Sanity-Check Your Strategy with This Digital Marketing Checklist

What makes a promising digital marketing strategy? How do you know if your marketing campaigns are working? What should be in place before any campaign launch?

Stop wondering and whip your marketing efforts into shape with this handy marketing checklist.

 Quick-and-Easy Marketing Campaign Checklist

• Deep understanding of your target audience: All good communication starts with understanding, and your marketing should communicate with your would-be clients in a way that’s uniquely better than the competition. To achieve that, you have to know your target market.

Engage in audience persona exercises to visualize your clients, the problems they’re trying to solve with your services, and the barriers that might stop them from choosing you. If you have the time and resources, engage in market research, which can be as simple and cost-effective as asking your current clients why they chose your services. Then, knowing what you know about your audience, you’ll be ready to craft a message that hits home.

• A tight, well-honed list of keywords: Once you know your audience, you can start to imagine the search terms they’ll use to find your services. There are free keyword research tools that’ll help you find keywords that have a high-ish monthly search volume (MSV) with a low-ish keyword difficulty (KD) score that ranks their competitiveness.

Decide on 1 main keyword for your home page and 3-4 supporting keywords. Then, a specific keyword for each service page. If local audiences are important, include local search terms. Use your keywords throughout your website copy – especially in headlines, page titles, meta titles, and descriptions.

• A beautiful, functional website: Speaking of websites, you’ll need a great one. It should be recent and relevant, with keywords and phrases that tell the reader you understand their problems and how to solve them.

Your website design should be updated with crisp images and a fresh layout. And it needs to function perfectly – no slow-loading pages, no missing links, no half-loaded images. Make sure it’s optimized for mobile devices, too.

• A regularly-updated blog: While you’re conducting your keyword research, note any keywords that might make good blog topics. See what your competitors are blogging about, too. Read reviews (of your services and your competitors’) to understand what problems you solve for clients and how they talk about them.

Then, distill all of that fact-finding into a 12-month content calendar that hinges on a regularly-updated blog. We recommend blogging at least once per month – more, if possible! Use your content calendar like a blog post checklist that includes topics, the keyword each post is targeting, and a brief outline. That way, you’re never stuck for ideas and you feel in control of your content. After a post is live, you can use it as newsletter and social media fodder. Don’t be afraid to share different snippets from the same post throughout the month on your social media channels.

• Active social media accounts: When creating your content calendar, draft a social media marketing strategy as well. Write a brief description of the social media posts to include every month, and shoot to post several times per week across all of your social media platforms.
• Email campaigns for clients and new leads: If you’ve done it right, your website will be a lead generation tool that’ll help you guide target customers toward taking an action. Ideally, that action would be to call or fill out a form or become a customer. But signing up for blog post updates and monthly newsletters is a great outcome, too.

However you gather leads’ email addresses, you can use them in your email marketing. Create specific “nurture” email series for each type of lead – common categories include the service they use, how they found your website, how long they’ve been a customer, or how long it’s been since they engaged your services. Email campaigns should be as personal as possible, even if you’ve set them up to send automatically (like when a lead completes a form).

• Newsletters for clients: Aim to send out newsletters at regular intervals – weekly, monthly, or quarterly – so readers know when to expect your correspondence. That way, you stay on their radar, and they never forget about your services.

Even though your newsletter is a marketing tactic, the contents should be less about marketing activities and more about giving readers high-quality news, tips, updates, and advice. Return to those blog topic ideas and highlight topics that interest your readers. Share content from around the web that you’ve found interesting, useful, or helpful. Think of your newsletter as a way to remind clients that you’re a widely-read expert in the field with your finger on the pulse of your industry.

• Reviews and “social proof”: As your marketing plan swings into action, you can ask clients to write Google reviews and rate your services. Or they can simply reply to an email with some glowing words about your company. When you have reviews, add them in a social proof section on your home page and include them in your social media posts.
• Measure campaign success: You won’t know whether your marking campaign is working unless you keep track of marketing metrics. Decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most and track them monthly.
• Integrity and authenticity: You can’t win hearts and change minds (or win accounts and change your sales trajectory) without a marketing campaign that’s infused with authenticity. Readers know when you sound fake or too corporate, so try to have some fun with your brand personality. Post pictures of real users when possible and include videos and images of your actual employees when appropriate. Just be real, and you’ll be surprised to find how well readers respond to it.

Need Help from a Skilled Marketing Team?

A launch checklist helps you stay on track, but if you’re already busy running your business, you might need an extra set of hands to help you kickstart your content marketing and hit those marketing objectives.

We can oversee your strategy from draft strategy to well-oil marketing machine, creating digital content and printed marketing materials that support your plan. Let’s talk about your strategy and start crossing some items off that marketing checklist: 610.725.0702.