How to start building a modern digital marketing plan

It doesn’t take many sentences to explain the amount of disruption in search marketing in the season (or era?) we’re currently in.

Google is currently making rapid changes to organic and paid search that are creating excitement and confusion. New AI profiles, leaked information, and a potential OpenAI search engine are disrupting our careers. Additionally, changes to privacy laws and attribution challenges are adding complexity.

With so much going on, it can be overwhelming to keep up. It's important to have a clear plan linked to your strategy so you don't get distracted by new trends like AI or ignore the changes and get left behind. “Planning” may sound boring, but it's essential to a solid digital strategy.

To support this theme, I recently published my first book, Digital Marketing Success Plan, which details my personal story, process, and “how to” content centered around what I call the “START” planning process, detailing five steps to follow.

1. Strategy

The first phase of the START plan is strategy, where we understand the current state of your business and determine the goals you want to achieve through your digital marketing.

This is where you'll address everything from setting goals, mapping marketing metrics to business outcomes, and reviewing past marketing activities and expectations before moving on to the next stage of the planning process.

For some companies, this step is completed with thorough research, business intelligence data, and financial information backed up end-to-end through CRM and other platforms.

In other cases, companies have spent years (with good intentions) adding digital marketing channels but haven’t connected all the dots on attribution and ROI.

No matter the size of your company, there’s never been a better time to ensure all levels, teams and stakeholders are aligned on the end goal of digital marketing (and perhaps marketing more broadly).

Then, work backwards from there, considering all the possible tactics and methods to achieve the goals and overall strategy you have defined.

2. Tactics

The next stage is tactical, where you consider all the possibilities for reaching your goal, plan your business outcomes, and think flexibly about how to achieve them.

We use cutting edge research and estimation tools to evaluate all the potential channels and networks you can leverage (SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn sponsored content, etc.) to find opportunities to reach your target audience.

This is how strategy comes to life. Tactics are never the strategy itself or more important than the strategy. They are the actions that drive you to achieve and exceed your goals.

You should also consider your own biases towards certain channels based on your experience, expertise, or personal feelings.

In some cases, LinkedIn may be better than Google Ads, or you may need programmatic display to support your customer journey in hidden ways that you might not even realize are there.

Actively consider all channels and opportunities, conducting the necessary research and forecasting to ensure they align with your strategy and goals.

3. Application

The third phase of the START planning approach is application, which is the stage where you plan for the assets, big and small, that you need to get your house in order (or build it).

Create an inventory list of all the tactics you want or have defined, including creating the ads, graphics, web pages, copy and other assets needed to make your campaign successful.

At this point, you might be tempted to start creating new ads or landing pages, or thinking about creative with a defined set of strategies and tactics.

At this stage, I would caution you to stick to identifying things and not start creating new ones, as many good strategies stall at this stage and plans never come to fruition.

Acquiring the assets needed to launch or expand a plan takes time and money. If you jump right into designing or building something new without properly identifying what you're doing and going back to the “why” (strategic and tactical stages), you could end up doing costly work right away or postponing the launch of your plan indefinitely.

4. Review

The fourth phase is review, where you define the aspects needed to manage and measure success and hold the plan accountable.

This means you need to create performance measurement dashboards and systems that are tied to your bottom-line ROI equation, roll-up performance, channel performance, and resource measurement.

This stage also involves setting up a project management system and fine-tuning a resource planning platform to manage the work. Finally, benchmarks, budgets, reports, and overall roles are finalized.

This phase may seem obvious, but I have seen many systems over the years, including dashboards and resource managers, some fully customized and some out of the box.

Either way, the full picture of digital marketing ROI is often not tracked, leaving gaps that must be filled with guesswork or CFOs cross-checking investment figures.

You need to avoid gaps and make sure your system covers the full cost of digital marketing, including in-house personnel, contractors, agencies, software, advertising costs, and more.

If you don’t take these things into account, you could find yourself in a difficult situation in future meetings with executives or investors who don’t understand the full ROI you’ve calculated.

5. Transformation

The final stage of the START plan is transformation. This final stage schedules tactics to be subordinate to the overall strategy.

Create a comprehensive calendar of tactics, optimization processes, agile strategies, and reporting cycles. Also plan across milestones, flights, content pushes, experiments, tasks, and assignments.

Again, you may have years of experience in SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing, email marketing, programmatic, etc. You may have great success stories and consolidated, consistent results. I love to hear those stories.

But I would encourage you to consider that if you are seeing good results, it is most likely the result of focused effort and not sporadic stops to manage and get it done.

Regardless of your position, make sure resources are planned, tactics and action plans are scheduled, and plans are controlled.

Many things will happen to your company: new products and services, new customer segments, new competitors, new industry technologies, changes in search engines, the emergence of AI, and so on.

Be agile and flexible enough to have a documented plan that can be revisited and adapted at multiple levels so that the plan doesn't become outdated or abandoned just a few months into the effort.

Get started on your path to digital marketing success

Whether you follow the steps in the START plan or adapt it to your own strategy and planning process, we strongly encourage you to reexamine your current plan. Make sure your plan is objective, specific, actionable, and accountable.

A plan isn't a plan if it's in one person's head or if it's understood differently by multiple people. Things are changing quickly. Make a plan that stays on track, is adaptable, and can handle change.

My main goal is to ensure that whether you’re a digital marketing company or an agency doing digital marketing on behalf of your clients, you’re making smart, ROI-driven, responsible investments.

Google, their software, their agencies, their employees are paid and will take your money whether your digital marketing works or not, and we hope that you can make your digital marketing successful with a solid plan.