Plan: Create a digital marketing strategy, mission and objectives

Reach: Grow your audience online, situational analysis and competitive landscape, target audience, budget and goals

Act: Encourage brand interactions and leads, media and channels

Convert: Increase online and offline sales through optimization, KPIs and success metrics

Engage: Build customer loyalty and advocacy

Begin your plan by assessing the previous year’s performance. To create an effective digital marketing strategy, you must first have a good idea of what is working as a strength as well as knowing your weaknesses.

You should also have a view of the market and your competitors’ activities.

• Identify all of your current digital marketing activities.
• Work out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats using the SWOT/ TOWS frameworks.
• Outline your e-commerce marketing goals and make sure you’ve set SMART objectives. 
• Understand your target market, their needs, wants and expectations.

What is the growth timeline and how do you intend to reach new customers?

Reach involves building awareness of your brand, products, and services. After all, no one can buy from your business if they don’t know it exists.

ToFu (top-of-funnel) tactics as part of your e-commerce marketing plan should focus on how you can use other websites and offline media to drive traffic to your owned media e.g. website, blog, or social media profiles.

• Define your key brand messages to focus on awareness, familiarity and purchase intent.
• Embed campaign tracking and attribution to adequately review performance.
• Perform keyword research to identify strengths and opportunities (both paid and organic search) 
• Identify the appropriate channels to promote the right content to the right people.
• Define a paid and display media budget to reach the correct audience.

What channels and content works best to grab attention with the target audience? What makes them take action?

The ACT stage in the e-commerce marketing plan is aimed at encouraging interactions that will result in lead generation. It focuses on creating interactions with content rather than conversion at this point in the funnel. MoFu (middle-of-funnel) marketing works to position the company as the best provider to suit the customer's needs.

Plan the next year’s activities with appropriate budgets and KPIs specifically aimed at the middle of the funnel.

How do you intend to convert a lead to a sale? What activities will persuade your audience to take that vital next step and turn into paying customers? BoFu (bottom-of-funnel) looks at the end of the process; generating the conversion.

Today’s customers expect a personalized digital experience. This might be dynamic landing pages, multichannel marketing offering a range of conversion techniques such as email, LiveChat, and product demos, and fully optimized mobile browsing.

It’s important to remember that payment can be made through online e-commerce transactions or offline channels. The customer journey is not linear and a deep dive into analytics and customer data is essential to understanding the path to purchase. You should consider this as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Identify conversion funnels and paths to purchase.

Plan how you can personalize the digital experience within your current constraints and resources.

Establish a communication process between your marketing and development teams.

This stage in the funnel requires you to keep adding value to your brand experience to generate repeat purchases, build loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.

• Plan how you can use content to nurture the post-sale relationship. Examples include storytelling, case studies and engaging social content.
• Outline your intended onboarding process using e-commerce marketing techniques and online messaging.
• Establish your multi-channel customer service process e.g. chatbots, social media, call centres.
• Identify post-sale customer data for remarketing opportunities that will build relationships

Your e-commerce marketing plan should include a view as to how you will track and report on all KPIs:

• Customized Google Analytics goals, segments, events and dimensions to reflect campaigns
• A conversion-based forecast model for media ROI
• The conversion rate for different types of leads or subscribers
• A method of assessing the quality of visitors to your website
• Attribution across all digital channels, but also how they influence offline sales
• How to track returning customers and their value
• Email subscriber engagement
• Customer satisfaction and loyalty drivers