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How to Plan for Your 2021 Digital Marketing Needs
Are you putting together next year’s marketing budget, trying to navigate the coronavirus minefield? Wondering how much to spend, what channels to use, and what your messaging should be?
Here are nine things to consider when developing out your own digital marketing plan.
1. COVID’s Impact on Your Business, Industry, and Customers
Despite the rollout of the vaccine, it will still be months—some say the end of 2021—before things “get back to normal.” Even when they do, your customers will have changed; they’ll have new skills, new comfort levels around technology, and new expectations. How can you prepare?
What trends have you seen so far? Will there be pent up demand for your offerings, or will people have “had their fill?”
2. Your Digital Marketing Budget
How much should you spend this coming year? The Small Business Administration recommends 7% – 8% of gross revenue for marketing and advertising for businesses doing less than 5 million in sales and a net profit of 10% – 12%.
Businesses in their early stages may need to spend upwards of 20%.
3. What’s Your Message in 2021?
Consider your focus…and focus on that. Whatever part of your business you want to grow, it should be a primary navigation item, multiple blog posts, podcasts, and/or webinars. Target supporting keywords on Google Ads. Target appropriate people with Facebook Ads. Put your energy into being the expert on this topic.
4. Which Channels Should You Use in 2021?
Digital is more critical than ever. The customer journey was already moving online, but COVID sped that process up.
Spend time determining how customers are finding you currently and double down on those channels.
5. What Marketing Tools Should You Be Using?
At flyte, we’re upgrading to a CRM (customer relationship management) platform that offers marketing automation and email marketing tools.
In addition, I’ve been leveraging LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to reach more potential clients.
What tools will help you reach more people and move them down the sales funnel more efficiently?
6. What Experiments Can You Run?
You should constantly be experimenting with channels, messaging, A/B split tests, reporting tools, processes, and more.
7. What Type of Planning Should You Do?
I sit down each month to review our numbers with my Director of Marketing and Director of Operations. I work with an outside firm to help us with budgeting, utilization, and help us determine how many calls, leads, and sales we need to make our numbers.
8. What Are Your KPIs? What Are You Reporting On?
Know your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators.) Is it about traffic? Time on site? Engagement? Leads? Sales?
Pull your KPIs into a Google Analytics dashboard or Google Data Studio report.
9. Walk Before You Can Run
If this is all new to you, don’t try and do everything at once. Choose a few of the items that will have the biggest impact and start there.