How to create a digital marketing plan: steps and a practical example

Learn to turn your company’s objectives into a realistic marketing plan. Which actions to develop, how to choose channels, how much to invest, who should take responsibility and how to evaluate results.

Imagine you have decided to improve customer acquisition for your company.

You have a website, a few social media profiles and several ideas about what you could do.

One supplier suggests investing in advertising. Another recommends improving SEO. Someone on the team thinks you should publish more content and reconnect with past customers.

All the proposals may be reasonable.

But your budget is limited, you have little time available and you need to decide where to start.

Where should you invest first? Which results can you expect? Who will do the work? How will you know whether it was worthwhile?

This is where a marketing plan proves its value.

It means deciding which proposals contribute best to business objectives, what resources they need, in which order to develop them and how to evaluate them, rather than putting every proposal on a calendar.

A company can have many marketing ideas without having a plan.

It can also have a perfectly organised document and still not know what to do when circumstances change.

A good digital marketing plan should address both situations.

It must turn strategic decisions into a programme of work the business can understand, execute, maintain and review.

Above all, it should help answer one question:

Which actions deserve our resources, and why?

1. What a digital marketing plan is and what it is for

A digital marketing plan is a planning tool that organises the initiatives needed to achieve particular commercial objectives using digital channels, content, experiences and assets.

It connects business objectives with the customers we want to reach, the proposition we need to communicate, the actions we will develop and the resources available.

It also establishes owners, budgets, deadlines and monitoring indicators.

Its value lies in turning strategic direction into operational decisions.

It goes beyond describing what we would like to achieve.

It must explain what we will do to move forward, what we need to prepare and how we will check whether initiatives are working.

Strategy, plan and calendar are different things

Although frequently used as synonyms, they serve different purposes.

Digital strategy establishes direction.

It defines what the business needs to achieve, whom it wants to matter to, which capabilities it must develop and which priorities will guide investment.

The marketing plan organises commercial initiatives.

It decides which acquisition, communication, conversion or retention actions we will develop to contribute to those objectives.

The calendar coordinates execution.

It places activities in time and organises publications, campaigns, deliveries, meetings and reviews.

Consider a mountain activity company.

Its strategy may have identified the need to increase direct bookings for certain experiences.

The marketing plan will decide which customers it wants to reach, which channels to use, which content it needs, how to allocate resources and which results to measure.

The calendar will determine when content is prepared, campaigns activated and results reviewed.

All three dimensions must be connected.

A calendar full of posts does not demonstrate that a plan exists.

And a plan with many initiatives does not guarantee that they follow a coherent strategic direction.

The SOSTAC methodology, developed by PR Smith, uses a planning logic connecting situation, objectives, strategy, tactics, action and control. It is a useful reference for understanding why these dimensions must remain consistent with one another. [1]

A plan is not a promise of results

Planning does not mean knowing with certainty what will happen.

We can estimate costs, set objectives and formulate hypotheses about market behaviour.

But results depend on factors we do not fully control: demand, competition, economic conditions, seasonality or customer decisions.

That is why we must distinguish what we know, what we expect and what we need to validate.

A good plan does not eliminate uncertainty.

It makes uncertainty visible and establishes how we will work with it.

2. What you need to clarify before starting

The marketing plan should not be used to resolve every strategic question in a company.

If we do not yet know what value the business offers, whom it matters to or which objectives it wants to achieve, those issues need clarifying first.

Selecting channels and allocating budgets around a commercial proposition nobody has properly defined would make no sense.

That does not mean waiting for perfect information.

It means needing a sufficiently clear foundation to begin.

The business objective

What do you want to achieve?

You may need more direct bookings, to develop a new service line, improve repeat business or generate more suitable sales enquiries.

We must specify which part of the business we want to improve.

Increasing total revenue differs from improving the profitability of a particular offering.

Getting more contacts also differs from gaining customers we actually want to work with.

The priority customer

Whom are we developing the plan for?

We need to understand which customers fit the proposition and which circumstances might lead them to consider our offering.

