Become a digital marketing Planner careers and solutions

You are in the right place if you feel that you have too much to do in your marketing professional and not enough time to do it.

You’d like to get organized, but you can’t step away from your daily responsibilities long enough to design a system that works for you and your team.

Guide to digital marketing careers and solutions

In this article, we’ll show you how to create your digital marketing planner. It will help you prioritise the right marketing activities, develop a repeatable process – so you never forget a job or miss a deadline – and publish content that benefits your audience.

Want to improve your marketing results while reducing stress? This is the guide for you.

What is a marketing planner?

A marketing planner, also known as a strategic marketing planner, is a marketing tool that helps you plan and execute your marketing operations.

It is a platform that brings all your marketing tasks and deadlines together in one place. It serves as a single source of truth for marketing teams of different sizes, including one-person operations.

Instead of having to resort to different notes, documents and emails, you can rely on a unified hub to know exactly what is needed to achieve your marketing goals.

A marketing planner can help you in the following ways:

• All marketing initiatives and tasks should be coordinated. There will be no more uncertainty, no more jobs falling through the cracks or focusing on low priority initiatives.
• More work can be done in less time and with less stress. Everyone in the team knows what to work on next, eliminating friction and improving focus, depth and innovation.
• Keep superiors informed of your progress. Because you can see at a glance what you are working on and what is happening next, you can simply provide status updates to your managers and executives.
  Marketing planners

Here are six distinct types of marketing planners, ranging from physical assets to software solutions.

#1. Paper calendars

• If you currently use printed paper calendars in your daily life, you may be interested in a marketing version of a paper calendar.
• A monthly, quarterly or annual summary can be included in your printed calendar. You can then use it to plan and map :
• Your publication dates for blog posts, emails, videos and any other type of material you use.
• Product launch dates are important.
• Seasons/holidays relevant to your industry (e.g. Black Friday, Mother’s Day and social media holidays such as International Coffee Day or National Dentists Day).

This will give you a quick overview of your marketing plan. Keep in mind that any changes to the publication dates may cause your other plans on the same calendar to be deactivated and you may need to correct them one by one.

#2. Whiteboards

The Whiteboard Marketing Planner is ideal for organisations that think visually and like to keep their processes agile.

To get the most out of your whiteboard marketing planner, use whiteboard markers, sticky notes or both. There are different methods of structuring:

• Content types include blog entries, emails, videos, white papers, etc.
• Team members
• Team tasks include strategist, writer, designer, editor, etc.
• Process steps include: concept backlog, writing, design, editing, final approval and publication.
• Marketing personalities.
• Whiteboards are excellent for both a big-picture perspective and a day-to-day action plan. They are simple to update, but they have a disadvantage if your team is not constantly working from the office.

In such a situation, you will need an online planner that does not require everyone to be in the same room at the same time.

#2. Physical notebook-style planners

A notebook-style marketing planner is a next choice on the physical side of the planner alternatives.

It is a portable, pocket-sized version of a printed paper planner. They are popular among single bloggers and businesses, and there are even content-specific planners.

These planners would not work in teams as they do not allow for cooperation and exchange of ideas. A notepad version of a planner, like anything else on paper, takes a little longer to update if something changes in your campaigns, deadlines or launches.

Notepad-style planners do not allow for cooperation; keep this in mind when deciding on a marketing planning strategy.

#3. Kanban boards

A marketing kanban board allows you to move projects through the phases of the process – from left to right from start to finish.

• A kanban board is made up of columns that reflect the phases of your marketing process, and the cards in these columns represent projects. In this situation, you would have :
• The phases of the marketing process are displayed as columns: write, design, edit, review, and publish.
• The marketing project as cards: blog post on [topic 1], email campaign promoting this blog post, YouTube video interview with [expert]

Marketing planners as a kanban board are an ideal method for teams of any size, internal or remote, to know at all times what is ahead of them and what needs to be prioritised to optimise the results of their marketing initiatives.

#4. Spreadsheet-based calendars

You can use a spreadsheet-based marketing calendar if you like the concept of a digital marketing planner but don’t want to be limited by kanban charts.

• Spreadsheets give you the advantage of versatility. There are many ways to arrange it.
• As a calendar, with columns representing days of the week and rows representing different weeks.
• As a list of issues with priority levels, people in authority, current status and other information.

Also as a collection of monthly themes – each month has its own tab.
Spreadsheet-based marketing plans are wonderful because they can reside in the cloud and be available to your entire team through services like Office 365 and Google Drive.

