When you first start to plan out your E-commerce business you’re going to need a well thought out and efficient digital marketing strategy plan. A digital marketing strategy lays the foundation of your ongoing digital marketing activities. It is the first step in getting the most effective and optimized online marketing activities. Without a digital marketing strategy plan in place you will not have the defined goals necessary in order to drive your business growth online. 

A digital marketing strategy should define any transformations required in order to implement your marketing objectives. It should make a case for investment in your digital marketing activities, and how to get the best ROI. 

In this blog we are going to: 

• Create & Build a digital marketing strategy plan
• Laydown the groundwork for growth 
• Trust the process and get started!
  
  

Creating & Building The Marketing Plan

Set Goals & Objectives

A great tool you can use to get started and set you up for success is by implementing a S.M.A.R.T goal.

What is a S.M.A.R.T goal? This acronym helps break down specific key areas to help us get a better overall picture of our goals and how to achieve them. It’s important we remember to be as specific and realistic as possible at this stage. Ultimately, when we start to get specific it will help us answer important questions like the “Wh” questions (who, what, when, where, why and how).

Specific

Being specific is important, when setting up objectives you want to make sure you can be as specific as you can to make your objective more realistic and easier to stick to. For example, my goals of “making money” and “getting good marketing conversion rates”, are not very specific objectives. You want to get much more specific and make your objective something more focused and easy to follow. So if my objective is  “making money and getting good marketing conversion rates” I can say something like “I am going to increase sales during the slower quarters by X%” or “I am going to increase email conversion rates by X%”.

Measurable

How will you know if you have achieved your objective? If you don’t know how to measure your achievement, then your objectives are not going to mean much. If my objective is making money how does one measure this? What we can do is check how much revenue is being generated  but even that does not tell us the whole story. If we want to make money what we really want is to make a profit. So a better way to make this objective more measurable is calculating total profit which would be by subtracting the total revenue by the total expense to achieve a profit. 

Achievable

In order to be efficient and stay motivated our objectives we set should be realistic and achievable. Having realistic expectations will improve our chances of achieving success. However our objectives should not be too easy nor too hard. They should also be able to help us think wisely about how these objectives will be achieved (given certain circumstances) and ways to bring us closer to our goals. 

Relevant

The goals we set should be relevant to the business as well as align with other goals. Some questions to ask yourself are:

• Will achieving this goal help further the success of the business?
• Does achieving this goal assist other aspects and objects of the business?
• Is the amount of work and resources needed to achieve this goal worth it?

The answers to all of these questions should undoubtedly be “yes”. These questions are important to ask ourselves because it will help us avoid wasted efforts, resources and time.

Timebound

This final step is to ensure we set up time frames and have our priorities in order. Setting up and following through on a scheduled time frame to accomplish our smaller goals will ultimately help us get to our final destination faster and more efficiently.  

Mission Statement and Value Proposition 

• What’s the purpose of this business?
• What value does this business bring to people?
• What exactly does this business do or doesn’t do?

These are some of the questions that need to be answered when preparing a mission statement and value proposition. There needs to be a clear mission that brings value to people for the best chance of success.

Target customers, personas & markets

Know your target audience. It is essential that we know our audience and who we are choosing to target. The best way to figure out our audience is to know the following:

• Geographic location
• Age ranges
• Gender breakdown
• Purchasing Power

Situation Analysis

This stage is where you want to figure out your business situation as a whole. Analyze the business in its current state, the competition and the overall marketing plan that is going to lead the business to meet your goals and objectives. You want to make sure you completely understand where your business stands and what needs to be done. Research and conduct an analysis that will provide a clear consensus of the situation you’re in.

Pricing and Positioning strategy

Proper research is required to set accepted and profitable pricing. There needs to be a balance between setting prices that work well for your customers and that can bring the business profits. You need to make sure you are providing real value and not overpricing products to your audience, especially because of how relatively easy it is to do price comparisons now. Testing and adjusting throughout the product’s life cycle is always an option but doing a little research first will help in the long run.

