Creating a Digital Marketing Plan that works for your Business

Trying a new marketing strategy and not seeing the results that you want? You might not be tailoring your digital marketing plan to your company.

Picture of Alex Martin Alex Martin

Published: 06 Jul 2018

4 minutes read

Creating a Digital Marketing Plan that works for your Business

When it comes to digital marketing, planning is key. Without the correct plan in place, you might find that your efforts aren’t producing the results that you want, and that your marketing isn’t sustainable in the long run. B2B digital marketing is complex, and generating leads that are relevant and useful to your business can be a difficult process if you don’t have the tools that you need. Here are our  top tips for creating a digital marketing plan that’s aimed at growing your business, generating leads, and building a sustainable, profitable plan for the future. 

Don’t cast your net too wide

If you’re just getting started in the world of B2B digital marketing, it’s tempting to plan a strategy that targets everyone and anyone. With so many tools available for B2B marketers, it’s easy to share content across multiple channels, targeting thousands of people, and hope for the best. However, this isn’t the best use of your time or money to get your digital marketing plan off the ground. 

You need to understand your buyer personas and which platforms and channels are going to appeal to them the most. Depending on your industry, you can choose to target via social media channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn, or you can even take advantage of an email marketing strategy or guest blogging to boost your reach. It’s important to keep your reach focused  - you need to be targeting the people that you want to reach, not just hoping that someone will eventually be in touch. If your persona isn’t likely to be on LinkedIn, or you’ve never had a particularly high open rate on outbound emails, then these may not be the right channels for you.

Try not to get stuck in the past  

A staggering number of B2B companies are still using old-school tactics like cold-calling to try and drive sales, but only 18% of marketers believe that these methods produce high quality leads. Outbound techniques just don’t work the way they used to, and you need to understand this if you’re going to plan a successful digital marketing strategy. Due to the complexities of the B2B environment, your buyers need to be nurtured with educational content before they are ready to buy. If you’re focusing on a method of digital marketing that is more interruptive than helpful, then you aren’t going to be able to build a relationship with your buyers, leading to fewer leads, fewer deals, and ultimately less profit. 

Adopting a new, ‘inbound’ way of working is a big step, but it pays off in the long run. If you spend too much time trying to hang on to the marketing strategies of the past, then you aren’t planning for a successful future. 

Ready to fall in love with a new way of marketing? Download our planner here

Automate processes to make your job easier 

Carrying out a full digital marketing plan for a B2B company is a stressful and time-consuming task - sometimes. The rise of marketing automation software is slowly but surely changing this, and it’s making everyone’s lives a great deal easier. With marketing software, you can automate plenty of tasks without sacrificing the quality of work, and know that your digital marketing plan is running smoothly, even without you there to oversee it. 

There are a couple of tools on the market to help you automate tasks and turn your digital strategy into a smoothly running machine - we always recommend HubSpot, but make sure that you check out your other options to find the best software for you. Depending on the platform you choose, you can make sure that leads are nurtured at every stage of the funnel. For example, you could automatically send additional  content to prospects that have downloaded a specific ebook, or you could automatically check up on old leads to see if they’re ready for a consultation yet. The possibilities are endless with automation, so make sure that you don’t miss it out in your digital marketing plan! 

Stay organised 

The number one rule of planning a successful digital marketing strategy is to make sure that you’re organised. If you don’t have a quarter by quarter understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and what methods you intend on using, then you don’t really have a plan at all. It’s easy to just sporadically blog when you have time, or plan half of a campaign and then get stuck into another project, but this should be avoided if you want to actually create and implement a full working digital marketing plan.

The best way to ensure that your digital marketing plan is set up for success is to have a good structure in place. We’ve created a digital marketing pack to help, complete with a planning calendar and some useful resources to identify goals, analyse progress, and boost your company growth. Download it below! 

This blog was originally published in 2015 and has been updated in 2020 to ensure correctness and quality.

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