#5. Marketing calendar software

Finally, there is marketing calendar software with features targeted at you and your marketing team’s demands.

It is the ultimate hub for all your blogging and social media activities. It is your daily reference centre for everything your marketing team does. You will be able to do the following if you use a marketing calendar:

• Switch between calendar and kanban views.
• With a simple drag and drop, you can move dates, campaigns and tasks.
• On a timeline, you can get a great summary of content types, social media campaigns, specific assignments, etc.

You will regain full control of your marketing activity if you use a marketing planning software. Everything that helps your business grow will be kept in one place, making it easy to access, edit and plan your content.

How to use a marketing planner: 5 easy steps

Now that you’ve determined which form of marketing planner is right for you, here’s how to get started and get the most out of it.

#1. Start with a basic content strategy

Your marketing planner can help you become more focused and organized, but only if you use it strategically.

In other words, you need to know what you want to accomplish with your marketing activities. This is the only way to show results.

Here’s a simple way of content marketing strategy.

1. Determine your business goals.

Do you want to reduce churn? Increase revenue? Increase customer lifetime value? Is there anything else? This will help you map your content to the appropriate section of the funnel.

2. Determine your target audience.

What are their challenges? Demographics? Where are the hangers-on? Where are they looking for answers and what format are they looking for? How can you help?

3. Determine the core of your material.

This is a gap between what your audience is interested in and what your company offers. Define the topics and categories most closely related to your product.

4. Choose your content types and channels carefully.

Consider blog posts, email newsletters, videos, social media content, print materials, e-books and white papers, case studies and graphic content.

5. Create a publication schedule that you can stick to.

Choose something you can sustain over the long term – a blog post every week is a good start, and you can always progress later. Create a publishing schedule that you can stick to for any format you choose.

6. Determine who is involved in creating your material.

Are you a one-man marketing team? Do you have editors, designers or social media writers on your team? Make a list of all the people who will be on your marketing calendar.

#2. Develop marketing projects in line with your strategy

You have a goal, a target audience, a core content and formats. It’s time to brainstorm and plan your marketing efforts using them.

In 10 minutes, write down as many ideas as you can. Don’t hold back; just write down everything that comes to mind.

In 10 minutes, rate your ideas with a 1, 2 or 3. 1 denotes mediocrity, 2 denotes average and 3 denotes exceptional.

Take 10 minutes to prioritise and consider all three. Consider possible titles, perspectives and tools to help these themes stand out.

Once you have a list of fantastic content ideas, think about which forms and channels will work best for these themes. Here are some questions to think about:

• Is it best to cover this concept in print, video or audio?
• Is it possible to make this topic a series with many pieces of content?
• Can I interview experts or provide external resources to make this issue more valuable to my target audience?
• Is this issue more important at certain times of the year and, if so, should it be prioritised?

Is this issue relevant to the top, middle or bottom of our marketing funnel?
Note the ideal formats and channels for each of the content topics on your list.

Remember that you can reuse the content you publish on one channel on multiple channels and in various forms. Prioritise the most important ones first, then consider reusing them.

#3. Make a checklist for each marketing project.

Don’t want to overlook a task for any of your new marketing initiatives? If so, you’ll love the checklists.

Marketing tasks are essential for taking your content ideas from concept to reality. These are all the individual steps needed to publish a blog post, send an email newsletter or publish an ebook, for example.

This is an important aspect of your marketing planner; marketers who plan initiatives and activities in advance are 356% more likely to report success.

By converting your marketing tasks into checklists, you can establish your approach once and simply follow it the next time you work on that particular type of content. Nothing will ever fall through the cracks… ever.

Here’s how you can create your own marketing project checklists:

• Identify all the different types of projects you have. Blog posts, YouTube videos, email newsletters and social campaigns are all examples.
• Make a list of all the steps you have in progress for each project category. A blog post, for example, will include keyword research, an outline, writing, editing and proofreading, design, CMS formatting and planning.
• Clean up the list of steps specific to your project. Is there anything that could be overlooked? Can you combine some of them?
• Decide who will be in charge of which steps. Consider your SEO strategist, content strategist, writer, designer, editor and other jobs.

The tasks should provide time estimates. Is it true that a piece of work takes 30 minutes? What, an hour? What, three hours? What, three hours? This will help you and your team to plan these tasks throughout the working day.

