digital media business plan pdf

How To Write a Digital Media Business Plan + Template

Creating a business plan is essential for any business, but it can be especially helpful for digital media businesses that want to improve their strategy and/or raise funding.

A well-crafted business plan not only outlines the vision for your company, but also documents a step-by-step roadmap of how you are going to accomplish it. In order to create an effective business plan, you must first understand the components that are essential to its success.

This article provides an overview of the key elements that every digital media business owner should include in their business plan.

Download the Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan Template

What is a Digital Media Business Plan?

A digital media business plan is a formal written document that describes your company’s business strategy and its feasibility. It documents the reasons you will be successful, your areas of competitive advantage, and it includes information about your team members. Your business plan is a key document that will convince investors and lenders (if needed) that you are positioned to become a successful venture.

Why Write a Digital Media Business Plan?

A digital media business plan is required for banks and investors. The document is a clear and concise guide of your business idea and the steps you will take to make it profitable.

Entrepreneurs can also use this as a roadmap when starting their new company or venture, especially if they are inexperienced in starting a business.

Writing an Effective Digital Media Business Plan

The following are the key components of a successful digital media business plan:

Executive Summary

The executive summary of a digital media business plan is a one to two page overview of your entire business plan. It should summarize the main points, which will be presented in full in the rest of your business plan.

• Start with a one-line description of your digital media business
• Provide a short summary of the key points in each section of your business plan, which includes information about your company’s management team, industry analysis, competitive analysis, and financial forecast among others.

Company Description

This section should include a brief history of your company. Include a short description of how your company started, and provide a timeline of milestones your company has achieved.

If you are just starting your digital media business , you may not have a long company history. Instead, you can include information about your professional experience in this industry and how and why you conceived your new venture. If you have worked for a similar company before or have been involved in an entrepreneurial venture before starting your digital media business, mention this.

You will also include information about your chosen digital media business model and how, if applicable, it is different from other companies in your industry.

Industry Analysis

The industry or market analysis is an important component of a digital media business plan. Conduct thorough market research to determine industry trends and document the size of your market. 

Questions to answer include:

• What part of the digital media industry are you targeting?
• How big is the market?
• What trends are happening in the industry right now (and if applicable, how do these trends support the success of your company)?

You should also include sources for the information you provide, such as published research reports and expert opinions.

Customer Analysis

This section should include a list of your target audience(s) with demographic and psychographic profiles (e.g., age, gender, income level, profession, job titles, interests). You will need to provide a profile of each customer segment separately, including their needs and wants.

For example, the customers of a digital media business may include businesses that need marketing help, as well as individuals who want to improve their personal brand.

You can include information about how your customers make the decision to buy from you as well as what keeps them buying from you.

Develop a strategy for targeting those customers who are most likely to buy from you, as well as those that might be influenced to buy your products or digital media services with the right marketing.

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis helps you determine how your product or service will be different from competitors, and what your unique selling proposition (USP) might be that will set you apart in this industry.

For each competitor, list their strengths and weaknesses. Next, determine your areas of competitive differentiation and/or advantage; that is, in what ways are you different from and ideally better than your competitors.

Below are sample competitive advantages your digital media business may have:

• Strong management team with a wealth of industry experience
• Proven track record of success with similar businesses
• Robust and innovative technology platform
• Strong partnerships with complementary businesses
• Access to a large and growing customer base
• Ability to scale quickly to meet customer demand
• Favorable pricing structure

Marketing Plan

This part of the business plan is where you determine and document your marketing plan. . Your plan should be clearly laid out, including the following 4 Ps.

• Product/Service : Detail your product/service offerings here. Document their features and benefits.
• Price : Document your pricing strategy here. In addition to stating the prices for your products/services, mention how your pricing compares to your competition.
• Place : Where will your customers find you? What channels of distribution (e.g., partnerships) will you use to reach them if applicable?
• Promotion : How will you reach your target customers? For example, you may use social media, write blog posts, create an email marketing campaign, use pay-per-click advertising, launch a direct mail campaign. Or, you may promote your digital media business via a combination of these channels.

Operations Plan

This part of your digital media business plan should include the following information:

• How will you deliver your product/service to customers? For example, will you do it in person or over the phone only?
• What infrastructure, equipment, and resources are needed to operate successfully? How can you meet those requirements within budget constraints?

The operations plan is where you also need to include your company’s business policies. You will want to establish policies related to everything from customer service to pricing, to the overall brand image you are trying to present.

Finally, and most importantly, in your Operations Plan, you will lay out the milestones your company hopes to achieve within the next five years. Create a chart that shows the key milestone(s) you hope to achieve each quarter for the next four quarters, and then each year for the following four years. Examples of milestones for a digital media business include reaching $X in sales. Other examples include adding new customers, launching new services, and expanding to new markets.

Management Team

List your team members here including their names and titles, as well as their expertise and experience relevant to your specific digital media industry. Include brief biography sketches for each team member.

Particularly if you are seeking funding, the goal of this section is to convince investors and lenders that your team has the expertise and experience to execute on your plan. If you are missing key team members, document the roles and responsibilities you plan to hire for in the future.

Financial Plan

Here you will include a summary of your complete and detailed financial plan (your full financial projections go in the Appendix). 

This includes the following three financial statements:

Income Statement

Your income statement should include:

• Revenue : how much revenue you generate.
• Cost of Goods Sold : These are your direct costs associated with generating revenue. This includes labor costs, as well as the cost of any equipment and supplies used to deliver the product/service offering.
• Net Income (or loss) : Once expenses and revenue are totaled and deducted from each other, this is the net income or loss.

Sample Income Statement for a Startup Digital Media Business

Balance sheet.

Include a balance sheet that shows your assets, liabilities, and equity. Your balance sheet should include:

• Assets : All of the things you own (including cash).
• Liabilities : This is what you owe against your company’s assets, such as accounts payable or loans.
• Equity : The worth of your business after all liabilities and assets are totaled and deducted from each other.

Sample Balance Sheet for a Startup Digital Media Business

Cash flow statement.

Include a cash flow statement showing how much cash comes in, how much cash goes out and a net cash flow for each year. The cash flow statement should include:

• Cash Flow From Operations
• Cash Flow From Investments
• Cash Flow From Financing

Below is a sample of a projected cash flow statement for a startup digital media business .

Sample Cash Flow Statement for a Startup Digital Media Business

You will also want to include an appendix section which will include:

• Your complete financial projections
• A complete list of your company’s business policies and procedures related to the rest of the business plan (marketing, operations, etc.)
• Any other documentation which supports what you included in the body of your business plan.

Writing a good business plan gives you the advantage of being fully prepared to launch and/or grow your digital media business . It not only outlines your business vision but also provides a step-by-step process of how you are going to accomplish it.

If you are seeking funding from investors or lenders, it is especially important to have a well-written business plan that demonstrates the expertise and experience of your management team, as well as your company’s potential for financial success. By taking the time to write a detailed and comprehensive business plan, you will give your digital media business the best chance for success.  

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How to Write a Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan (with PDF Template)

SEOptimer now serves over 2,000 digital agencies around the world and through the years we've had the chance to connect with many of our agency customers to understand their early days in starting their agency. This is incredibly interesting to us because it helps us understand where and how they plan to grow so we can help build the features they need in SEOptimer.

This article is the 3rd in our series focused on starting a new digital agency. For some useful prior reading be sure to check out our previous articles:

• How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency : a comprehensive guide covering typical agency business models, services, hiring, training, new business, day to day management and more!
• Digital Agency Lean Canvas : a digital agency business model on a single page! The lean canvas is a popular documentation methodology borrowed from the tech startup world.

