Creating a Digital Marketing Roadmap: 7 Steps, Tips, and FREE Template

The Effective Way to Keep on Track with Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

For a digital marketing campaign to be successful, it must be planned to achieve your content marketing goals. However, this is not enough. It’s crucial for your whole team to be onboard. They must know what the plan is and understand the part they play. Even though you know your digital strategy like the back of your hand, your team needs help to get to the same level.

Welcome to the digital marketing roadmap.

What is a digital marketing roadmap?

A digital marketing roadmap is a tool that brings your content marketing strategy to life. It’s a visual depiction of your goals. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the stats about visual learning back this up:

• Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text

• 65% of people retain visual learning in their memory after three days ─ compared to only 10% of what they read

• Visuals have been found to improve retention by up to 400%

Why is a digital marketing strategy roadmap important?

A roadmap for digital marketing will help your employees, marketing teams, and other stakeholders and third parties to process your digital marketing goals, and to envisage how different tools and digital marketing channels are used to promote your company and its products or services. This high-level approach will also help to make all those involved feel a part of the conversation.

The benefits of using such a roadmap include:

• Onboarding and aligning your team with your digital marketing strategy, your digital marketing plan, and marketing campaigns. They’ll be able to see how they fit in and gain a greater appreciation for the work that needs to be done (deadlines and deliverables).
• A marketing roadmap template will help to improve the coordination of your digital marketing efforts, providing clarity around each team member’s specific function, role, tasks, and responsibilities in the project.
• A marketing roadmap removes confusion surrounding complex strategies and marketing plans and helps to prioritize tasks.
• It keeps an open line of communication regarding direction and progress to internal teams and management.
• A digital marketing roadmap helps to keep work on schedule across the marketing team.
• It provides visibility and transparency around marketing campaigns, keeping individuals, teams, and stakeholders informed about the next steps, forthcoming marketing activities, and so on.

In short, an effective marketing roadmap will ensure that people understand their roles and the plan, progress is tracked, and results are achieved while taking work efficiency to another level.

What are the elements of a digital marketing roadmap?

A digital marketing roadmap is a detailed plan that outlines the goals of the marketing strategy and how to achieve them. It includes all aspects of digital marketing, such as:

• Social media

• Search engine optimization

• Paid advertising

• Content creation (video, blog posts, etc.)

• Email campaigns

To be effective, it’s crucial to include the following five elements in your digital marketing strategy roadmap:

• Strategy

Your digital marketing goals and how you will attract your target audience to create your desired outcomes.

• Initiatives

High-level programs or campaigns that support those team goals.

• Timeframe

How long each marketing campaign will last, and what needs to be done while in progress.

• Activities

The tactics you plan to use to achieve your marketing goals (e.g., SEO, social media, paid ads, email marketing, etc.).

Steps to build a roadmap for digital marketing

Now you understand why you need a roadmap for digital marketing, and the benefits it brings, let’s look at the seven steps to develop your digital roadmap from our free template.

A roadmap is a business plan that helps you to decide where to go and how to get there. It is used for both short-term goals and long-term objectives.

Step #1: Detail your marketing strategy

The first step is to establish your business goals for your digital marketing, define your target audience, and conduct some competitor analysis. At this stage, we can summarize what you must do as follows:

• Establish your goals

• Determine your target audience

• Analyze your competitors

• Learn competitors’ SEO keywords

• Discover SERP information

• Figure out how much competitors are spending on advertising

• Identify gaps in competitors’ marketing that you can exploit

• Learn what competitors’ Facebook ad campaigns look like

Step #2: Boost your website to align with your goals and target audience

As the digital world is moving towards a more globalized, interconnected, and personalized space, it is important for brands to adapt to these contemporary trends. 