You should end up with checklists that look like this:

• Task 1 (30 minutes), [person 1] 10 days before publication
• Task 2 (one hour), [person 2], seven days before publication
• Task 3 (two hours), [person 1], seven days before publication
• … etc.

#4. Work with your marketing planner to set deadlines.

Now you can start to flesh out your marketing planner.

Take the marketing campaigns you have planned and designate publication dates for each on the planner based on the publication cadence you have established.

Then, using your checklists, start adding all the marketing tasks for these initiatives to the calendar as well. If you have a marketing team, these tasks and deadlines should be made public and accessible to all team members.

• A team-wide marketing calendar will help you in the following ways:
• Recognise the bandwidth of each team member at any given time.
• Make sure no one is overloaded with work.
• By reassigning work, you can minimise delays and missed deadlines by identifying potential bottlenecks.

#5. Start shipping more projects and get rid of the stress

As you start using your marketing planner, you’ll ship more marketing initiatives than ever before, with less stress and on time – every time.

To ensure that your marketing planner is always working with you to achieve your marketing goals, make sure you tweak it regularly and identify any deviations so you can react quickly:

• Are there tasks that take you less time or more time than you expected? Note this in your task lists.
• Are some formats or channels more effective than others? Adjust your strategy and build on what works.
• Is your bandwidth increasing or decreasing? Make changes to your publishing cadence.
• As with all things marketing, evaluate your team’s influence and results so you can modify your marketing plan in the future.

What is a digital marketing planner?

A digital marketing planner is a document in which you outline your digital marketing goals and the steps you will take to achieve those goals.

It may include, but is not limited to, business objectives, digital strategies to achieve those objectives, competitive landscape analysis, timelines, budgets, digital channels, etc.

Think of a digital marketing planner as a kind of roadmap. You know where you want to go and the plan clearly shows you the way.

Your digital marketing efforts will be useless and unproductive unless you have a well-defined planner in place. You will probably end up wasting money and not getting the desired effect.

How to make a digital marketing planner

Let’s go through the different components of the digital marketing planner, as well as the specific steps you need to take to build your strategy.

#1. Establish your digital marketing and business goals.

Clear, quantifiable and realistic digital marketing planner goals help you define exactly what you want to accomplish and measure. Be as specific as possible when setting these goals. Include specific measures and dates that can be used to track your development.

Avoid goals such as increasing lead generation, increasing conversion rates or improving the digital customer experience. These are a bit too vague. You can’t quantify your progress and it’s not clear what actions you need to take to achieve them.

A much more achievable goal would be to quadruple organic search traffic over the next 12 months. This gives you a timeline, a structure for setting milestone goals and specific steps to follow (optimising your site, creating incredible content and conducting strategic SEO awareness, etc.).

#2. Identify audience segments and buyer profiles.

To be effective in any digital marketing effort, you must first understand who you are trying to reach. Building buyer personas for each sector of your audience can give you insight into the types of marketing that will be most successful.

Let’s say you provide IT services. Small businesses with less than $500,000 in sales may be your target audience. You can also target large organisations with high IT requirements. Your buyer personas and marketing techniques will be very different for each of these categories.

Messages that appeal to a small business owner are unlikely to appeal to the head of a large IT department, and vice versa.

Start by identifying the different categories of your target audience. Start by creating personas for your ideal consumer within each group. Here are 9 examples of great personas to get you started.

Your buyer persona information will differ depending on whether you are B2B or B2C, as will the cost of your product/service. You can include the following demographic and additional information:

• Age group
• Income
• Job title
• Location
• Priorities
• Objectives
• Challenges
• Interests
• Social media platforms
• Sector
• Points of contention
• Desired products/features
• Invent new customer profiles.

The goal of persona design is to get inside the heads of your target consumers and see things through their eyes. When you learn what is most important to them, you can create a digital marketing plan that addresses both their deepest desires and their biggest problems.

#3. Conduct competitive research to assess market share.

If you want your marketing efforts to be successful, you must first understand who your competitors are. A competitive study allows you to identify your competitors, assess your market share and learn about their marketing strategy.

Consider the following factors while conducting a competitive analysis:

• What demographic do they cater to?
• What are your competitors’ digital marketing channels?
• What is their apparent difference?
• Where are they most powerful?
• What percentage of their traffic is earned, owned or paid for?
• What is their market positioning?
• Where are they most vulnerable?
• What kind of message and language do they use?
• What is their brand tone and personality?