It also matters how they research, what they compare, which questions arise and which information they need before deciding.

There is no need to repeat all the customer research inside the plan.

But we do need to use its conclusions.

The value proposition

Why should someone choose us?

The plan needs a sufficiently clear proposition, supported by the reality of the business and relevant to the customer.

If we cannot yet explain our difference, the first initiative may need to review the offering and its communication.

Increasing its distribution will not correct that lack of definition.

Existing assets and resources

What do we already have available?

The company may have a suitable website, a good reputation, professional photographs, a customer base, useful content or an established commercial relationship.

It may also have technical, operational or budget constraints.

The plan must recognise both.

We do not need to rebuild what already works. We need to use it and correct what prevents progress.

If these decisions are not yet sufficiently defined, it is best to review the strategy first.

Our guide “How to define a company’s digital strategy” explains how to investigate the business situation, establish priorities and decide which capabilities and assets it needs to develop.

3. The fundamental elements of a digital marketing plan

A professional plan does not need to be complicated to be useful.

It can fit into a few pages, provided the important decisions are sufficiently developed.

What matters is a clear relationship between its elements.

Objectives and expected outcomes

The plan must establish which change we want to achieve and our starting situation.

For example, increasing direct bookings for a specific activity during a season.

That objective needs a baseline and a success criterion.

If we do not know the current booking volume or its profitability, we must investigate those figures before setting reasonable expectations.

Audiences and customer decisions

We need to identify which customers we want to reach and which decision we hope to facilitate.

A person may discover our offering, compare alternatives, request information, book or buy again.

Each situation may require a different initiative.

Marketing is not exclusively about attracting people who do not yet know us.

It can also answer questions, facilitate a purchase or maintain relationships with existing customers.

Initiatives, channels and assets

An initiative is a specific set of actions designed to serve a purpose.

For example, improving a service page to facilitate bookings.

The channel indicates where or how we will reach people: search engines, email, advertising, social media or other media.

The asset is what we use or develop to serve the purpose: a website page, a piece of content, a purchasing tool or a communication system.

These dimensions are related, but not equivalent.

SEO can help capture demand from search engines. An activity page can address that demand. A booking system enables the purchase to be completed.

The plan must explain how they connect, rather than merely list them.

Priorities and dependencies

Not every initiative can begin simultaneously.

Some require preparatory work.

Before advertising a service, we must check that the offering is understandable and there is a suitable way to buy it.

Before starting regular communication, we need to define what it will offer the customer, how it will be managed and which legal obligations must be respected.

The plan must identify those conditions and order the work.

Owners and resources

Every initiative needs an owner.

We must also identify who will execute the work, who will approve decisions and which resources will be necessary.

These resources include money, time, skills, tools and coordination capacity.

An initiative may appear financially affordable yet prove unworkable because the team lacks the time needed to maintain it.

Calendar and budget

We must establish when initiatives will be prepared, when they can go live and which investment they require.

We must also distinguish initial costs, recurring expenditure and working time.

Budgeting for launch is not enough.

An action requiring maintenance must include that commitment from the start.

Measurement and review

Finally, the plan must determine what we will observe to evaluate each initiative.

We may need indicators of visibility, enquiries, bookings, revenue, costs or repeat business.

But metrics must answer specific questions.

Are we reaching the right people?

Do they understand the offering?

Do enquiries become purchases?

Is the cost sustainable?

Should we continue, correct or stop an initiative?

A plan is complete when it also explains how its decisions will be reviewed.

4. How to create a digital marketing plan step by step

We can organise the work into six steps.

They are not a universal recipe. Their purpose is to help build a coherent plan suited to each company’s reality.

Step 1. Turn the objective into a specific need

Begin by identifying what you want to change.

Avoid expressing the objective as a predetermined solution.

“We need to invest in advertising” does not yet explain the business problem.

“We want to increase direct bookings for our family activities” allows us to investigate different ways to achieve it.

Then specify the starting situation, desired outcome and known constraints.

You must also check that the objective is compatible with commercial and operational capacity.

