How to Build a Digital Marketing Plan for a Small Business
A plan is a set of decisions with reasons attached. A list of tactics is not a plan. Most small firms have the second while calling it the first. This sets out what the decisions are, the order they have to be made in and how you know afterwards whether any of it worked.
What A Plan Actually Is
Most documents called marketing plans are lists of things somebody intends to do. A plan states what you are trying to achieve, who for, through which channels, why those ones, in what order, at what cost, measured how, reviewed when.
The test that separates them. Ask why.
Take any line in the document and ask why it is there. If the answer is available in the document itself, it is a plan. If the answer is that somebody suggested it, else that a competitor does it, you have a list.
Why the distinction is not academic. Lists cannot be reviewed.
A tactic with no stated reason cannot be judged, because there is nothing to judge it against. When money is tight, everything on the list looks equally cuttable, so the decision gets made on preference rather than evidence.
How long it should be. Two pages.
Long enough to state each decision and its reason. Anything longer is usually a document written to be presented rather than used. It will not be opened again after the meeting it was made for.
Who it is for. The people doing the work.
Including you in six months, when the reason for a decision has faded and somebody is proposing to reverse it.
Start With The Commercial Number
A plan begins with what the business needs to earn, not with what marketing might do. Everything else is derived from that figure by a chain of arithmetic anybody can follow.
The chain. Five links.
The revenue you need. The average value of a sale, which gives the number of sales. The proportion of enquiries that become sales, which gives the enquiries required. The proportion of visitors who enquire, which gives the traffic required.
A worked example. An illustration, not a benchmark.
Every figure below is invented for the purpose of showing the arithmetic. Substitute your own and ignore these entirely.
A business wants £120,000 of additional revenue. Its average sale is £2,400, so it needs 50 additional sales. It converts one enquiry in four, so it needs 200 enquiries. Two visitors in every hundred enquire, so it needs 10,000 additional visits.
What the chain tells you. Whether the plan is possible.
Ten thousand visits is a large number for a small local business and a modest one for a retailer. Seeing it at the start tells you whether the target needs a bigger budget, a better converting website or a smaller target.
Where the inputs come from. Your own records.
Not from any published average. Your average sale value and your close rate are facts about your business. Any figure you cannot evidence should be marked as an assumption in the plan.
Know Who You Are Selling To
A plan built on a vague audience wastes money in every channel it touches. That is not a slogan. It is the mechanism by which most marketing budgets leak.
Why vagueness is expensive. It compounds across channels.
An imprecise audience means broader targeting, which means paying to reach people who will never buy. It means content written for everybody, which persuades nobody in particular. It means an offer that does not address any specific objection, so the website converts poorly and the whole chain in block two worsens at once.
What the plan needs to contain. One profile, evidenced.
Who buys, what triggers the search, what they consider instead of you and what stops them. Written from evidence rather than from a meeting.
Where the method sits. Its own guide.
How to build that profile from customer records, sales conversations, reviews and search behaviour is in defining your target audience.
Establish Where You Are Now
You cannot plan from a position you have not measured. A plan written without knowing the current state is a plan built on somebody's impression of it.
What you need before writing anything. A baseline.
What the website currently produces, where visitors come from, which pages already earn traffic, whether enquiries are being tracked at all and how the business appears against its competitors.
Why this order matters. The plan changes.
A business that discovers its enquiry form has not been working for two months does not need a marketing plan this week. It needs the form fixed. That kind of finding reorders everything. It only surfaces if somebody looks first.
The awkward finding. Measurement is usually the problem.
More often than not the baseline exercise reveals that nobody can say which channel produced last year's enquiries, which means the plan cannot use last year as evidence.
Where the method sits. Its own guide.
The full sequence is in how to do a digital marketing audit.
Choosing Channels On Evidence
Channels get chosen because a competitor is visible there or because somebody read an article. Neither is evidence. Three questions decide it properly. A channel has to pass all three.
Is there measurable demand. Are people looking.
For search, this is answerable directly: either people search for what you sell or they do not. For social and display, the question becomes whether your audience is present in any quantity.
Can we reach it affordably. At our margin.
Demand can exist and cost more to reach than the sale is worth. A channel that works beautifully for a business with wide margins can be unusable for one selling at thin margins, which is why copying a competitor is unreliable.
Can we serve it once it arrives. The forgotten test.
A channel that produces fifty enquiries a week is a problem for a business that can answer ten. Capacity belongs in the channel decision rather than being discovered afterwards.
What to do with the answers. Write them in the plan.
Each chosen channel gets a line saying which tests it passed. That line is what protects the decision when somebody questions it in month four.
Sequence Matters More Than Selection
Choosing the right channels in the wrong order wastes most of the money anyway. Each step below makes the next one measurable, which is the dependency people miss.
First, the website and the measurement. Everything reports through these.
Until the site converts and enquiries are tracked, every channel spends money that cannot be evaluated. You will know what you spent and not what it produced.
Second, capture existing demand. It converts fastest.
People already searching for what you sell are the cheapest customers available, because the wanting already happened. This also produces early results, which buys patience for the slower steps.
Third, answer the buying questions. Content, in the ordinary sense.