Don't be dismayed if it feels like there's a lot of other competing digital agencies in your city. This is perfectly normal. Digital marketing services like local SEO, for example, are dominated by small agencies. Search Engine Land reported that over 50% of local SEO agencies have 10 or fewer clients. Forbes Council Member Jon Hall says, this keeps the industry "weird" - aka diverse as its not dominated by a small handful of big agencies.

The first step in launching a new digital marketing agency is to write a plan. In this guide, we'll cover two of the more traditional ways to define a business plan document with handy downloadable templates:

• Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan Document (DOCX & PDF) Template
• Creative Agency Business Plan Deck (PPTX) Template

Why do you need a Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan?

The days of mandatory 50+ page business plans are long gone. The choice is now yours as to whether you define your digital agency business plan in an in-depth strategic document or not. Some agency founders find it useful to brainstorm this way and document their thought process in a long-form fashion across many pages. Other founders prefer creating shorter slide decks, others opt for a 1-page lean canvas version or some even write their plan in a wiki or business planning tool.

There is no right or wrong way to document your plan. You need to find the documentation method that suits you best. If you're unsure what suits you best, the following factors may help you decide:

Consideration #1: Who is the audience?

Think about who this document is for. Who will read it? In some cases it will just be you and the founding team. If you are raising money, obviously your investors will be a key audience.

You might also have business partners or board members who may be an audience too. When thnking through all these different groups, work backwards from the most optimal presentation format.

Consideration #2: Seek an unbiased third-party opinion

Devin Schumacher is the Founder of SEO agency SERP and says it's easy to get swept up in your own overly optimistic projections.

"Ask an experienced agency founder you trust or admire to sanity-check your plan. Seeking an objective opinion from a third-party detached from your new business is vital."

Devin makes a great point. This type of peer review methodology is commonplace in other industries but sometimes lacking amongst agency founders. Make sure you get at least 1 other unbiased opinion from someone who has already achieved success in your niche.

Don't fall into the trap of asking a friend or your accountant or someone you know personally to review your plan. Doing so will give you a biased opinion. You need an unbiased opinion from someone willing to give you objective feedback.

Consideration #3: Stand your ground

The whole point of a business plan is to take the time and effort to research the market, your competitors and potential clients. This document will distill all your insights into a strategic plan you can operationalize. As is always the case, unexpected distractions masquerading as opportunities (rightly or wrongly) will pop up in your field of view demanding your attention.

Perhaps it's a new client opportunity with a project slightly adjacent to your niche. Perhpas a hiring opportunity for a role you didn't plan to hire yet. Sometimes the hardest thing is to say no, when you're in the mindset of taking every opportunity for growth.

During these situations, revisit your agency business plan and remind yourself of your focus area niche and how you planned to grow within that niche.

Consideration #4: But, be ok with change

In fact this balance between sticking to the plan and pivoting the plan needs to be navigated by every digital agency founder. It's not easy and often you will be second-guessing yourself.

"Every agency owner I know has had to massively adjust their target audience, pricing structure, competitor analysis, and service offerings based on the way they grow over the first 2-5 years."

Rebekah says that founders need to be prepared for change, afterall, digital marketing is in constant flux and evolution, so change is the norm and we need to write business plans with flexibility in mind.

Trust your performance metrics and continue to do the things that have the biggest quantifiable business impact.

Typical Business Plan structures

We mentioned previously that there's no right or wrong way to document your business plan. So with that said, let's look at some typical marketing agency business plan templates that you can use. After considering all the factors above, choose the structure that works for you and your stakeholders best. We've outlined six of the more common options below:

Option #1: Written business document

This is the more traditional (and still valid) way to describe your business. A written business plan document in MS Word or Google Docs is still the most common way to document your digital marketing agency business plan.

This type of business plan is considered "long-form", ie: longer in length and suited to more descriptive language. Expect to write longer rationales, longer explanations with plenty of space for evidence, research, insights and strategy. This type of plan will likely be 30+ pages and feel comprehensive. This comprehensiveness is especially needed if external investors or business partners are involved who need to be convinced of the robustness of your plan.

Option #2: Slide deck

The PowerPoint Presentation (or Google Slides or Keynote) has become the go-to corporate communication format. Digital agency founders spend most of their time communicating to staff, clients and stakeholders in PowerPoint so it makes sense to use this format for the purposes of communicating the agency's overall business plan.

The fundamental difference between this option and the written document, is that a slide deck is a presentable format. So typically you might be in the room with your business partners, walking through the presentation on the screen. Whereas in option #1, a written document is not a compelling way to present an idea. It's much more suited as a sent document to be consumed in isolation. That's not to say that a slide deck can't be utilized this way, it's just more common that you would be presenting and talking through your plan with the slides serving as a visual backup to what you say.

There's also a good argument for doing both (ie written document AND slide deck). It comes down to who all the stakeholders are (eg investors, business partners or just you) and whether you intend to present your plan or just document your plan.

Option #3: Lean canvas

The Lean Canvas developed by leanstack.com is a business plan on a page split into 10 boxes. This planning document has become very popular in the tech/startup world and has since been adopted in many other industries, including digital agencies. Be sure to check out our previous article explaining how to use a Lean Canvas for your agency .

The entire business plan fits on a single page which means you obviously need to sweat on every single world and ensure only the most important details are included. We are big supporters of this format because this helps you prioritize and focus your efforts down to the fundamental aspects of your new business.

Option #4: Wiki

In the context of a business, a Wiki is usually an internal website with multiple interlinking articles. The biggest Wiki in the world is Wikipedia and if you want to get really meta, check out Wikipedia's wiki about wikis :

"A wiki (/wɪki/ WIK-ee) is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project."

Wiki's are generally perceived as internal knowledge bases so if your business plan has executional detail, this might be a good format for documenting processes and methodologies for staff.

Option #5: General Planning tool

Tools like Notion and Trello have grown massively in recent years as more people are working remotely and more work in general is being done collaboratively online.

These types of planning tools are designed to be multi-purpose and fall somewhere between a wiki and a specialized business planning tool.

How to construct the business plan

Now that we've covered the typical business plan structures let's look at the specifics of how you actually go about constructing the business plan and each of the main tasks you need to perform and sections of the business plan.

Market research data gathering

Customer/client research.

Rebekah Edwards, who we spoke to previously stresses the importance of market research with as many potential clients as you can. She interviewed several businesses in their target market when developing their service offerings and pricing. Some of the questions she thought were most helpful included:

• With no other information, what do you think X would cost from an agency? (X being the service in question.)
• What is the biggest roadblock for you to accomplish X in-house? (X being basic content/SEO projects, such as article creation/editing/uploading or strategizing new keywords.)
• How would you typically search for a digital marketing agency? (Referrals, social media, Google search, etc. — this helped us understand how to best market our services)
• If you already work with a digital marketing agency of any kind, what stood out? Why did you sign on the dotted line?
• Have there been digital marketing agencies you've specifically decided not to work with for any particular reason? What were the red flags or the issues with a fit that led you to say no?
• What matters most to you when working with a digital marketing agency? (Examples: data/analytics, frequent communication, hitting deadlines every time, price, niche of expertise, etc.)

Answers to these questions are invaluable as they help you position and market your new digital agency based on customer insight.

Competitor research

The importance of competitor research goes without saying. It's vital you have a good understanding of how your competitors are going to market, how they sell, who they target and what their rough price points are. If you have a friend who owns a small business, ask them to mystery shop at a competitor so they can report back to you what the sales process was like.

The way you position and sell your services should be informed by a combination of both customer insights and competitor insights. Addressing client needs whilst maintaining a unique selling proposition will set your new digital agency up for success!

Building out the business plan

Download our template: digital marketing agency business plan document.