You must define the goals of your website. What are you trying to achieve with this site? What do you want the visitor’s experience to be like? What will they take away from the site? Defining clear goals will help you answer these questions and know what direction you should take when designing or updating your site. Our tip here is to focus on:

• Building a functional and engaging site

• Delivering accurate messaging

• Ensuring quality copy

• Providing an engaging user experience (UX)

Step #3: Ensure your site and content is search engine optimized (SEO)

You’ll waste all the time and effort you’ve expanded in step #2 if your SEO is poor and your ranking is low.

Great SEO makes your website easier for the search engines to crawl through it and index it correctly ─ and this boosts your on-page ranking, which means your target audience is more likely to find you online.

The elements you must address are:

• Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website ‘behind the scenes’ to rank better in search engine results pages. This includes the use of technical on-page optimization techniques such as XML sitemaps, site structure, and HTML code. It includes things like site architecture, page speed, site security, and more.

• Keyword strategy for content

Keyword strategy is one of the most crucial factors for successful content. Keywords are words or phrases that are used to find content on a search engine.

If you have a keyword strategy in place, you can start writing your content with a clear focus on what your target audience wants to read about. This will make it easier for readers to find your content and will also help you rank higher in organic search results.

Step #4: Content planning and creation

Content is the ultimate way of engaging with a customer and telling them your story in all your marketing initiatives. It’s the best way to get your message across. Content is king.

It’s also important to keep in mind that we are living in the era of social media. Content marketing needs to be social as well, meaning it needs to be shared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

The marketer goal of content planning should be to create compelling, valuable, and relevant content for your target audience across multiple marketing strategies, including:

• Blogs

• Video

• Podcasts

• Webinars

• eBooks

• Case studies

• Social posts

Step #5: Engage in social media

Social media is a terrific way to engage your target audience and support other content. This is because social media platforms are a suitable place to share articles, blog posts, videos, and images, which will then be seen by your followers or those who stumble upon them. Brands can also use social media to answer questions or respond to comments in real-time.

There are a few tips to keep in mind when you are trying to engage your target audience on social media:

• Be relevant ─ What you post should be relevant to your audience and their interests.

• Be organized ─ Make sure that you are posting at the right times of day, and in the right order, so that your posts don’t seem too sporadic.

• Be original ─ You want to make sure that people remember what they see from you. So, make it unique, but still related to your brand’s voice.

• Be responsive ─ Respond quickly when people comment on or like one of your posts. This shows that you care about them and their feedback.

• Stay active ─ The key is consistency, so don’t go missing.

Step #6: Employ the power of email marketing

Email marketing is the most effective and profitable strategy to reach customers. With email marketing, you can have a direct conversation with your customers without having to worry about the time or location.

You can also use email marketing for a range of marketing goals, such as creating leads, increasing traffic to a landing page on your website, sharing newsletters, and generating sales and revenues.

One of the key advantages of email marketing is that it can be automated easily.

Step #7: Don’t neglect paid digital marketing campaigns

Paid campaigns are also a major component of digital marketing. It is important to note that paid campaigns are not just for the big brands and companies ─ they can be used by any business no matter the size. They are a fantastic way to reach a new audience and tell your story in front of them and deliver a call-to-action that will drive people to your website.

Tips to improve your digital marketing strategy roadmap

As you build out your digital marketing roadmap, our experience is that you should follow the CEO ™ Framework.

CEO stands for Create, Engage, Optimize:

Create

• Strive for authenticity
• Create quality content that matters to your target audience
• Experiment with different channels
• Schedule your content using a content planner (BJX)

Engage

• Allow your visitors to interact with your site (comment, rate, or add tags)
• Use smart CTAs with dynamic content
• Set up forms to drive conversions

Optimize

• Use built-in analytics and reports to cut or change the content that isn’t working
• Repurpose and update existing content

Start putting your digital roadmap in place today. We’ve simplified the process with our Digital Marketing Roadmap Template, which is free to download. Just click on the link below:

Download our free Digital Marketing Roadmap Template today.

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