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Stage 1: Planning & Preparation
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Starting any new endeavor can be daunting. When you start a new project, it can be easy to let it slide and ignore the maintenance. With proper planning, commitment and attention, you can create and maintain a successful digital marketing footprint for your agency.
1. Create expectations
First, create expectations for yourself and this project in going digital. What is your end goal? When do you want to achieve that goal? What are all of the areas you want to focus on? What are the areas that you may be better at than others? Make the expectation internally that certain tasks will be easier and quicker to complete while others may be more time consuming and challenging.
2. Break things down into checklists and easily digestible tasks
You may have the goal of creating a website, adopting every social media channel and engaging daily with your followers. The only issue is that this goal will be hard to achieve if it is not broken down into mini goals for each day or week. Your digital footprint and digital marketing portfolio will not be created in a week. It takes time to build up a successful digital marketing strategy. It helps if you create checklists, specific mini-tasks and keep on top of your progress toward your end goal.
3. Stay organized
As you are starting your digital marketing journey, make sure to stay organized whether that means creating a new folder on your desktop or, if you like physical copies of documents and reminders, having a new folder on your desk. This will help keep all things related to digital marketing organized and remind you to stay on top of different tasks.
4. Set aside time each day to focus on digital marketing
Setting aside time each day to focus on digital marketing creates a habit of investing time into digital marketing and can help make sure that marketing needs are not ignored. You may want to set time on your calendar (30 minutes each day) or decide the first 30 minutes each day is spent on marketing. Either way, you are showing commitment to this need.
5. Check out your competition
As you begin, it’s important to review what competitors are doing. A simple Google search of “Insurance quotes in [your city, Wisconsin]” should be done first, what agencies are shown? If you go onto your competitors website, is there anything they do that you like or see any opportunities based on their site? Spend a few minutes on Facebook and see if the other agency is active on Facebook, if they are interacting with followers and what their engagement strategy looks like. You can gain ideas and also find opportunities where competitors are lacking.
6. Begin thinking about your unique selling proposition
Marketers may ask, “What makes your business unique?” In doing so, they are essentially asking what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. In essence, it’s what your agency specializes in or offers that makes it unique. Maybe it’s a level of service, it’s a specific niche market or some other focus of your agency. You will formulate your USP and positioning statement in the next stage. You will have to think about your target audience, your point of difference and supporting statements for backup. This is the foundation of creating a successful marketing plan and strategy.