To make edits to the document make sure to download our DOCX template which you can edit directly in Microsoft Word. However if you would prefer a printable PDF, we also provide this option too. Use these templates as a starting point to help you draft your digital marketing business plan:

Below are some of the highlight areas of the plan:

Market Research Findings

We suggest conducting three types of research to inform your marketing agency business plan:

• Qualitative research like one-on-one interviews, focus groups and meetings with prospective clients
• Quantitative reserach like online surveys, mass emails and multivariate testing
• Competitor analysis to determine their strengths and weaknesses

Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and Service Offering

Nailing your USP will be tough especially if you are in a competitive industry / city. Use the previous market research tasks to discover where the gaps are in the market and leverage these insights to position your new agency to be competitive AND different. Perform a SWOT analysis based on your new USP. Then you can determine your actual service offerings and pricing strategy.

Go-To-Market (GTM) Plan and Org Structure

Define your target market - the exact client types who you want to sell to and list the marketing and advertising activities that you will perform that would be most effective in reaching these types of people.

Also list your people (this might not be many on day 1!), sources of advice and support as well as the strategies you'll use to retain your staff and build their skills and knowledge.

Goals Sales Forecasting

This marketing agency business plan template includes goal setting for the next year and goal setting for the next 3 years. This page is structured to help you set SMART goals.

SMART goals are:

• Specific : In the '[Enter a goal]' section describe your goal clearly and ensure you attach a person responsible in the 'Who's responsible' section.
• Measureable : Ensure the actions you list in the 'Actions to achieve goal' have an objective outcome
• Achievable : Ensure you sense-check your goals with your team and all agree that they are attainable
• Relevant : Ensure this is a priority goal and will help your new agency grow
• Time-bound : Enter a due date to ensure the goal doesn't get forgotten

Use the Cash flow forecast table as a simple way to visualize cash-on-hand in your first 12 months. Add rows to estimate your monthly expenses like payroll, rent, utilities, subscriptions, insurance, fees and other ongoing costs.

Tools and Tech

Finally, list out all the tools and technology your new agency will likely need to run an efficient operation. We've listed SEOptimer for you already because it's one of the best, low-cost lead generation tools for your agency. Over 2,000 digital agencies use SEOptimer to generate white label site audits and embed an audit form on their agency website to capture new lead details.

Creative Agency Business Plan Slide Deck PPTX Template

If you prefer a slide deck template, use this creative agency business plan example in PowerPoint format:

Tim's background is in digital marketing working for both large and small digital agencies and diverse client types. He has a passion for tech, software and staying up to date on the latest search engine news.

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How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan: 4 Steps

• 08 Feb 2024

Digital marketing is essential; it helps you connect with customers via online channels and enhance brand awareness. To ensure your campaigns succeed, you need an effective digital marketing plan and strategy.

Not all businesses understand strategic planning's importance. According to a Smart Insights report , only 17 percent clearly define their digital marketing strategies.

If you want to create a digital marketing plan, here’s an overview of what it needs and four steps to take.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is a Digital Marketing Plan & Why Is It Important?

Technology has revolutionized business, but that doesn’t mean traditional marketing tactics are obsolete.

“There are certain aspects of marketing that remain true no matter how technology changes,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the course Digital Marketing Strategy . “One of these aspects is the importance of developing a plan to effectively use your marketing resources.”

A digital marketing plan is a comprehensive strategy outlining how your company will use digital channels to promote its products and services. Unlike traditional marketing tactics, it focuses on identifying your target audience and connecting with consumers via online platforms and channels.

Your plan’s significance can’t be overstated. It provides a strategic focus while optimizing your marketing efforts and budget. More importantly, it ensures your company remains agile and responsive to market dynamics and maintains a competitive edge.

Adaptability is particularly crucial in times of uncertainty. According to HubSpot , 20 percent of marketers pivoted their established marketing plans last year due to the potential for a recession.

To help craft your digital marketing plan, here are four steps to ensuring it’s comprehensive and can weather market challenges.

4 Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Plan

1. set goals & objectives.

The first step to creating your digital marketing plan is understanding what goals and objectives are essential to succeed.

“Companies often have multiple objectives, and you’ll need to prioritize and balance these goals,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy . “Often these goals are tied to the overall strategy of the company.”

For example, if you don’t work at a big-name company, you may want to focus on brand awareness. If you’re a market leader, you may want to expand your target audience by highlighting a new or revised product or service.

The best way to determine your company’s objectives is by identifying its challenges and opportunities throughout the customer journey , which has three stages:

• Awareness: Introducing customers to your brand or product to address a problem they have
• Consideration: Making customers aware of your brand or product while they evaluate alternatives
• Decision: Using information gathered during the previous stages to influence consumers’ purchasing decisions

“Which stage of the funnel you focus on and how you allocate your budget across different stages depends on the specific context of your brand and where you feel is the greatest barrier for your growth,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy .

Your company's strategic decisions hinge on which customer journey stage they pertain to. For example, to increase conversion rates at the consideration stage, you could allocate more resources to producing targeted, personalized content.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Your digital marketing strategy is only effective if you know who you’re trying to attract. That’s why identifying your target audience —the consumers most likely interested in your products or services—is the next step to crafting your digital marketing plan.

To determine your target audience, collect data related to:

• Demographics: General information like age, gender, and occupation that help you make implicit assumptions about customers
• Customer behavior: Behavior patterns related to your products or services, such as purchasing history and website interactions
• Consumer motivations: Primary motivations when making purchases, such as convenience, value, or status

You can use your insights to employ tactics like segmentation —organizing your customers into groups.

“While you can try and market a product to everyone, consumers have different needs and preferences,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy . “What appeals to one group of consumers may not appeal to another.”

By segmenting your customers, you can provide personalized experiences—even when their needs or market conditions shift.

Related: 3 Most Common Types of Customer Needs to Be Aware Of

3. Define Your Value Proposition

Once you know who to target, you can communicate your value proposition .

“If you want to convince consumers to buy your product, you need to give them a compelling reason to purchase your brand instead of a competing brand,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy .

To start, you need to know your:

• Target audience
• Unique value
• Competitive set
• Justifications for brand value

You can then combine these components into a value positioning statement:

For [target market] , [Brand X] is the only brand that offers [unique value claim] among all [competitive set] because [reason to believe] .

According to Digital Marketing Strategy , you can analyze your value claim’s validity and potency using the three C’s of brand positioning:

• Consumer analysis: Understanding your target audience’s behaviors, needs, preferences, and motivations.
• Competitor analysis: Evaluating your competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and market position to enhance your strategy.
• Company analysis: Assessing your value proposition, capabilities, resources, and performance to identify areas for strategic improvement.

Effective brand positioning requires being faithful to your value claim and ensuring it’s feasible and favorable.

“As you work to create a value proposition, remember: A brand’s position is not just defined by the brand itself,” Gupta says in the course. “A brand co-creates its position with its consumers as they interact with each other and react to emerging cultural trends.”

4. Establish Metrics

Metrics are critical to your marketing plan. Without key performance indicators (KPIs) , it can be difficult to tell whether it’s effective.

Common marketing KPIs include:

• Impressions
• Click through rate
• Conversion rate

“At the simplest level, you need to measure what you set out to achieve with your marketing objectives,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy . “And certain metrics will be more relevant for specific stages of the funnel.”

For example, you can focus on metrics like impressions —the number of times your brand-specific content was displayed—to determine your strategy’s effectiveness at the awareness stage.

With a well-crafted digital marketing plan, you can use metrics to optimize your strategy as priorities shift throughout the customer journey.

Create Your Own Digital Marketing Plan

If you want to be a more strategic marketer, you need a digital marketing plan. With one, you can solidify your company’s position, enhance your digital marketing skills , and satisfy customers.

“Determining your marketing goals, who you’re reaching, understanding the uniqueness of what you have to offer them, and how you’ll measure the value of your marketing efforts isn’t always easy,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy . “However, as you clarify these components and create your plan, you’ll have a much clearer path ahead toward identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers.”