A comprehensive study of the competitive landscape will provide you with information on how you can use Internet marketing to outperform your competitors. For example, you may realise that your rivals’ positioning and difference is widely understood, so you will benefit from crystallising yours in comparison. Alternatively, you may learn that they excel in social media marketing but fall short of SEO effectiveness.

#4. Conduct a SWOT analysis

A competitive landscape study is the reverse of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. It gives you a framework to examine your business in the context of your market. It allows you to analyse what works and what doesn’t, to discover possible organic development opportunities and to prepare for external dangers.

Start by assessing your company’s strengths. What are your main competitive advantages? What are you particularly good at? Then what unique resources do you have at your disposal?

Next, consider your shortcomings. What aspects of your business are not going well? What factors are holding you back from making sales? Where are you falling behind your competitors?

The third step is to look carefully at the opportunities available to your business. Are there market trends that you can capitalise on? Can you use new technologies that your rivals cannot? Is there a demographic in your audience that is underserved?

Finally, make a list of all the possible dangers to your business. Is it possible for a competitor to take market share? Is there anything hindering the growth of the business? Are there any financial worries on the horizon?

The information from your SWOT analysis will help you create your digital marketing plan. Your plan should capitalise on your strengths, reduce your weaknesses, seize opportunities and prevent potential risks as early as possible. All under the guise of helping you increase your sales.

#5. Determine the budget for your digital marketing planner.

The next step in developing the best digital marketing planner for your business is to determine your budget. The budget will specify how much money you need to spend on digital marketing activities, as well as direct you to certain channels, methods and approaches.

The amount of money you set aside for a digital marketing planner will depend on a variety of factors, including:

• Revenue
• Place in the industry
• Previous results
• Goals
• Location
• The cost effectiveness of a strategy, tactic or campaign

How much money will you spend on increasing brand awareness? What about special marketing and promotions? Will you spend any of your digital marketing budget on customer retention? Do you know how much money you should spend on SEO?

It is essential to plan your budget in advance. However, maintain flexibility to capitalise on opportunities to increase SEO ROI. If you notice that a particular campaign is not generating a positive ROI, you may be better off eliminating it.

Similarly, if you find that a campaign (or channel) is overperforming, consider adjusting the budget and allocating more funds to what is working effectively. If you have a certain high return on investment in mind, continue to increase the budget as long as your acquisition spend remains below target.

Therefore, your budget can serve as a dynamic and ever-changing support mechanism for your digital marketing campaigns.

#6. Establish your digital outlets

Before you can create a content strategy, you must first identify the main digital platforms you will use. Your channel selection should take into account your audience, your goals and your budget.

Let’s say you want to increase the number of targeted visitors to your website by 30%. One method is to use PPC ads, which can give you an instant boost. However, Google Adwords can be expensive.

Turn to more cost-effective methods, such as SEO and content marketing, to increase the return on investment. These channels take longer to produce results, but they also have a much lower acquisition cost, giving you more bang for your buck. What’s more, the effects of SEO and content marketing compound over time, laying the foundation for long-term sustainable success.

Consider where your target audience spends the majority of their time when developing your digital platforms. If you work in a B2B company, you may want to focus on platforms such as LinkedIn or webinars.

If your target demographic is younger, you may want to investigate Instagram influencer marketing. Focus on how you can provide value to your audience using the media they prefer.

Also, don’t assume that your audience isn’t interested in fantastic material. Some of the best examples of content marketing come from a wide range of businesses with a wide range of target audiences.

#7. Create a digital marketing strategy and approaches.

Following the definition of your channels, you need to establish the digital marketing methods and strategies that will be used within those channels.

For example, if you want to focus on search engine optimization, you must first decide which keywords to target and how to target them.

You can create a comprehensive content centre, online courses, SEO topic groups or a collection of online tools. You can also choose to provide more in-depth and higher quality practical knowledge, analysis of upcoming trends or content featuring celebrities.

Look for ways to stand out from the competition when planning your digital marketing plans and approaches. You’ll have a hard time standing out if you do what everyone else is doing.

• Dollar Shave Club has attracted attention by being humorous and irreverent in an otherwise boring industry.
• Tableau provided a free online tool and received backlinks from over 56,000 XNUMX domains.
• LEGO has created an interactive online community that receives over 300,000 XNUMX organic visitors each month.

The more saturated the market, the harder it will be to get attention and true optimization of your entire digital marketing portfolio. Be true to your brand in everything you do while developing your digital marketing plans and approaches.

#8. Make a marketing calendar.

