Strategic Plan
A strategic plan is a summary of everything we plan to do and hope to achieve over the course of the client’s online marketing campaign. It guides our actions and lets us know whether we are succeeding or failing.
The more specific our strategy is, the more effective the execution will be. We ensure our strategic plans are concise, defines the main aim of the client’s online presence and sets the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it.
It’s also important to note that strategic plans are constantly changing. As new trends emerge, we may want to add them to our plans. As we attain goals, we will need to set new targets. Unexpected challenges will arise that we may need to address. And, as the client scales their business, we might need to add new roles or grow their online presence for different branches or regions. As such, we have to make sure to always review strategic plans and adjust them to reflect the latest latest insights.
Strategic Plan Template
Use our Strategic Plan template to help draft a client’s SEO campaign strategy. Our strategic plan templates are structured to:
- Clarify the client’s objectives
- Audit their current online status
- Determine market segmentation, targeting and positioning
- Create or improve their profiles
- Formulate strategies and programs
- Establish analytics requirements to track progress
- Ensure campaign in sync with marketing initiatives
Objectives
The Audit Report prepared in the Research stage delivers a clear picture of the client’s visibility, traffic, engagement and conversions. We use this information to define the client’s objectives and establish performance KPIs to benchmark our efforts on their campaign.
The objectives as set out in the strategic plan need to establish what the client wants to gain from their campaign.
- Is it to build brand awareness?
- Is it sales leads or perhaps direct sales?
- Drive traffic to their website?
- Influence the conversation?
- Product research? User data?
The list goes on and on but before we start any activity we should set clear objectives and gain buy-in from the business and its stakeholders for those. Remember that we have to be able to tell if our objectives have been met. Set clear metrics and devise a reporting structure.
Once established, we adhere to them for three to six months. We then evaluate the results. If some of our objectives don’t pan out, we tweak them and give it another three to six months. That gives us enough time to test our objectives while allowing us to find the best methods quickly.
It is recommended to organize our objectives in the following manner:
Business Objectives
The primary goal and two or three lower-level goals of the campaign. There is no right answer here. Just pick one. For example:
- Prospecting: Generate leads for follow-up by sales and marketing teams.
- Sales: Help sales team close sales more quickly.
- Marketing: Generate interest in their products.
- PR: Build and repair public opinion about their brand and products.
- Community: Develop friends and fans who interact with their brand socially.
- Customer support: Help customers get the most from their products.
Benchmark
The standard against which our campaign will be assessed for future results and measure growth.
Desired Outcome
The exact outcome the client would like to see or percentage improvement.
Business Impact
The reason why the client would like to achieve each goal.
Timeframe
A realistic time frame for achieving each goal.
Audience
Identifying the client’s audience and their interests enables us to determine how best we can reach and engage with them online, as well as prioritize content that would appeal to them. For this, we need to understand the client’s core audience (personas, profiles, demographics etc.) and identify any new customer types (loyal, existing, potential) that we want to attract based on the client’s products/services.
The truth about marketing is that if we target everyone, we’ll hit no one. So we always need to make sure to refine the client’s target audience group as much as possible but ensure that it is large enough to ensure we meet our online marketing objectives. Defining a target audience involves segmenting them in the following groups:
Demographic segmentation – age, location, gender, income level, marital or family status, occupation, ethnic background, etc.
Psychographic segmentation – personality, attitudes, values, interests/hobbies, lifestyles, online and purchasing behaviour, etc.
When identifying a client’s audience, we want to be able to answer such questions as:
- What is their demographic profile?
- What language or languages do they speak?
- Where are they geographically located? At a regional, national or international level? In what countries?
- How and where can we reach them?
- What keywords are used to look for the client’s products or services?
- What are the navigation and consumption preferences of the client’s target market?
- What is the seasonality of the client’s sector? When is the high season? And the low season?
- What do they want? What are their needs that aren’t being met?
Seasonality Map
Results from campaigns will fluctuate over the course of its life cycle. There are several reasons why this happens but one reason can be due that the client’s business is seasonal.
We develop a seasonality map to anticipate broad seasonal trends and recurring external factors such as industry or social events. It allows us to plan ahead and optimize the campaign intelligently where we can target specific product/service categories in periods that exhibit best opportunity.
A great starting point for forecasting seasonal trends is by using Google Trends. Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages over a certain time period.