One of the most effective ways to learn how to craft a plan is by enrolling in an online marketing course, such as Digital Marketing Strategy . Through real-world case studies and interactive exercises, you can understand how to position your brand for success.

Do you want to create a digital marketing plan? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy to discover how. If you’re interested in exploring online education but aren’t sure where to start, download our free guide to online learning success .

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Digital Marketing Agency Business Plan

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54 & Cloudy

Executive summary executive summary is a brief introduction to your business plan. it describes your business, the problem that it solves, your target market, and financial highlights.">.

54 & Cloudy is a newly formed digital marketing agency that is run by two industry veterans, Tom and Stephen, who collectively have more than two decades of experience running e-commerce sites, working at digital marketing agencies, and helping small to medium size businesses achieve their digital growth goals.

While 54 & Cloudy has been operating as a small consultancy for the past two years, it is now looking to raise some funding and become a full-service digital marketing agency that will need to purchase technology assets and ramp up hiring to meet client demands. Additionally, once the 54 & Cloudy ramps up their marketing efforts, there will be a need for internal resources to manage all the new clients that they will onboard.

54 & Cloudy will operate initially as a fully remote organization with resources across various functional areas of the business including Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”), Conversion Rate Optimization (“CRO”), paid advertising (including social media and search), as well as contractors who will support auxiliary revenue streams such as content writing and design services.

54 & Cloudy is well-positioned to quickly become one of the most trusted digital marketing agencies in the industry given its existing reputation and the plans of building a proprietary technology solution that will bring meaningful value to clients. As 54 & Cloudy furthers their reputation in the market, 54 & Cloudy is poised for long-term success and will be able to increase hiring and expand service offerings to meet client demands with ease.

Service Offerings

After completing their fundraising, 54 & Cloudy will expand their operations to four main revenue streams:

• SEO marketing services include SEO strategy development, technical SEO, keyword targeting, content marketing, and link building
• Includes full-service PPC marketing efforts, including search engine advertising, paid shopping ads, display ads, paid social media ads, retargeting, and more
• eCommerce CRO services will run over thousands of AB tests across a variety of eCommerce platforms with the goal of driving sales. Through targeted user research, a team of UX analysts, and psychological experts, 54 & Cloudy will grow not only transactions but average order and customer lifetime value for clients
• Industry-focused content writers and designers who excel in translating the voice and tone of a client’s business into conversion-driving copy or rich and engaging design

Expectations

Financing needed.

Given the management team’s long-standing success in the industry, 54 & Cloudy will be looking to secure an SBA loan in the amount of $300,000 to finance the acquisition of initial startup technology costs as well as cover initial cash flow needs as 54 & Cloudy ramps up customer acquisition and operates at a loss in Year 1.

Given industry growth and the new technology platform 54 & Cloudy will develop, the projected next five years will see strong growth from DMA as they service new and existing clients while capturing additional wallet share with existing new services as 54 & Cloudy grows to become a one-stop-shop for all types of digital marketing. Across the company, 54 & Cloudy is projecting to ramp up meaningfully after securing their debt capital and hiring several resources to achieve 2022 revenue of $2,535,009, which will grow to $12.6 million by 2026. EBITDA will also grow from $738526 in 2022 to $5,115,174 by 2026.

Financial Highlights by Year

Opportunity

Business overview.

At launch, 54 & Cloudy will operate across four main service categories all focused on digital marketing services for clients. The main categories are outlined below as well as their revenue assumptions used in the financial projections.

• Customers will pay a monthly recurring charge that averages out to $3,000
• Customers pay the agency a fee of 15% of the client’s advertising budget, which was assumed to be an average of $10,000 per month
• Customers will pay a monthly recurring charge that is tiered based on the number of tests and campaigns run per month but will average out to $4,000
• Industry-focused content writers and designers who excel in translating the voice and tone of a client’s business into conversion-driving copy or rich and engaging designs
• Customers will be charged per hour for design and writing services at an average rate of $100 per hour

Growth Strategy

Within the first five years of operations, 54 & Cloudy will look to drive revenue growth by not only acquiring new customers but also expanding their wallet share with existing customers. By reducing the churn rate and upselling customers on additional services, they will enhance the client LTV.

In addition to organic client growth, 54 & Cloudy will also be launching new service offerings, standalone product offerings, and will establish several partnerships for referral revenue. The main inorganic growth avenue is with the development of a proprietary reporting and marketing forecast dashboard. This will become an integral selling point in 54 & Cloudy’s service packages as a way to visualize audits, changes, and provide instant access/feedback to the user. 54 & Cloudy anticipates eventually launching this technology as a standalone product that will further its growth far in excess of the financial projections in this business plan.

Target Market

Market size & segments.

Overall Market

Over the past five years, the Digital Advertising Agencies industry has benefited from the rapid shift from traditional print advertising to digital advertisements. In particular, strong demand for digital advertising services from the retail, financial services, automotive, and telecommunication sectors have bolstered industry revenue. As more consumers generate website traffic through the use of smartphones and tablets, many businesses have purchased digital advertising services to build brand awareness across multiple screens and platforms. Additionally, as more product manufacturers are directly selling their products online, many retailers are demanding industry activities such as search engine visibility services to help them compete. Over the five years to 2019, industry revenue is anticipated to grow at an annualized rate of 17.2%, including a 5.6% jump in 2019 to reach $15.7 billion. Over the five years to 2019 total industry operators are expected to increase at an annualized rate of 16.2% to 4,471.

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Over the five years to 2024, digital advertising agencies that can develop innovative tools such as data mining, with applications for analyzing customer purchasing behavior, will experience strong demand. As online media streaming services and social media continue to generate substantial internet traffic, many businesses will strengthen their investments in digital advertising. As a result, industry revenue is forecast to increase at an annualized rate of 4.4% to $19.5 billion over the five years to 2024.

Key Market Drivers

Internet traffic volume

Internet traffic volumes represent the total data sent over the internet globally per month. As the amount of internet traffic increases due to more consumers accessing websites from their mobile devices, tablets, or computers, many businesses will expand their online presence. As a result, demand for digital advertising services will rise as more businesses use advertising to drive website traffic volumes. Internet traffic volume is expected to increase substantially in 2019, representing a potential opportunity for the industry.

Total advertising expenditure

Total advertising expenditure typically trends in line with corporate profit. When corporate profit rises, businesses are likely to revitalize their advertising budgets. In 2019, total advertising expenditure is expected to increase.

Consumer spending

A rise in consumer spending indicates that more consumers are making discretionary purchases. This trend encourages many businesses to invest in advertising services to boost brand awareness and remain competitive. As a result of these services, businesses benefit from a larger customer base. In 2019, consumer spending is expected to increase.

Corporate profit

As businesses become more profitable, they often expand their advertising budgets, since many digital advertising services result in a strong return on investment. Thus a rise in corporate profitability, particularly in the retail, finance, automotive, and telecommunications sectors, stimulates demand for digital advertising services. Corporate profit is expected to decline in 2019, representing a threat to the industry.

Investor uncertainty

Investor uncertainty is an important indicator of industry performance. The degree to which businesses invest in advertising is related to the confidence that decision-makers have in the market. As uncertainty increases, businesses may decide to reduce or suspend advertising activities. In 2019, investor uncertainty is expected to decline.

Industry Services

Digital display advertising makes up an estimated 50.0% of industry revenue in 2019.

This product segment includes various forms of advertising, including banner, which makes up 12.6% of total revenue, followed by video (10.5%), rich media (8.7%), and sponsorship (1.5%). Over the past five years, as more users have streamed videos online, video advertisements have steadily grown, as many advertising agencies have strategically placed advertisements either before, during, or after a video clip. Furthermore, sponsorship advertising has exhibited growth over the past five years, particularly for digital-only publications.

