Develop a digital marketing plan

When defining your digital marketing objectives, you should think about how they will align with your overall business goals and your key performance indicators. See measure performance and set targets.

You should also consider what the return on your investment will be. This is likely to be financial, but could also include, for example:

• an improved conversion rate
• greater brand awareness
• an increase in visits to your website
• a greater market share

Examples of digital marketing objectives

The objectives you decide on for your digital marketing need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely).  
Some examples of SMART digital marketing objectives are:

• Achieve 200 'contact us' conversions via organic search traffic by the end of the financial year
• Reduce bounce rate from pay-per-click traffic to below 50% across all ads by December
• Increase the average order value of website sales to £35 per customer by the end of the quarter. 

See your marketing objectives.

The customer journey

Your plan needs to look at the whole customer journey:

• awareness - how a customer will become aware of your brand
• acquisition - why they will then want to visit your website
• conversion - how easily will they be able to make a purchase or register once on your site

Set SMART objective to improve performance at every stage of the customer journey. 

Download a digital marketing plan template (DOC, 74K).

Measuring digital marketing objectives

At this stage, you should consider how you will track and measure how well you have met the targets set in your objectives. You can define the further in the tactics section of your plan.

See measuring your online marketing.