Do you have a business plan for your digital marketing agency? If not, you’re missing out on a brilliant tool to help you structure growth and progress over time.
Many people think of creating a business plan as being a tedious, time-consuming process. The truth is, it can take a couple of weeks or even months to perfect your plan. However, with the right knowledge in place, you can create a killer digital marketing business plan with relative ease.
We’re here to share that knowledge with you and get you on the right track.
In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about why business planning is so important, how to create your own digital marketing agency business plan, and how to implement it for ongoing success.
What is a Business Plan?
A business plan is a detailed document that creates a picture of your agency as it is today and details your growth plan over the next three or five years. Your business plan will structure and explain your key business goals and your strategies for how to reach them.
Most plans include plenty of market research to support these strategies and provide proof that they will provide the results you want to see.
Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Business Plan?
Your digital marketing business plan should include your key short-term and long-term goals and digital strategies. It should also cover an analysis of your competitor landscape, and other information like budgets, timelines, the channels you aim to target, and more.
Your business plan will act like a roadmap that shows you exactly what you need to do to work towards your desired path. You probably already know where you want to get to, and your plan will supply you with a specific, logical route to take to get there.
You’ll also need a complete business plan to secure funding and attract investors and stakeholders. Virtually all businesses use a business plan to obtain funding from investors. So, the clearer and more convincing your plan is, the more likely people will be to invest time and money into your venture.
Of course, your plan should include a projected marketing budget that will show you exactly how much you need to spend to market your services effectively to the right audiences. If you can get your brand in front of your target market without breaking the bank, you’ll be in a great position to maintain profitability in the long run.
Common Business Plan Structures
A business plan usually contains a scope of between one and three years – and in some cases, up to five years. Most business plan structures include sections for sources of revenue, cost management strategies, new service development strategies, marketing budgets, and projected profitability figures.
They also include existing financial performance reviews, objectives, and strategies to achieve them, and your value proposition. Along with sales and marketing tactics, operational strategies, financial forecasts, hiring and staffing strategies, and any foreseen potential challenges.
The purpose of a good plan is to align your goal opportunities with strategic activity, resources, and effort to achieve your desired growth. Luckily, there are plenty of templates available online that break down your digital marketing business plan into simple, easy-to-understand categories. This helps to ensure that you include all the information you need without leaving anything crucial out.
How Do I Develop My Digital Marketing Strategy?
There are five key stages to developing your agency’s digital marketing strategy.
Step 1: Planning
Every solid digital marketing strategy needs a plan. We highly recommend using data to assess the efficacy of your current marketing practices and develop tactics to improve them.
You can craft a plan using KPI dashboards, customised analytics, and SMART goals to craft a step-by-step improvement strategy for your digital marketing, lead generation, and sales approaches.
Step 2: Reaching out to leads
Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to enhance your marketing funnel by reaching out to as many leads as possible and building awareness of your agency. Use the latest, most effective online marketing approaches like paid advertising and SEO to drive traffic to your site.
Step 3: Take action
By this, we mean interacting meaningfully with your target audience through your website and social channels to generate as many quality leads as possible. Once you’ve reached your audience, take action to guide them through your marketing funnel towards making a purchase.
Content marketing is especially effective in this regard. It helps to entertain, educate, and engage potential leads, helping to persuade them to become customers.
Step 4: Convert your leads
Strategies like nurturing leads, optimising your conversion rates, and retargeting past customers are all excellent ways to convince your leads to become loyal customers.
You should consider using website personalisation and social commerce to your advantage. Data shows that 87% of eCommerce shoppers use social media to help them make purchase decisions!
Step 5: Engage your customers
Now that you’ve successfully transformed leads into customers, there are many ways to increase sales from them by keeping them engaged in the long term. Use tools like personalised website, email, and social media communications using customer data to create customised marketing campaigns.
You can obtain this data using A/B testing, customer personas and content mapping, customer feedback, website surveys, and more. Predictive analytics tools are also great for finding out the best times to engage with your customers and follow up with them.
How Do I Create My Business Plan?
As we mentioned earlier, we’re big fans of using business plan templates to structure digital marketing efforts and strategies. Using a template is the best way to ensure that you include every piece of information you need to secure funding from investors and drive your agency forward.
Your plan should include:
- An executive summary
- Company overview
- Industry analysis
- Customer and competitive analyses
- Marketing and operations plans
- Management team structures
- Financial plans
- Balance sheets and a cash flow statement
- An appendix and summary
How Do I Successfully Implement My Business Plan?
Once you have your business plan in hand, it’s time to gather your team and inform them of the details. Additionally, you can share any metrics (like sales or conversions) that need to be prioritised. Establish timelines and milestones for reaching these goals.
Delegate tasks and responsibilities to the right team members and create systems that will allow you to measure your results and progress. Remember to schedule regular business plan review sessions as well. This is a working document that will need to be updated frequently as your goals and the greater market shift.
A Plan For Progress
Every agency needs a strong digital marketing business plan to structure and guide its progress towards its greater goals. Use our tips to create a complete, comprehensive plan that will secure your success.