Search engine optimization

In 2019, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing services are expected to account for 28.9% of industry revenue.

SEO services help increase a company’s visibility in a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Typically, websites that have favorably used SEO to appear in search engine result pages for certain keywords are more likely to have high online visitor traffic, which can increase clientele’s sales volumes. Digital advertising agencies that can build website algorithms with the highest relevancy can obtain favorable placing for their clients in search results. Over the past five years, this market has steadily grown, due to many businesses developing their online website presence. However, over the next five years, many clients will expand their online presence through other mediums, particularly video, which will cut into growth for this product segment.

Major End Markets

The industry primarily relies on corporate clients from the retail, finance, automotive, and telecommunications sectors.

Retail and telecommunications

In 2019, retail and telecommunications are expected to account for 21.9% and 10.5% of industry revenue, respectively.

Retail has comprised the largest share of digital advertising spending over the past five years, which can be partly attributed to many consumers making their retail purchasing decisions online. According to eMarketer, while retailers have demanded direct response advertisements over the past five years, many retailers will move toward brand advertising, such as advertisements via video, social display, and hybrid formats.

Comparatively, telecommunication-related advertising has steadily declined over the past five years, due to data privacy laws that have constrained the ability for advertisers to implement digital advertisements using user data from consumers’ mobile phones. Furthermore, consolidation among telecommunication providers has limited their demand for advertising services.

Automotive and financial services

Automotive and financial services are anticipated to make up 12.4% and 12.1% of industry revenue, respectively.

Over the past five years, demand for digital advertising services from the automotive sector has steadily increased, due to the revitalization in consumer demand for automobiles. In particular, many consumers have used the internet to shop for their next vehicle, which has prompted the automotive sector to purchase more digital advertising services. Additionally, demand for digital advertising services from the financial sector has remained relatively stagnant over the past five years, due to many digital advertising services, such as rich media and video formats, not being as effective with driving customer purchasing decisions, compared with other sectors, such as the automotive sector.

Consumer packaged goods and consumer products

In 2019, consumer packaged goods and consumer products are expected to generate 8.8% of industry revenue.

Over the past five years, this product segment has exhibited growth. For bigger brand products within this segment, demand for digital advertising services has increased in line with peak seasons, such as Christmas and the back-to-school period. Comparatively, retailers of lower-priced products within this market segment typically purchase display advertising campaigns to build brand awareness and encourage a strong customer base that makes repeat purchases.

Travel and media

Travel and media comprise an estimated 7.8% and 6.3% of industry revenue in 2019, respectively.

In the past five years, the travel and media sectors have increased their demand for digital advertising services. Over the next five years, the travel sector will demand digital advertising services that integrate well with consumers that access travel websites from their mobile device. Comparatively, media, which includes social media sites, have increasingly used digital advertising services to generate website traffic and monetize their websites.

Computing products and consumer electronics

In 2019, computing products and consumer electronics account for an estimated 8.0% of industry revenue.

Over the next five years, this product segment is expected to account for a larger share of industry revenue. As consumer electronics are expected to exhibit high growth over the next five years, many electronic companies that manufacture devices, such as digital and video cameras, telephones, and TVs, among other products, will increase their demand for digital advertising services.

Other sectors

Other sectors include the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, as well as the entertainment sector, among others.

Over the next five years, many sectors, such as entertainment, will increasingly demand digital advertising services to attract users that increasingly access websites with their smartphone and tablet.

54 & Cloudy  Initial Target Market

Competition

Competitive landscape.

The digital marketing agency landscape is filled with thousands of small companies that have fewer than ten employees with only a handful of organizations that have reached scale to have more than 50 employees. Additionally, the market is rapidly becoming more reliant on various technology and software providers, who themselves are now some of the biggest competitors in the market. Detailed below are several of the large digital agencies as well as large service providers in the market.

Large Digital Marketing Agencies

• Ignite Visibility is one of the highest awarded digital marketing agency in the industry, specializing in digital marketing strategy, SEO, paid media, social media, email marketing, analytics, Amazon, and CRO.
• WebFX is a performance-focused digital marketing agency with services designed to increase qualified leads, phone calls, and transactions for clients. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Harrisburg, Penn., they have over 250 digital marketing, design, and development experts who serve customers through SEO, PPC, web design, and more.
• Power Digital is a digital marketing agency based in San Diego with an office in New York. The agency, founded in 2012, has more than 300 employees and provides content marketing, email marketing, PPC, SEO, social media marketing, web design, and PR services. Power Digital serves mid-market and other-sized companies in the consumer products & services, advertising & marketing, business services, and retail industries.
• This Utah-based agency has a marketing team of 50+ that has conducted over 2,500 marketing campaign audits since 2011. Disruptive Advertising specializes in traffic, conversion, and analytics to help its clients outperform their competitors.

Service Providers That Displace Agencies

• SEMrush is a leading online visibility management software-as-a-service platform. With over 7 million businesses having used the platform across 50 products, tools, and add-ons including tools for search, content, social media, and market research. The company tracks data from more than 140 countries, seamlessly integrates with Google and task management platforms.
• Ahrefs is a software company that develops online SEO tools and free educational materials for marketing professionals. Ahrefs database has over 11 billion keywords and more than 400 billion indexed pages.
• Both of these companies are best-in-class email marketing and growth marketing platforms that helps deliver more personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like email, SMS, in-app notifications, and web.

54 & Cloudy Advantages

While the market is highly competitive, 54 & Cloudy sets itself apart by leveraging proprietary technology and world-class third-party software. Additionally, 54 & Cloudy will only initially work with clients who operate within specific niches in the e-commerce space and this will allow 54 & Cloudy to develop a sector expertise and reputation for excellence that will drive organic growth.

Some of the key advantages that 54 & Cloudy will have when going head-to-head with competitors includes the following:

• Targeted user segments to conduct market research that is the exact audience of the client
• Relationships with BI data firms that help find the sweet spot in terms of pricing, sales, etc. These kinds of licenses cost nearly 6-figures but 54 & Cloudy has a sweetheart deal
• Custom reporting dashboard that brings in paid, organic and outbound sales touchpoints
• Custom dashboard for A/B split testing, which allows agency and customers to take analysis and turn into immediately actionable copy tests
• Direct integration with eCommerce platforms (WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix) or off-the-shelf CMS platform

Keys to Success

Given the competitive nature of the industry, 54 & Cloudy will need to be aware of the various keys to success that are critical for long-term growth in the market.

• Digital agencies must stay up-to-date with the latest developments in technology, from the newest advertising platform to the latest software used to track and analyze campaigns
• Membership in the American Association of Advertising Agencies may indicate a higher level of professionalism in operations and boost the agency’s credibility and image
• As a highly competitive industry, digital advertising agencies must be able to develop professional proposals for work and accounts to secure contracts
• Digital advertisers that develop a solid brand with a good reputation achieve a greater level of success within the industry
• Building and scaling tools and technology that are proprietary will allow 54 & Cloudy to scale and capture market share with a defensible offering that can increase LTV and reduce long-term churn

Marketing & Sales

Marketing plan.

Like other rapidly growing B2B companies, 54 & Cloudy will focus on targeted digital and print marketing, multiple advertising campaigns, conventions/trade shows, and strategic partnerships. Since 54 & Cloudy has already been offering its services on a consulting basis and has developed a loyal following, organic inbound traffic is already coming in and will continue to create a compounding effect that will propel 54 & Cloudy to strong and sustainable growth.

In order to continue growth and maintain their industry-leading reputation, 54 & Cloudy plans to utilize their own digital marketing knowledge to expand within their core markets, growing into new markets, and increase wallet share with existing customers.

