How To Create a Digital Marketing Plan

As an economic developer, you are your community’s hero. You fight the good fight to bring in jobs, investment, improve quality of life, and solve workforce challenges. If there’s an issue - you’re the hero standing in the breach.

We understand you’re busy. So the idea of coming up with a digital marketing plan from scratch and on your own can be more than overwhelming. But Golden Shovel Agency has your back. We can assist you with the steps to success and be the tool in your hand so you’re prepared to win - every time.

Creating a Digital Marketing Plan

When starting a digital marketing plan, or identifying if your current plan is effective, start with these six tasks.

#1 Identify Your Target Audience

Who are you writing your content for, or who would you like to see it? Everything you say should come down to this. Whether you’re delivering content through a blog, newsletter, social media, or video, it needs to target that specific audience. If you listed more than one audience, let’s go back and prioritize them to identify which are most important. Some ideas to get you started include site selectors, current business owners, prospective business owners, community members, and prospective workforce.

#2 Decide What You Want to Be Known For

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of information on the Internet, and your competitors aren’t being silent. Due to all the noise, you need to be very specific and direct if you want to be noticed. If you make any web visitors think extra or read more than necessary, you aren’t going to be worth their time.

That’s why you need to determine what you want to be known for and stick to that message. What do you know well? What makes you different and better than your competitors? Start by focusing on that.

#3 Determine Specific Topics to Cover in Your Strategic Plan

Here’s where you’ll start unwrapping your answer to question #2. Create a list of topics that you want to publish content on and sort them into key categories. For example, if you are focusing on your prime location, you could break that down into categories for workforce attraction, business attraction, quality of life, etc. Get your content written, then go ahead and strategically schedule it throughout your calendar.

#4 Get Your Message Out with Difference Platforms

There are a lot of different ways you can share content digitally. First and foremost, share it on your website in your “News” or “Blog” section. It’s important this stays current and is updated frequently. If it’s outdated, web visitors’ perception of your organization could be one that’s stuck in the past, underfunded, or inactive.

After adding the content to your website, you’ll want to share it on social media. We recommend choosing one to three social media platforms to focus your resources and energy. Any more, and it’s overwhelming. Plus, we’re going to assume that most of your target audience isn’t on every single platform. Choose the ones they are on, and be consistent on those. For economic development organizations, we’ve found Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to be the most effective.

#5 Assign Someone to Be in Charge

Having your digital marketing planned out isn’t enough. Someone needs to be in charge of developing, editing, publishing, distributing, and watching analytics for the content produced. Does your team have the bandwidth to successfully implement your plan, or is a third-party partner a better way to go to get those results you want? This is a very important part of your strategic plan, so you want to get it right.

Lucky for you, this is something Golden Shovel Agency excels in. Our strategic marketing plans provide insight, data, and a roadmap for how to reach the right audience with your message and solutions.

#6 Track Engagement and Measure Effectiveness

Finally, how will you know if all this hard work is paying off? Do you know which metrics to track and measure? There are tools and software you can use to deliver the reports to want and need. These include things like Google Analytics and Lead Forensics to track website visitors, social media analytics to see the performance of your posts, and more!

Other questions will surely come up during this process as you plan and develop your digital marketing plan, but if you start with these six tasks, they will definitely get you up on your feet with a thought-out marketing plan. Also, know that you are never alone with things like this. We are more than happy to be that tool in your toolbox!

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