Designing a plan to double demand for a service already working at full capacity would make no sense.

Step 2. Reconstruct the journey the customer needs to take

Once the objective is defined, we need to understand what must happen to achieve it.

Imagine that we want more bookings.

Before booking, a person will probably need to discover the activity, understand whether it suits them, check terms, compare alternatives and confirm availability.

The journey can differ depending on the service and customer.

What matters is identifying which information and experience they need at each point.

We must then review whether our assets allow that journey to be completed.

We may discover that demand already exists, but the page does not address the main objections.

Or that people check availability by telephone because the website makes it difficult to find.

In these cases, improving the journey may matter more than increasing visibility.

Step 3. Choose initiatives by their purpose

Now we can assess possible actions.

We do not need to include every available channel.

We should select the initiatives that contribute best to the objective and can be sustained with our resources.

It helps to compare alternatives through simple questions:

This comparison does not necessarily require a scoring system.

If we do not yet have enough information to assess an initiative, we can plan a limited test before committing to a larger investment.

We must also consider which actions to postpone.

Good planning needs priorities and trade-offs.

Step 4. Assign resources, owners and budget

Each selected initiative must become a sufficiently defined commitment.

We need to know who will own its outcome, who will perform the work and which resources its preparation and maintenance will consume.

We must also check for external dependencies: approvals, suppliers, materials, tools or missing information.

The budget must represent the full cost of the decision.

An advertising campaign, for example, may require content, a landing page, measurement setup, advertising spend and supervision time.

If we budget only for the adverts, we will underestimate the initiative.

The same applies to internal resources.

Having a team member do a task does not mean it has no cost.

It consumes time that could be devoted to other responsibilities.

Step 5. Organise a realistic sequence

With initiatives selected and resources identified, we can build the calendar.

We do not start by assigning arbitrary dates.

First, we check what must be ready before moving forward.

Some activities can run simultaneously. Others must wait.

A plan can be organised into three moments:

Prepare: resolve the necessary conditions for initiatives to work.

Activate: develop the selected actions and observe initial responses.

Evaluate: analyse results, correct problems and decide the next moves.

Each stage can have dates and owners.

But we must remain flexible when new evidence or unforeseen dependencies emerge.

Step 6. Establish how you will learn from results

Before execution, define which information you will need to evaluate each action.

Do not wait until the end to decide what would have been interesting to measure.

Establish indicators, information sources and review points.

It also helps to anticipate which circumstances would justify a correction.

For example, if a campaign generates visits but no enquiries, we will need to investigate whether the problem lies with demand, the proposition, the page or the purchasing system.

If it generates many suitable enquiries that do not become sales, we may need to review sales follow-up.

These are different situations.

A useful plan should help us recognise them.

5. Practical example: the marketing plan for a mountain activity company

Let us apply the above to a specific situation.

Imagine a small company in the Pyrenees organising guided excursions and nature experiences.

It has a good reputation, works with small groups and receives a significant share of customers through recommendations, accommodation partnerships and external platforms.

Its digital strategy is already defined.

The company has decided to progressively develop its direct booking channel for certain family activities.

It has also identified its priority customers and knows what differentiates its offering: local knowledge, personal attention and experiences adapted to people without specialist technical training.

Now it needs a marketing plan.

The following example is entirely hypothetical. Its objectives and budget proportions only show how to organise a plan. They do not relate to a PhiStudio client or represent market prices or performance forecasts.

1. Define the objective

Suppose that, during a comparable period in the previous season, the company received 30 direct bookings for its family activities.

For the next twelve-week period, it wants to reach 40.

The objective will be more than simply obtaining ten additional bookings.

We need to set two conditions.

The first is that operational capacity exists to fulfil them properly.

The second is that the increase makes economic sense.

More bookings would be pointless if acquisition costs eliminated the margin they generate.

Our planning objective could be expressed as follows:

Increase direct bookings for family activities from 30 to 40 over a comparable twelve-week period, maintaining a positive economic contribution after attributable commercial costs.

These figures are teaching assumptions.