Digital and Print Marketing

54 & Cloudy will launch a robust digital marketing campaign across paid search and through digital publications/blogs specific to their core demographics. With a unique skill set and offers, 54 & Cloudy will be able to gain meaningful momentum through paid search, providing them with business demographic information and contact information for re-targeting and promotional messaging. Additionally, by working with key online and print publications and blogs specific to the company’s various end-markets, 54 & Cloudy will be able to develop a strong industry presence that will be crucial for recurring customer growth. Some of the tactics that 54 & Cloudy will use to attract customers will include free site audits, industry-specific templates, and other free services to capture emails and upsell customers.

Strategic Partners

Relationships will be formed with multiple organizations that are selling to the same end customer including with design agencies, print media groups, traditional advertising agencies, and other non-marketing service providers like bankers, lawyers, and small business associations. By building a large team of strategic partners, 54 & Cloudy will be able to generate a stable and reliable customer base that will ultimately lead to repeat customers and an increased potential for larger contracts.

Customer Re-engagement

As with any business services company, recurring customers are a vital source of income as well as word-of-mouth for a growing business. As 54 & Cloudy continues to sell within their core demographic, they will be using various engagement tactics to drive retention and improve new referrals from existing customers. Through building a strong group of loyal customers, 54 & Cloudy will be able to identify key growth opportunities for the business including new product lines and end markets to work with.

Organic Marketing

As a leading digital marketing agency, 54 & Cloudy will be able to also publish onsite blogs, detailed landing pages, and other relevant content, as they would for any client, in order to drive organic rankings and new customer acquisition. By focusing on long-tail niche content in combination with highly competitive keywords and questions, 54 & Cloudy will generate strong SEO growth and generate meaningful organic traffic.

Trade Shows/Conventions

The business will be based out of the Bay Area where 54 & Cloudy’s two founders are located. Given office rent prices and the plan to hire resources independent of physical location, 54 & Cloudy is planning to operate as a fully remote organization for the near term. There will be a small rent expense to cover the founders’ rent but no other rent or office costs will be incurred by 54 & Cloudy in the projections.

54 & Cloudy will be utilizing many of the industry’s leading automation, data tracking, analytics software for handling client work. This technology will include SEO tools, paid advertising automation platforms, A/B testing systems, and other useful resources that can help clients achieve their growth targets. Additionally, 54 & Cloudy will utilize several internal tools including a CRM, Slack, an email marketing platform, and other services to grow the business and manage operations and a remote workforce at scale.

Milestones & Metrics

Milestones table.

Key Metrics

As with many B2B businesses, 54 & Cloudy will be tracking several key customer acquisition and customer retention metrics that will drive overall profitability and allow for more reliable hiring need forecasting.

The metrics 54 & Cloudy will be tracking include:

• Revenue by Service Line
• Contribution Margin by Service Line
• Cost Per Acquisition (“CPA”)
• Churn Rate by Service Line
• Revenue Per Employee
• MRR and ARR

Ownership & Structure

54 & Cloudy is co-owned by the two founders who each have a 50% ownership in the business. The company is based in the Bay Area and is a California LLC. There are no other ownership interests in the business at this time.

Leadership Team

54 & Cloudy is currently being run as a small agency by the two founders who are looking to secure funding to make additional hiring and take on enterprise-level clients. The two founders, Tom and Stephen, have extensive experience in the market not only as e-commerce digital marketers but also as technical/UX engineers.

Tom was previously a technical/UX engineer at a successful digital marketing agency where he worked on building proprietary dashboards, reporting tools, and advertising automation for both internal and external use cases. Stephen, on the other hand, is 54 & Cloudy’s e-commerce marketing expert with more than a decade working at e-commerce companies including a fashion business in the Bay Area in 2013 that was later sold in 2019. Since the sale of that business, Stephen has worked as a contractor developing his product-side and marketing expertise for small to medium size businesses.

The two founders complement each other’s skillsets and both are looking to move 54 & Cloudy from a small contract consulting business to a full-service digital marketing agency.

Hiring Strategy

In addition to 54 & Cloudy’s leadership team, there will be a strong hiring strategy to handle all the new clients as the business grows over the five-year projection period. With a mix of full-time hires and contractors, the Company will look to scale hiring to meet client demand but not be overstaffed so that people are not fully utilized.

The following roles will be areas 54 & Cloudy will hire to handle client services.

• Acts as primary technical architect and engineer for all development, testing, and product development
• Full-stack in-house marketer that is expert in all services the firm employs. Has extensive background and experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, paid search marketing, outbound email, and site analytics
• Initially outsourced, this role handles all of the Google / Microsoft / LinkedIn / etc. ad management as well as its reporting
• Liaisons the day-to-day relationships with our clients, working closely with technical and marketing leads to deliver on contract scope and goals. Managers the timelines and execution of all projects to ensure their success
• In-house sales lead that possesses the ability to sell-in and move prospects through the buyer’s journey. Based on our target markets, this role has experience and knowledge specifically to help those business types grow
• Copywriting
• Paid Marketing
• CRO Analyst

54 & Cloudy anticipates growing from 13 resources in Year 1 to more than 45 by Year 5. As outlined in the chart below, this growth will result in Year 5 personnel expenses exceeding $3.8 million, up from $965,000 in Year 1. Revenue per employee will increase from $185,000 in Year 1 to $262,000 in Year 5.

Financial Plan investor-ready personnel plan .">

Key assumptions.

54 & Cloudy developed the following financials utilizing their extensive industry knowledge and relevant historic financial performance.

• Given the long-term nature of SEO, the churn rate is 5%
• Churn rate is slightly higher than SEO at 7.5%
• eCommerce CRO services will run thousands of AB tests across a variety of eCommerce platforms with the goal of driving sales. Through targeted user research, a team of UX analysts, and psychological experts, 54 & Cloudy will grow not only transactions but average order and customer lifetime value for clients
• Churn rate is high at 20% due to the nature of the service line
• This is an ancillary service within 54 & Cloudy’s paid and optimization offerings but can be expanded to help clients develop all onsite and paid messaging

The financial projections assume an SBA loan for $300,000 at 8% over 10 years and those funds will be sufficient to cover all growth and hiring projections outlined in the business plan.

54 & Cloudy believes that the introduction of proprietary reporting and marketing forecast dashboards will help accelerate new customer acquisition and allow churn rates to remain low for existing customers. This will be an integral selling point in 54 & Cloudy’s service packages as a way to visualize audits, changes, and provide instant access/feedback to the user. In the future, 54 & Cloudy may look to offer the reporting and forecasting dashboard as a separate stand-alone service offering.

Revenue by Month

Expenses by Month

Net Profit (or Loss) by Year

Sources of Funds

Given the management team’s long-standing success in the industry, 54 & Cloudy will be looking to secure an SBA loan in the amount of $300,000 to finance the acquisition of initial startup technology costs, as well as cover initial cash flow, needs as they ramp up customer acquisition and operates at a loss in Year 1.

Use of Funds

54 & Cloudy is securing an SBA loan for $300,000 that will be used to fund initial technology asset purchases of $65,000, startup costs including licensing, legal, and other marketing costs of $50,000, as well as cover cash flow needs during Year 1 as 54 & Cloudy, grows from negative operating income to cash flow positive by year-end.

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6 Steps To a Successful Digital Media Plan

For most businesses, a successful digital media strategy serves as a tool for attracting and retaining customers. Yet, not all digital media strategies consider the best routes for establishing goals and monitoring success. For this reason, we’ve created a 6-step process for an effective digital media plan.

What is a Digital Media Plan?

