How to START building a modern digital marketing plan

It doesn’t take many sentences to cover the number of disruptions in search marketing during the season (or era?) we find ourselves in.

Right now, Google is rapidly changing organic and paid search, causing excitement and confusion. New AI insights, information leaks, and potential OpenAI search engines create distractions in our careers. Additionally, evolving privacy laws and attribution challenges add complexity.

With so much going on, it can be difficult to keep up. It’s essential to have a clear plan linked to your strategy so you don’t get distracted by new trends like AI or ignore changes and fall behind. Although the term “plan” may seem boring, it is essential for a solid digital strategy.

To help you on the subject, I recently published my first book, “The Digital Marketing Success Plan”. In this document, I go into detail with personal stories, processes, and “how-to” content centered around what I call the “START” planning process, and I will detail these five steps to follow.

1. Strategy

The first phase of START planning is strategy. This is where you understand the current state of the business and the goals to be set and reasonably achieved with digital marketing.

Here, you’ll cover everything including setting goals, matching marketing metrics to business results, and reviewing all past marketing efforts and our expectations before moving on to the next phases of the planning process.

In some companies, this step is supplemented by exhaustive research, business intelligence data and financial information backed up end-to-end via CRM or other platforms.

In other cases, businesses have started adding digital marketing channels over the years (with good intentions), but don’t have all the pieces connected for attribution and ROI.

Whatever your company’s position, there’s never a better time to ensure all levels, teams and stakeholders are aligned on the end goals of digital marketing (and perhaps marketing more broadly).

Then you can work backwards from there as you explore all possible tactics and means to achieve your overall defined goals and strategy.

2. Tactics

The next phase is tactics. This is where you explore all possible avenues to achieve your goals, define business outcomes, and be open-minded about how to achieve them.

You will evaluate all potential channels and networks (e.g. SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn sponsored content) that you can leverage using industry-leading research and estimation tools to uncover opportunities to reach our audiences targets.

This is how the strategy comes to life. You never want tactics to “be” strategy or be more important than strategy. These are the actions that push us to achieve and exceed our goals.

You should also consider your own biases toward certain channels based on your experiences, expertise, or personal feelings about them.

In some cases, LinkedIn can beat Google Ads. Or, programmatic display is necessary to support the customer journey in a hidden way that you don’t realize.

Be open to exploring all channels and opportunities, and do the necessary research and projections to ensure they align with your strategy and goals.

3. Request

The third phase of the START planning approach is application. Now is the time to identify the assets, big and small, that you need to get our house in order – or to build it.

Develop the inventory list you will need for all desired or defined tactics. This includes creating ads, graphics, web pages, copy, and other elements necessary for a successful campaign.

At this point, it’s tempting to start creating new ads or landing pages or review your creative with a defined strategy and set of tactics.

I caution you to stick to identifying things at this point and not start creating new things. This is where many great strategies fail and plans fail to come to fruition.

Obtaining the assets you need to launch or scale your plan takes time and money. Let’s say you dive straight into designing or creating new things without properly identifying what you’re doing and connecting to the “why” (strategy and tactics phases). In this case, you can do expensive things quickly or delay launching your plan indefinitely.

---

4. Review

The fourth phase is revision. Here you will define the aspects necessary to manage and measure success and ensure accountability of the plan.

This means creating dashboards and performance measurement systems tied to the ultimate ROI equation, cumulative performance, channel performance, and resource measurement.

In this phase, you also implement our project management system or align resource planning platforms to manage work. Ultimately, you get to benchmarks, budgets, reports, and roles as a whole.

This phase may seem obvious, but I’ve seen a number of systems over the years, including dashboards and resource managers. Some are completely custom and others are ready to use.

Either way, they often fail to track a complete picture of digital marketing ROI and leave gaps that need to be filled through assumptions or cross-checking investment numbers by a CFO.

You don’t want any gaps and want to make sure our systems account for the full costs of digital marketing. This includes internals, contractors, agencies, software, ad spend and perhaps more.

If you don’t take this into account, you could have difficult meetings with management or investors later when they don’t see the full ROI that you might calculate.

5. Transformations

The final phase of START planning is transformation. In this final phase, you plan the tactics so that they remain subordinate to the overall strategy.

You will develop a comprehensive timeline of tactics, optimization processes, agile strategy and reporting cycles. You’ll also chart milestones, content flights and pushes, experiments, tasks, and assignments as a whole.

Again, you may have extensive experience with SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing, email marketing, programmatic and more. You could have great successes or even integrated and consistent results. I love hearing these stories!

However, I challenge you to consider that if you are seeing positive results, they are likely the result of focused efforts and not sporadic visits to manage and see things through.

Whatever your position, make sure you have planned resources, planned tactics and action plans, and control of the plan.

Things will happen in your business, like new products/services, new target audiences, and new competitors. Things will also happen, such as new industrial technologies, changes in search engines, the emergence of AI and much more.

Have a documented plan that also allows for some agility and enough flexibility to be reviewed and adapted at multiple levels so that it doesn’t become obsolete or abandoned just a few months into the effort.

START your path to digital marketing success

Whether you follow the START planning steps or adapt them to your own strategy and planning process, I strongly encourage you to review your current plan. Make sure it is objective, specific, achievable and accountable.

A plan is not a plan if it is in one person’s head or if it is understood differently by several people. Things change very quickly. Have a plan that can keep you on track, adaptable and aware of changes.

My primary goal is to ensure that you are making wise, ROI-driven, and responsible investments, whether you are a business doing digital marketing or an agency doing it on behalf of your clients.

Google, software, agencies and employees will get paid or take your money whether your digital marketing works or not, and I hope you see success in your digital marketing with a solid plan.

---