In a real project, we would need to check the baseline, expected demand, availability, seasonality and margin of each activity before approving them.

2. Identify the customer and their journey

The strategy has already determined that we want to focus on families visiting the Pyrenees who seek accessible guided activities.

We do not need to research the entire market again.

But we do need to understand what must happen for these people to book.

A family may search for activities at the destination, discover our offering and check whether it suits their children’s ages.

They will probably also need to understand the duration, difficulty, required equipment, price and what happens if weather conditions prevent the activity from taking place.

Finally, they need to check availability and complete a booking.

These needs allow us to review the current journey.

Imagine we find three difficulties:

The activity page barely explains its features.

Availability information is difficult to find.

And the business has no organised system for tracking what happens to the enquiries it receives.

Now we have specific problems to act on.

3. Select the initiatives

Instead of immediately launching several campaigns, we design a small set of connected initiatives.

This table explains why we chose each initiative.

It also shows that they cannot all begin simultaneously.

Advertising, for example, depends on having a prepared page and a reliable booking process.

Communication with past customers will depend on being able to do it properly and providing real value to recipients.

4. Allocate budget

We now need to check whether the whole is viable.

For this exercise, we will divide 100 hypothetical budget units between preparation and activation. The units show proportions; they are not euros and do not represent PhiStudio fees.

In a real project, each item would have a quoted cost, and the distribution would change with the scope.

The illustrative distribution does not necessarily include tools, licences, photographs or external services either.

These items should be identified in an actual budget.

There is another important issue: internal time.

Imagine the company needs to dedicate 24 hours of its own team’s time over the twelve weeks to provide information, review content, approve decisions, respond to enquiries and participate in reviews.

That time also forms part of the plan’s cost, even if it does not generate an external invoice.

To know the full economic cost, we would need to value those hours and add them to the budget.

How will we know whether the investment makes sense?

Comparing the actual cost of initiatives with revenue from additional bookings is not enough.

We need to know those bookings’ contribution margin, consider commercial costs and assess what share of the result can reasonably be attributed to the initiatives.

Some initial investments may also continue creating value in later seasons.

For example, improving a website page can benefit future bookings, while advertising budget is consumed during the campaign.

That is why it helps to distinguish the cost of building lasting assets from recurring activation expenditure.

A plan should allow us to evaluate both the immediate outcome and the capabilities we are building for the business.

5. Organise the calendar

We have twelve weeks to prepare, activate and review the initiatives.

We could organise them as follows:

This is not a universal timeline.

The page may be ready from the outset, or we may find technical difficulties that require a different sequence.

The calendar coordinates work; it should not ignore reality.

Each initiative should go live when reasonable conditions exist to do so.

6. Establish indicators and decisions

We now need to define what we will observe.

Not every metric will be available directly in a web analytics tool. The guide “What to measure in digital marketing to make decisions” explores how to choose useful signals for the next decision.

To evaluate overall performance, we will need to connect digital data with commercial and financial information.

In Google Analytics, for example, key events can be configured to observe relevant user actions. But a recorded interaction does not necessarily equal a confirmed booking or realised revenue. [2]

It is important to avoid that confusion.

7. Review the plan and decide

Imagine that, after several weeks, the page starts receiving more visits.

Yet bookings do not increase.

Does this mean marketing is not working?

We cannot conclude that yet.

The visits may come from people looking for a different activity.

Prices or terms may be raising questions.

There may be a technical problem in the booking process.

Or availability on particular dates may be insufficient.

We need to investigate.

Now imagine another situation.

Enquiries increase and appear suitable, but the company takes two days to respond and loses opportunities.

In this case, increasing advertising is probably not the right next decision.

The problem may lie in sales follow-up.

The plan should help recognise and correct it.

Finally, suppose an initiative produces bookings but costs more than the margin they contribute.

We will need to review the investment, also considering whether it helped build a usable asset or learning.

Successful planning means making better decisions as we gain information, rather than completing every planned action.

6. How to prioritise when you cannot do everything

The example above includes five initiatives.

But what happens when budget or capacity only allows two?

This is common.