Distribution and Fulfillment Plan

Have a clear understanding of your fulfillment and distribution requirements. Options range from packing and shipping yourself, overseeing a team, or utilizing a third party fulfillment service like Amazon FBA and FedEx fulfillment. Even if you start small, you should know your distribution and fulfillment options and whether your fulfillment processes can meet the market’s demand. Once a plan is settled, it would be a good idea to spend time further enhancing and evolving your plan over time especially as you start growing.

Laying The Groundwork For Growth

By this point you should have a very clear understanding of all key areas, attributes and obstacles that define your business and all the aspects involved. If you’re a small business starting out this is when you start laying down the groundwork for growth and if you’re a more established business this is how to accelerate your growth.

Determine your sales & lead generation strategy 

There are numerous ways to market your business and quite frankly, the possibilities are almost endless, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although there are numerous strategies and techniques to market your business, in this blog I will highlight some of the most well known strategies with proven track records.  

A sales funnel is a strategy and tool that is widely used with businesses to market their products and services. A sales funnel essentially has 3 stages (but can be more complex) that starts a path from awareness to interest to desire to action. Each stage of the process includes notes about the specific marketing strategies that are deployed to get customers through that funnel. The top of the funnel is where you’ll see brand awareness strategies like posting organic social content programmatic display ads – these generally don’t often produce immediate conversions. The bottom of the funnel you’ll see strategies like google search advertisements and direct email communication.

You want to consider the purpose of every campaign strategy and where it fits in your funnel. In the next section we will look at some other strategies and tactics that can bear positive results. 

Get technology and reporting software

• Is the technology I’m using to track my marketing efforts adequate?
• Can it be used to determine if the KPI’s I’m seeking to improve are working?
• Will it help determine the ROI of our actions?

If the answer to these questions is “yes” then that’s great but it is still a good idea to double check. If the answer to these questions is “no” then a change must be considered before deploying a marketing strategy.

A well know tool is Google Data Studio (free + paid options)

The amount of marketing channels seems to be only increasing so the tool you decide to use to track that information needs to be sufficient. The tools are out there and with a little research there are even several free resources that you can help.

Start with conversions

When you’re first starting out, it is recommended to start with certain bottom-of-the-funnel strategies designed to close sales and push customers over the finish line. Then once you’re comfortable with the initial results, continue to roll out your entire marketing strategies.

Test the waters 

It’s always a good idea to set aside part of your marketing budget to test new strategies. You’ll never know what works well and what doesn’t until you do some trial and error. Be cautious of where your money is being spent, however depending on your budget, running some simple tests in smaller markets can provide fruitful results and justify a budget increase and/or open the door to an entirely new market opportunity. 

Refine & expand your ecommerce marketing strategy

At this stage you’ve gotten off the ground and seen some positive momentum! You have a good understanding of what’s working, what’s not, what needs improvement and the opportunities that still exist. There will be no point where you come to a dead end and exhaust all options, that can be assured. Refine and ramp up your initial strategies. Having a proven ROI, it’s time to increase your budget and scale up!

Trust the process and get started today!

It can most definitely seem overwhelming to create an e-commerce digital marketing strategy plan, especially with no prior experience in this field. Take things slow and don’t rush and make haste decisions, that will only lead to disappointment. If you feel overwhelmed, take it step by step, break things down into smaller chunks to bring your focus to key areas then move on. People may tell you the world of e-commerce is oversaturated but I can assure you there is room in this space for everyone to win as long as you make informed decisions and do your research! 

E-commerce is only going to get bigger and more widely adopted in the years to come. Truly there is no better time to start than now. Trust the process and get started today!  

If you’re interested in learning some important tips for your startup, I have written a blog about 3 import tips for your E-commerce startup.

By Michael Chaya (2022/03/21) Content marketing analyst at The International Institute of Digital Marketing ™