A marketing calendar helps you plan when your digital marketing campaigns and activities will be implemented. It also creates accountability, ensuring that you meet deadlines and execute the plan effectively throughout the year. A calendar also allows you to contact each of your audiences regularly throughout the year.

Make a plan for the next 12 months and divide your calendar into each month of the year. This will provide you with an overall structure as well as enough time to plan and execute each delivery. For example:

You will publish a training webinar in January. Before you can publish it, you must first prepare a presentation platform, a destination website and social media graphics, among other things.

Throughout January and February, you will publicise the training webinar using various means such as social media, email, video and public relations.

You plan to create a blog in March that will be updated weekly. To do this, you need to decide on topics, assign them to writers, work with a designer, develop a blog calendar, organise films to be included, etc.

When making your calendar, be practical. Give yourself enough time to do everything in a timely and quality way, and make sure that each delivery is properly allocated to certain people.

CoSchedule, Content and Trello are three popular marketing planning platforms.

#9. Track the results and KPIs of your digital marketing planner.

The final step in developing a digital marketing strategy and plan is to evaluate your results by defining metrics and KPIs.

You need to evaluate the results of your marketing activities against both the baseline and the original objectives. If the results are disappointing, modify and optimise before measuring again.

Be sure to measure each channel so that you, as a marketer, can understand what works best for your brand and what needs to be reduced.

Excellent digital marketing planner promoting integration.

The process of creating a digital marketing planner promotes marketing integration, which creates a higher business impact. Customers won’t be able to ignore your brand if you continually bombard them with messages, offers and calls to action.

By effectively and judiciously reusing and atomising your marketing materials, you will do more with less.

Whether your business is an established e-commerce brand or a brick-and-mortar giant, you need to have a digital marketing plan. It takes time, effort and coordination, but it’s worth it. Your marketing will be much more effective and you will generate much better marketing results for your business.

Marketing Planner Career

* The profession of marketing planner is part of the broader professional field of marketing managers. The content on this page will generally apply to all occupations in this category, although it may not explicitly apply to this job title.

Marketing Planner Job Description:

Plan, direct, or coordinate marketing plans and activities, such as assessing demand for a company’s goods and services and its competitors and identifying new consumers.

Create pricing plans to increase the company’s revenue or market share while keeping consumers satisfied. Monitor trends that suggest demand for new goods and services or oversee product development.

Use your marketing planner to its full potential

Your marketing planner will help you become more efficient, organized and on track with your marketing and business goals. Your target audience will be delighted, and they will become devoted readers and consumers.

With these five simple actions, your marketing team will be able to do more and eliminate missed deadlines for good.

What role does data play in the work of a marketing planner?

Data is a crucial element in the work of a marketing planner. Marketing planners need to be able to collect, analyse and interpret data from various sources to inform their marketing plans and decisions.

This may include data on consumer behaviour, market trends, competitor analysis and sales performance. By using data, marketing planners can make informed decisions, set achievable goals and measure the success of their marketing efforts.

What tools and technologies do marketing planners use to do their work?

Marketing planners use a range of tools and technologies to carry out their work, including project management software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, data analysis tools and marketing automation software.

They may also use tools such as spreadsheets, presentation software and graphic design tools to create visual aids and presentations.

How do marketing planners prioritise tasks and allocate resources?

Marketing planners prioritise tasks and allocate resources by setting specific goals and objectives for their marketing plan.

They consider factors such as budget, timing, target audience and available resources when making decisions about which tasks to prioritise and how to allocate resources.

Marketing planners also regularly review and adjust their plans based on data and results to ensure they are on track to meet their objectives.

What are the most important indicators for measuring the success of a marketing plan?

The most important metrics for measuring the success of a marketing plan can vary depending on the specific goals and objectives of the plan. Some common measures include website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, customer engagement and brand awareness.

Marketing planners use these metrics to determine if their marketing efforts are effective and make changes to improve their results.

Marketing planner FAQ

Who is a marketing planner?

Marketing planners help to think through marketing campaigns and then put those campaigns through test scenarios to find particular problems or benefits of the campaign.

They then focus on these features and present their plans to marketing managers.

Is being a marketing manager a stressful job?

According to a study by Workfront (2), a project management software company, one in four industry professionals said they experience “intense stress” on a daily basis.

The rest of the group said there was at least some tension in the workplace.

What personality do you need for marketing?

While the specific skill requirements differ from job to job, the attributes required to succeed in marketing are consistent across the occupational spectrum.

Good marketers are exceptional communicators, team players and project managers with strong analytical and creative skills.