and progress. It should be shared with the sales team, allowing you to update the marketing action plan based on commercial and company objectives.

Want to design an effective inbound marketing strategy, generate leads easily, and more? A digital marketing action plan can help you achieve this.

What Are the Objectives of a Marketing Plan?

As you can see, a marketing action plan is a guide for the marketing team but also for all company members. It serves to:

• Align marketing objectives with company goals: A marketing plan's objectives must align with the company's overall objectives.

• Show budget utilization to achieve marketing goals: Explain the amount needed to reach your objectives and what this will generate in return.

• Inform and involve the entire company: A marketing action plan is a document that motivates the troops! The marketing team is responsible for properly tracking objectives and can keep all stakeholders informed.

• Support other teams' development: Other teams can use the marketing action plan as a roadmap for their own actions.

• Identify the target audience: When writing your marketing action plan, you'll inevitably need to analyze your market and audience.

• Determine communication channels: It's valuable to indicate the media most used by your target audience and best suited for conveying your message.

What Elements Should You Include in Your Marketing Action Plan?

To build a digital marketing plan, there are several standard elements to determine, including:

• Your marketing action plan objectives: Your objectives are the foundation for designing your marketing action plan.

• Your marketing action plan target: To understand who you'll be addressing and how you'll approach them.

• Marketing strategies integrated into your action plan: Your marketing strategies describe how your company will achieve your objectives (actions, means, responsible parties, etc.).

• Key performance indicators: KPIs should allow you to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing actions.

• Your action calendar: You need to establish a campaign calendar to set key deadlines for your action plan.

• Budget for implementing your actions: Budget is a factor that will inevitably influence the actions you can implement.

• Your company's mission: You can also include your company's mission to maintain alignment between your marketing action plan objectives and company goals.

How to Develop an Effective Digital Marketing Action Plan

Conduct an Audit for Your Marketing Action Plan

The first step in writing your marketing action plan is conducting an audit of your environment and past actions. You need to first understand and keep in mind what worked and what didn't work before defining future actions.

By analyzing the results of your previous actions, you can establish a assessment and build on it to correct, replace, or reuse certain methods.

You should also study external factors, particularly your market and competitors, to analyze your strengths and weaknesses.

Study Your Target for Your Marketing Action Plan

This market analysis will help you create your persona and gather key information about them.

You need to put yourself in the buyer's shoes to create a coherent marketing action plan: What problem are they trying to solve? What satisfaction will they get from your offer? Basically, what are their purchase motivations? What do they type into search engines?

Define Objectives for Your Marketing Action Plan

This is THE step not to neglect because your entire marketing action plan will flow from your objectives: the actions to take and the means (resources and budget) to allocate. You must therefore define your SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound).

For example, simply saying you want to increase your revenue isn't sufficient—you need to specify by how much compared to your current situation.

Defining your marketing objectives will also make them coherent with your sales team's objectives, preventing everyone from heading in opposite directions.

Develop Your Marketing and Content Strategy

Once objectives are clearly defined and your market has been well studied, you need to implement your marketing strategy to communicate about your offer.

Small disclaimer: A marketing strategy is not a marketing plan—it should describe how your company will accomplish its mission (including content, channels, tools, etc.). While a marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies.

A marketing strategy should allow you to clearly identify the actions to take, when, and by whom. Similarly, you should also identify the communication channels you'll use based on your persona research.

To feed your channels, also think about developing your content strategy. There are many types of content, so you should carefully choose your formats based on your target audience and channels before building your communication plan.

Assign Roles for Your Marketing Action Plan

Once you have your strategies in mind, you can break them down into tasks and subtasks before assigning them to a person or team. You can also provide important contacts in case different stakeholders have questions.

This role assignment is important so everyone knows what they need to do, how, by when, and who to contact if needed.

Establish a Budget for Your Marketing Action Plan

A good marketing action plan should include forecasts regarding the budget to allocate to different marketing strategies and the future sales that will result.

You need to measure the profitability of your actions and define the amount to implement your actions. Every cost should be indicated and described in your marketing budget. Don't rush through this part!

Digital Marketing Action Plan: Template and Example

Step 1: Model Your Marketing Funnel to Test and Prioritize

If you're not familiar with the marketing funnel concept, you should add our article on the subject to your "to-read" list.

In short, the idea is that your digital marketing strategy aims to make you known to generate visitors to your site and then convert them into leads, then MQLs, then SQLs, and ultimately clients.

For an effective action plan, you need to measure your plan's effectiveness between each stage of a potential client's maturity.

In our template, we give you baseline elements that you can modify using your real data. With formulas of complexity that would make Einstein pale (okay, it's elementary level in a Google sheet), you'll be able to test the impact of your actions and identify whether it's better to first invest in your ability to generate traffic or your ability to convert.

Pretty cool, right?

Step 2: Define Your Marketing Action Plan

Now that you have a vision of your marketing strategy's effectiveness and priority improvement points, it's time to take action.

In our marketing action plan example, we suggest producing three types of actions:

• Actions to improve your ability to attract visitors

• Actions to improve your ability to educate your leads

• Actions to improve your ability to convert them

We highly recommend using an incredible management tool: OKRs. Yes, we also have an article for that: The OKR Method for Managing Yourself and Your Teams.

Step 3: Ask for a Raise

Yes, because ultimately it's not more complicated than that, and it will greatly advance your company.