A plan must help resolve it.

Imagine a company considering three possibilities:

Improve the page for its main service.

Develop an advertising campaign.

Create a newsletter to maintain customer relationships.

All three can create value.

However, they do not necessarily share the same priority.

If the current page does not explain the offering properly, improving it may be a prerequisite for more effective acquisition.

If the website works properly but the company lacks sufficient relevant demand, an acquisition initiative may be worth assessing.

And if the business has many satisfied customers who could buy again, the opportunity may lie in strengthening that relationship.

We cannot decide simply by comparing which initiative seems more modern or attractive.

We must consider the business situation.

Impact is not the only criterion

An initiative may have great potential but require resources that are not yet available.

Another may offer a more limited benefit but allow an important hypothesis to be tested with little investment.

That is why I recommend assessing expected impact, evidence, dependencies, capacity and risk together.

We must also consider urgency.

A campaign tied to a particular season may miss its opportunity if we wait too long.

By contrast, developing strategic content can retain its usefulness for years.

There is no universal mathematical formula for ordering these decisions.

We can use matrices and scores to facilitate comparison, but must recognise when assessments are estimates rather than verified data.

The purpose of prioritising is to justify why we invest resources in particular initiatives, rather than produce an apparently precise ranking.

The plan must also explain what is left out

This is one of the most important decisions.

If every new proposal is added without revisiting earlier priorities, the plan becomes a wish list.

That is why it helps to keep postponed initiatives visible.

They may have value, but do not yet represent the best use of our resources.

A well-founded temporary trade-off protects business capacity.

And prevents every technological or commercial novelty from forcing a fresh start.

7. Marketing does not end when an enquiry arrives

A substantial part of marketing planning focuses on attracting visitors, generating contacts and getting someone to complete a form.

But for the business, that action may be just the beginning.

Imagine that a campaign receives twenty sales enquiries.

The figure looks positive.

Yet we still need to answer several questions.

How many enquiries come from suitable customers?

How many receive a timely response?

How many become bookings or contracts?

And why are the others lost?

A company may invest well in acquisition yet waste opportunities because its sales process is unprepared.

The opposite can also happen: the sales team works well but receives enquiries that do not fit the offering.

These are different problems.

Connect marketing, sales and operations

The plan must identify where an initiative depends on another area of the business.

This does not mean the marketing owner must manage bookings, prepare quotes or deliver the service.

It means we need to establish how those functions connect.

For example, we may need to define who receives enquiries, which information is recorded, how suitable opportunities are identified and which results are communicated to the marketing owner.

We do not need a complex system.

For some businesses, a clear procedure and a well-organised record will be enough.

Others will need sales tools or more advanced integrations.

The solution must be proportionate to the company’s needs and capabilities.

Retention is also part of marketing

The plan should not focus exclusively on acquiring new customers.

In many businesses, existing customer relationships can represent a major opportunity.

A hotel can improve guest return rates.

An activity company can offer different experiences to people who already know its service.

A restaurant can maintain a useful relationship with customers who organise celebrations regularly.

But that communication must create value and respect people’s preferences.

If the plan includes electronic commercial communications, before using a contact base we must check the legal basis for processing, the applicable sending conditions and how recipients can object. [3][4]

Having a customer’s email address does not automatically mean we can use it for any purpose. Planning must account for these obligations from the start.

Marketing is more than gaining an initial purchase. It can also help build useful, sustainable and respectful customer relationships.

8. How to measure and review a marketing plan

Measurement often appears at the end of the process, after actions have already been developed.

But we must plan it from the start.

If we do not know which information we will need to evaluate an initiative, we may discover too late that we lack sufficient data.

We may also end up producing reports full of figures nobody knows how to interpret.

Three levels of measurement

A simple way to organise monitoring is to distinguish three levels.

Activity. What we have done and with which resources.

For example, content published, campaigns activated, investment made or time spent.

Response. What happens when people interact with our initiatives.

We can observe relevant visits, enquiries, requests, interactions or booking starts.

Outcome. What contribution the whole makes to the business objective.