A digital media plan is simply a plan for all of your digital channels for a given quarter. It should include brand awareness and engagement initiatives and encompass your team-wide goals and timelines. Some initial considerations should include:

• Which of your “owned” digital platforms you’re using (i.e. social media, websites, landing pages)
• Available software to support execution such as content calendars, SEO software, social media automations, etc. 
• Steps to monitor success or areas of improvement

How to Make a Digital Media Strategy

• Profile your target audience (e.g., age, location, professional status, lifestyle interests)
• Analyze your digital media channels
• Choose a digital media platform(s)
• Identify your overarching goals
• Identify resources and tools
• Monitor and optimize content

1. Profile Your Audience

Regardless of your business, knowing your audience is the first step in building an effective media strategy. The first lesson to learn is that it’s nearly impossible to market to every audience, or even less-defined audiences. Knowing basic demographic and psychographic characteristics about your audience will help you narrow down where and when to reach them and what messages will best resonate. 

How to Determine Your Target Audience 

1. Location (Country/City)

Understanding the location of your audience will help plan your posting schedule and which areas of the world to promote your service/product. Knowing the city your audience is finding you from is also important. This allows you to determine which time zones are most applicable.

Age is important to know for many reasons. For example, different age groups use the internet differently. For example, the 18-25 age group is more likely to consume content later in the night. Whereas, 25-35 and 35-45 are more likely to search early in the morning before work (7:00-9:00 AM), on lunch breaks (noon-2:00PM).

Pro Tip: Demographics change frequently, so it’s important to constantly monitor Google Analytics accounts and adjust your media strategy accordingly. 

3. Psychographics Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation is a way to divide your audience into specific groups, based on psychological characteristics. 

Although marketers have found that psychographics can be difficult to master, it’s beneficial to understanding your audience. One of the biggest areas of confusion is the difference between demographics and psychographics in marketing. 

Why Use Psychographics Over Demographics?

Psychographics is a better way to understand your customer because age, sex, and religion, don’t tell enough info about how consumers think. However, a consumer’s hobbies, lifestyle, and opinions give more opportunity to see what your audience wants and how they interact with content.

For example, if I know that my target audience is likely to focus on high-end travel or spends their free time participating in endurance sports, then I can craft messaging and distribution channel plans to better resonate and meet them where they are spending time.

2. Analyze Digital Media Channels

Social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn , and Instagram, are all great ways to reach audiences. However, not all channels are appropriate for every company. 

As a media strategy team, it’s important to know where your audience is, what they’re interested in, and how you can connect with them. There is not one size fits all when choosing channels because every business is unique. 

3. Choose the Right Digital Media Channel for Your Business

As you analyze your social media channels, examine what audiences are interacting with your content. If your followers aren’t your target audience, it’s time to reposition your messaging or invest in different platforms. 

For example, if you run an ecommerce business, Facebook is going to be more beneficial than LinkedIn. Each company will have different followers, so it’s important to identify your audience and use the channel with the best chance of reaching them.

4. Identify Your Goals and Key Strategies

As you start discussing goals, create a brainstorming session with the whole marketing team. This promotes critical thinking skills and allows each member to contribute what’s on their mind. 

Once you’re aligned on key goals, analyze and synthesize the data to determine if the goals are contributing to your company’s overarching goals. Next, brainstorm an exhaustive list of high-level strategies to reach these goals. 

Finally, narrow the strategies down based on: 

• Resource cost 
• Feasibility to achieve
• Level of impact
• Contribution to the stated objectives 

Use S.M.A.R.T. Technique To Write Goals

While there are many strategies for writing goals, the S.M.A.R.T. system ensures the process is repeatable and strategic. 

The S.M.A.R.T. technique for goal setting ensure that each goal is the following:

• Specific: Understand what exactly you need to accomplish so you can formulate a path for success. 
• Measurable: Work to establish specific, quantitative baselines and goals.  
• Achievable: Estimate the feasibility of your goal and if it is within your team’s ability to achieve based on workload, budget, tools, etc.  
• Relevant: Ensure your goal is relevant for your company’s overall priorities and company-wide goals. 
• Time-bound: Establish a specific timeline for your goal and an expectation for goal reporting.

How Do I Know When a Goal is Attainable?

Out of all the requirements for S.M.A.R.T. goals, attainability may be the most difficult to measure. In order to ensure your goal is attainable, it has to start with a baseline that can be quantified. 

Establishing baseline analytics is vital to any digital media strategy because you can never know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. 

5. Define Key Tools and Resources

Every digital marketing team needs a Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics (GA), and one of the SaaS platforms (Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz). These help you understand your site health and create optimized content . However, you may also need other tools to help you manage your content calendar, automate social posts, or other relevant activities. 

As you develop your digital media strategy, consider what tools you need to perform well and if you have existing tools that are obsolete. 

Google Search Console: This is a must for every website because it shows you the health of your website, traffic, popular pages, and many other relative metrics. 

Google Analytics: This is the most accurate form of tracking available for Google. There are hundreds of things you can do on GA, such as monitoring clicks, views, top pages, time of visitors to the site, and many other metrics that are beneficial to a media team.

The “Users by time of day” is a prominent feature that can be used with your content publishing schedule. For example, from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm on Wednesday and Thursday, this sample site has the highest concentration of website users. This shows them they should publish content around those times to reach their target audience.

6. Monitor and Optimize Content 

Before you can talk to your target audience, you have to introduce yourself. This means you have to be discoverable, and the best way to think about this is how findable you or your brand is on organic search results. To measure your progress, place all of your keywords into a tracker on Semrush. Using trackers allows you to monitor your progress passively, instead of constantly researching the same terms. 

How Do I Setup Keyword Trackers on Semrush?

• Go to Organic Research on Semrush account (left-side of page)
• Analyze keywords that you want to rank for and click the blue Add to Keyword List
• Click Create New List and enter a name for the keywords you want to add
• Finally, click on the gray + button to highlight in green with a ✅

If you’re monitoring your goals on platforms outside your website, track your progress on an internal tracker and identify areas for improvement. 

Final Thoughts

A successful digital media strategy requires time, energy, and focus to properly plan. Our 6 step process for a successful digital media strategy provides a straightforward framework to follow and maintain. Reach out to us at Forbes Books for more insights and learn how we can help you build Authority in your industry.

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Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Social Media Marketing Business Plan

Over the past 20+ years, we have helped over 1,000 entrepreneurs and business owners create business plans to start and grow their social media marketing businesses. On this page, we will first give you some background information with regards to the importance of business planning. We will then go through a social media marketing business plan template step-by-step so you can create your plan today.

Download our Ultimate Business Plan Template here >

What Is a Social Media Marketing Business Plan?

A business plan provides a snapshot of your social media marketing agency as it stands today, and lays out your growth plan for the next five years. It explains your business goals and your strategy for reaching them. It also includes market research to support your plans.

Why You Need a Business Plan for a Social Media Marketing Agency

If you’re looking to start a social media marketing business or grow your existing company, you need a business plan. A social media marketing business plan will help you raise funding, if needed, and plan out the growth of your business in order to improve your chances of success. Your business plan is a living document that should be updated annually as your social media marketing agency grows and changes.

Funding Sources for Social Media Marketing Agencies

With regards to funding, the main sources of funding for a social media marketing business are personal savings, credit cards, bank loans and angel investors. With regards to bank loans, banks will want to review your business plan and gain confidence that you will be able to repay your loan and interest. To acquire this confidence, the loan officer will not only want to confirm that your financials are reasonable, but they will also want to see a professional plan. Such a plan will give them the confidence that you can successfully and professionally operate a business. Personal savings and bank loans are the most common funding paths for social media marketing agencies.

Finish Your Business Plan Today!

How to write a business plan for a social media marketing agency.

If you want to start a business or expand your current one, you need a business plan. Below we detail what should be included in each section of your own social media marketing business plan:

Executive Summary

Your executive summary provides an introduction to your business plan, but it is normally the last section you write because it provides a summary of each key section of your plan.

