Investing in online campaigns is critical for every business, whether large or SMB, but how do you do it? Create your own site and advertise online
Advertising is the soul of commerce. This phrase, despite being uttered more than a century ago by Henry Ford, is as relevant as ever. Even though advertising communication has changed radically compared to how it was a hundred years ago, the promotion of the products or services you sell is fundamental to the commercial success of any company.
And if online advertising and communication used to pass through print media, radio and TV, today it is the web that takes the lead. It is therefore essential for a company that wants to promote its products and services, or even just its brand, to have a well-structured digital marketing plan that allows it to have visibility on all possible channels that the Web makes available. And this is where things get complicated: online communication can be articulated on various media and each has its own language (written and visual), its own logic of operation and its own strategy.
In short, giving an answer to the question “How to make a digital marketing plan for your company” is not at all simple. The most immediate answer is to rely on professionals, who put their skills and professionalism at the service of our products and our brand. If, however, you want to draw up an outline so as not to arrive unprepared for the appointment, here are some suggestions that may be useful.
Business Objectives
First of all, it will be necessary to establish what the objectives of your company are. That is, you will need to conduct market research, identifying your company’s competitors and strengths. In this way, you will be able to establish a list of priorities and, consequently, which will be the business objectives that the marketing campaign should help to achieve.
For example, you will have to choose the products on which to focus and which, instead, to exclude from the digital marketing plan (at least at first). In this way, it will be possible to rationalize efforts and economic resources, and reach the strategic objectives more quickly and without waste.
Identify a target audience
Having identified the products and objectives to be reached, you will have to move on to the target audience. Depending on the product that you want to sell, in fact, you will have a very specific audience that can / should be interested in our communication campaign. Technically speaking, this is the moment in which the audience is segmented and buyer personas are created. That is to say, a generalized representation of the typical customers must be created based on their biographical information, lifestyles and commercial preferences.
Which channels?
According to the target audience and the products, then, the right channels must be chosen, which allow to reach them quickly and without filters or intermediations. The strategy is based on two actions: create your website and advertise online. You can choose between creating a corporate website or a blog, with its editorial calendar and SEO positioning strategy, rather than an advertising campaign on social media depends both on the type of product or service, and on the buyer personas identified.
Budget and development plan
Having obtained all what we might call “preliminary information” you can move on to action. Or almost. First, in fact, you will have to establish the development plan and its timing and the budget you have available to achieve it. Without identifying the time horizon in which to develop the digital marketing plan and the money to invest in communication, it will be impossible to draw up the actual plan.
How to make a digital marketing plan
The points and information listed above are necessary to draw up the digital marketing plan and identify the time horizon in which to implement it. As it is easy to deduce, however, both the theoretical study at the base of the plan, as well as the practical part require knowledge and professionalism that is not always possible to meet in the company’s workforce.
If, however, you want to try the DIY way, Italiaonline provides all users with useful tools to implement the digital marketing plan without having to resort to professionals.
Create your site with the Italiaonline tool that allows you to customize it to the maximum: Do it yourself site. You start by choosing the graphic layout and the setting of the pages; then you pass to the contents and, in case, you can choose to import contents from another site or from the company Facebook page. Once everything is ready, you can go online and track the progress of traffic thanks to the Analytics tools that Italiaonline provides.
With DIY Advertising, however, you can create online advertising campaigns to implement your digital marketing plan. We’re talking about the banner ads on websites or the increasingly frequent sponsored ads on social platforms. This tool allows you to create a multi-channel campaign, letting the user choose whether the ad should appear on Google and/or on supported social platforms (such as Facebook and Instagram, for example).
Also in this case, the operation is extremely simple: first you choose the channels, the audience and the geographical area that should be “covered” by the campaign (a particularly useful feature for professionals operating in small parts of the territory). Then you move on to the creation of the actual campaign and the definition of the duration and budget. If everything corresponds to your expectations, you go on to put the ads online.