What people need to know before choosing. This step gives every later channel something worth pointing at, which is why it precedes them rather than following.
Fourth, build demand. Social and video.
Reaching people before they are looking. Slow, hard to attribute and the thing that fills next year's pipeline.
Fifth, amplify with paid. Once you know what converts.
Advertising makes more of something happen. Running it first means paying to discover what the earlier steps would have shown you for nothing.
Budget And Resource
A plan that ignores who will do the work is a wish list. Budget is not only money. The half that gets forgotten is usually the half that stalls everything.
The two currencies. Money and time.
Money buys media, tools and other people's work. Time is what your own staff have available after the business they already run. A plan requiring four hours a week from somebody with none is a plan that will not happen.
What gets underestimated. Production.
Most small budgets count media spend and forget the cost of making what gets advertised. Photography, video, writing and design all cost something. Advertising with nothing worth showing performs accordingly.
The line to write down. An owner per action.
Every item in the plan gets a name against it. Anything without one will still be undone at the review.
Where the method sits. Its own guide.
Arriving at a defensible figure is covered in how to create a digital marketing budget.
Timelines And What To Expect When
Channels run on different clocks. A plan that expects them all to report on the same schedule will cancel the slow ones before they have done anything, which is the commonest way a sound plan fails.
Paid advertising. Immediate, then it stops.
Traffic on day one, enquiries within days if the site converts. It also ends the moment spending ends, leaving nothing behind.
Email. Fastest payback once a list exists.
Reaching people who already know you costs almost nothing per message. The constraint is having a list, which takes time to build.
Search and content. Compounding, across quarters.
Slow to start and it keeps working after the work stops. This is the channel most often abandoned just before it would have paid.
Social. Recall first, enquiries later.
Builds familiarity months before it produces anything measurable. Much of what it produces gets credited to search.
What to write in the plan. What should be visible, plus when.
At three months, at six and at twelve. Describe what should be observable rather than promising outcomes, since nobody can promise those.
Deciding What You Will Not Do
A small team can run two channels well or five badly. The second is the default, because saying no to a channel feels like missing out and saying yes costs nothing at the meeting.
Why exclusions belong in writing. The argument recurs.
Without a written decision, the same channel gets proposed every few months by somebody who read something. Each time, the discussion starts from nothing and the answer depends on who is in the room.
What to record. The channel and the reason.
Not simply that it was excluded. Why: no measurable demand, cannot reach it at our margin, no capacity to serve it, else nobody to run it. A reason can be revisited when it changes. A blank cannot.
What this protects. The channels you chose.
Every unplanned addition takes attention from something already running. Spreading effort is how two functioning channels become five that all underperform.
When to reopen it. When the reason stops being true.
Capacity increases, margins improve, somebody joins who can run it. Those are legitimate triggers. Each is visible against a written reason.
Measuring And Reviewing
Two rhythms. Confusing them causes most bad marketing decisions. Weekly recording is not the same activity as quarterly judgement.
What to record weekly. Facts, without conclusions.
Enquiries, where they came from, spend, anything published or launched. Recording is bookkeeping. It should take minutes and should not prompt any decision.
What to review quarterly. Whether the plan is working.
Trends across the quarter against the chain in block two. This is where channels get judged and money gets moved. It is deliberately infrequent.
Why the separation matters. Weekly numbers are noise.
A quiet week is a quiet week. Businesses that review weekly end up changing course monthly. A channel changed monthly never runs long enough to produce a readable result.
What a fair run means. Defined in advance.
Paid advertising can be judged within weeks. Search and content need quarters. Write the fair run for each channel into the plan, before anybody is impatient.
What to judge against. The commercial chain.
Enquiries and cost per enquiry rather than impressions. The detail is in return on marketing investment.
Writing It Down
Eight headings. If each has an answer underneath it, you have a plan. If any is blank, that is the next decision to make rather than a gap to fill later.
The commercial goal. The revenue number and the chain derived from it.
The audience. One profile, in a paragraph.
The starting position. What the baseline showed.
The chosen channels. Each with the three tests it passed.
The excluded channels. Each with its reason.
The sequence. What happens first, second and third.
The budget and the owners. Money, time and a name against each action.
The measures and the review date. What gets recorded, what gets judged and when.
Who sees it. Everybody doing any of it.
A plan held by one person is a plan nobody else can follow. It gets revisited quarterly and rewritten annually. The content strategy sitting under it is covered in what is a content strategy.
Common Mistakes
Each of these produces a document that looks like a plan and behaves like a list.
Starting with tactics. Beginning with what to do rather than what to achieve. Everything downstream then has no standard to be judged against.
No measurement in place. Writing a plan that depends on knowing which channel produced what, when nothing records it.
No owner named. Actions belonging to the business rather than to a person. These are the items still outstanding at every review.
Budgeting media without production. Money to promote things, none to make them. The advertising then promotes whatever already existed.
Changing course monthly. Reacting to weekly noise. No channel gets long enough to produce a readable result, so nothing is ever proven either way.
Copying a competitor. Their margins, capacity and starting position are invisible to you. A channel that works at their economics can be unaffordable at yours. The whole picture is on the digital marketing guide.