This may involve confirmed bookings, revenue, margins, repeat business or improved opportunity quality.

All three levels provide information.

But we must not confuse them.

Publishing ten pieces of content is an activity.

Getting that content to attract interested people is a response.

Demonstrating that it contributes to a commercial or strategic objective requires analysing outcomes and their relationship with the actions taken.

An initiative’s contribution cannot always be perfectly isolated either.

A customer may discover us through search, check our social media, receive a recommendation and book several days later.

Measurement must recognise these limitations.

Every indicator needs a question

I do not recommend beginning monitoring by asking which charts we can generate.

I prefer to begin with what we need to understand.

If we want to know whether a page facilitates bookings, we will investigate what happens along that journey.

If we want to evaluate a campaign, we need its costs and associated commercial results.

If we want to improve repeat business, we will observe customers who buy again.

Indicators must be chosen according to those questions.

Then we can select suitable tools.

Review must end with a decision

A plan needs review points defined in advance.

Not every initiative should be evaluated at the same frequency.

Technical errors may need immediate attention.

An advertising campaign may need relatively frequent reviews.

By contrast, some organic search content may need more time before showing interpretable trends.

Frequency should reflect the type of initiative and how quickly useful information becomes available.

At each review, it helps to compare results with the initial hypotheses.

Then we must decide.

We can continue, correct, expand, reduce, investigate an open question or stop an initiative.

We may also discover that priorities have changed.

What matters is documenting the decision and its basis.

A report describes what happened. A useful review decides what we should do next.

9. A simple template for starting your marketing plan

You do not need to reproduce a complex methodology to begin.

You can build a first version with a general plan sheet and one sheet per initiative.

General plan sheet

This sheet establishes context.

Then we need to specify each initiative.

Initiative sheet

Name: Improve an activity’s booking page.

Objective: Help interested people understand the proposition and book.

Customer: Families seeking accessible guided experiences.

Identified problem: The page leaves some commercial questions unanswered and creates friction in accessing availability.

Planned work: Review the information, improve the activity’s presentation and make booking easier to access.

Dependencies: Confirmed prices, terms, availability and service features.

Owner: Person responsible for the website asset.

Resources: Approved budget and review time from the sales team.

Period: Preparation and publication according to the agreed calendar.

Indicators: Relevant interactions, booking starts and confirmed bookings.

Review criterion: Check whether identified difficulties decrease and whether the journey contributes appropriately to bookings.

Status: Awaiting approval, in preparation, active, under review or completed.

A structure like this already allows us to organise a first version of the plan.

We do not need dozens of fields or a sophisticated platform.

A spreadsheet or shared document may be enough, provided it allows the information to stay current.

What matters is that initiatives connect to the overall objective and someone is responsible for maintaining the plan.

What should never be missing

If you remove an initiative from the plan, you should be able to explain its effect on the objective.

If you add another, you should know which need it addresses, what it costs and which resources it displaces.

And if you change a priority, record which information prompted that decision.

That is when planning becomes more than a task list and turns into a management tool.

10. From a documented plan to shared direction

A useful digital marketing plan does not have to be the longest or include the most channels.

It must enable a company to use its resources with a clear purpose.

To do that, it needs to connect objectives, customers, value proposition, assets, initiatives, responsibilities, budget and measurement.

But it must also recognise the business’s limitations.

We cannot plan as though time, money and operational capacity were unlimited.

Nor can we assume every initiative will work exactly as expected.

We need planning that can learn.

Planning that distinguishes actions creating value, those requiring corrections and those no longer justifying the resources they consume.

And that does not depend exclusively on the person who prepared it.

When decisions are documented, the team can understand why an initiative is developed, which purpose it serves and which conditions must be respected.

Collaborators have clearer instructions.

Owners can evaluate new proposals without starting every conversation from scratch.

And the business retains the knowledge needed to review its direction.

A good marketing plan helps the company use resources better and make informed decisions during execution, rather than merely complete every planned action.

Because the objective is not a full calendar.

It is for every initiative to have a reason to exist.