The goal of your Executive Summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of social media marketing business you are operating and the status. For example, are you a startup, do you have a social media marketing business that you would like to grow, or are you operating social media marketing in multiple markets?

Next, provide an overview of each of the subsequent sections of your plan. For example, give a brief overview of the social media marketing industry. Discuss the type of social media marketing business you are operating. Detail your direct competitors. Give an overview of your target customers. Provide a snapshot of your marketing plan. Identify the key members of your team. And offer an overview of your financial plan.  

Company Analysis

In your company analysis, you will detail the type of social media marketing business you are operating.

For example, you might operate one of the following types of social media marketing businesses, or a full-service agency:

• Paid Ads : this type of marketing business focuses on creating social media ads and optimizing social media ad campaigns. A social media marketing agency may specialize in ads for one platform in particular or across all platforms.
• Content: this type of business focuses on creating content, either for specific platforms or across all platforms.
• Strategy: this type of marketing is where campaigns are created around specific goals that help businesses or individuals tailor where and how to best achieve results that will help them succeed.

In addition to explaining the type of social media marketing business you will operate, the Company Analysis section of your business plan needs to provide background on the business.

Include answers to questions such as:

• When and why did you start the business?
• What milestones have you achieved to date? Milestones could include the number of customers served, number of positive reviews, total campaigns, etc.
• Your legal structure. Are you incorporated as an S-Corp? An LLC? A sole proprietorship? Explain your legal structure here.

Industry Analysis

In your industry analysis, you need to provide an overview of the social media marketing industry.

While this may seem unnecessary, it serves multiple purposes.

First, researching the social media marketing industry educates you. It helps you understand the market in which you are operating.

Secondly, market research can improve your strategy, particularly if your research identifies market trends.

The third reason for market research is to prove to readers that you are an expert in your industry. By conducting the research and presenting it in your plan, you achieve just that.

The following questions should be answered in the industry analysis section of your social media marketing business plan:

• How big is the social media marketing industry (in dollars)?
• Is the market declining or increasing?
• Who are the key competitors in the market?
• Who are the key suppliers in the market?
• What trends are affecting the industry?
• What is the industry’s growth forecast over the next 5 – 10 years?
• What is the relevant market size? That is, how big is the potential market for your social media marketing business? You can extrapolate such a figure by assessing the size of the market in the entire country and then applying that figure to your local population.

Customer Analysis

The customer analysis section of your business plan must detail the customers you serve and/or expect to serve.

The following are examples of customer segments: corporations, small business owners, nonprofits and individuals. Customers may also be segmented by industry, such as healthcare, technology, beauty, restaurants, music, B2B, and more.

As you can imagine, the customer segment(s) you choose will have a great impact on the type of marketing business you operate. Clearly, individuals in the music industry would respond to different marketing promotions than corporations in the healthcare industry, for example.

Try to break out your target customers in terms of their demographic and psychographic profiles. With regards to demographics, include a discussion of the ages, genders, locations and income levels of the customers you seek to serve. Only select social media marketing agencies primarily serve customers living in their same city or town. However, if your niche is to provide social media services to local businesses, such demographic information is easy to find on government websites.

Psychographic profiles explain the wants and needs of your target customers. The more you can understand and define these needs, the better you will do in attracting and retaining your customers.  

With Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template you can finish your plan in just 8 hours or less!

Competitive Analysis

Your competitive analysis should identify the indirect and direct competitors your business faces and then focus on the latter.

Direct competitors are other social media marketing agencies.

Indirect competitors are other options that customers have to purchase from that aren’t direct competitors. This includes digital freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. You need to mention such competition as well.

With regards to direct competition, you want to describe the other businesses with which you compete. Most likely, your direct competitors will have a similar niche audience.

For each such competitor, provide an overview of their businesses and document their strengths and weaknesses. Unless you once worked at your competitors’ businesses, it will be impossible to know everything about them. But you should be able to find out key things about them such as:

• What types of customers do they serve?
• What types of social media services do they provide?
• What is their pricing (premium, low, etc.)?
• What are they good at?
• What are their weaknesses?

With regards to the last two questions, think about your answers from the customers’ perspective. And don’t be afraid to ask your competitors’ customers what they like most and least about them.

The final part of your competitive analysis section is to document your areas of competitive advantage. For example:

• Will you provide better social media strategy, content and ad services?
• Will you provide services that your competitors don’t offer?
• Will you provide better customer service?
• Will you offer better pricing?

Think about ways you will outperform your competition and document them in this section of your plan.  

Marketing Plan

Traditionally, a marketing plan includes the four P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. For a social media marketing business, your marketing plan should include the following:

Product : In the product section, you should reiterate the type of social media marketing agency that you documented in your Company Analysis. Then, detail the specific products you will be offering. For example, in addition to social media marketing, will you provide web design services, copywriting or any other services?

Price : Document the prices you will offer and how they compare to your competitors. Essentially in the product and price sub-sections of your marketing plan, you are presenting the services you offer and their prices.

Place : Place refers to the location of your agency. Document your location and mention how the location will impact your success. For example, is your business located in a busy professional district (good if targeting local businesses), or is it fully remote (good if targeting clients that aren’t place-specific). Discuss how your location might be the ideal location for your customers.

Promotions : The final part of your marketing plan is the promotions section. Here you will document how you will drive customers to your location(s). The following are some promotional methods you might consider:

• Advertising in local papers and magazines
• Reaching out to local websites
• Social media marketing
• Local radio advertising

Operations Plan

While the earlier sections of your business plan explained your goals, your operations plan describes how you will meet them. Your operations plan should have two distinct sections as follows.

Everyday short-term processes include all of the tasks involved in running your business, including discovery calls, onboarding new clients, attending campaign meetings, managing employees and working on campaigns.

Long-term goals are the milestones you hope to achieve. These could include the dates when you expect to take on your 10th client, or when you hope to reach $X in revenue. It could also be when you expect to expand your social media marketing business into a new market.  

Management Team

To demonstrate your social media marketing business’ ability to succeed, a strong management team is essential. Highlight your key players’ backgrounds, emphasizing those skills and experiences that prove their ability to grow a company.

Ideally, you and/or your team members have direct experience in managing social media marketing businesses. If so, highlight this experience and expertise. But also highlight any experience that you think will help your business succeed.

If your team is lacking, consider assembling an advisory board. An advisory board would include 2 to 8 individuals who would act like mentors to your business. They would help answer questions and provide strategic guidance. If needed, look for advisory board members with experience in managing social media marketing agencies or successfully running small businesses.  

Financial Plan

Your financial plan should include your 5-year financial statement broken out both monthly or quarterly for the first year and then annually. Your financial statements include your income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements.

Income Statement : an income statement is more commonly called a Profit and Loss statement or P&L. It shows your revenues and then subtracts your costs to show whether you turned a profit or not.

In developing your income statement, you need to devise assumptions. For example, will you gain one new client per month or per quarter? And will sales grow by 2% or 10% per year? As you can imagine, your choice of assumptions will greatly impact the financial forecasts for your business. As much as possible, conduct research to try to root your assumptions in reality.

Balance Sheets : Balance sheets show your assets and liabilities. While balance sheets can include much information, try to simplify them to the key items you need to know about. For instance, if you spend $50,000 on building out your social media marketing business, this will not give you immediate profits. Rather it is an asset that will hopefully help you generate profits for years to come. Likewise, if a bank writes you a check for $50,000, you don’t need to pay it back immediately. Rather, that is a liability you will pay back over time.

Cash Flow Statement : Your cash flow statement will help determine how much money you need to start or grow your business, and make sure you never run out of money. What most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t realize is that you can turn a profit but run out of money and go bankrupt.

In developing your Income Statement and Balance Sheets be sure to include several of the key costs needed in starting or growing a social media marketing business:

• Location build-out including design fees, construction, etc. (if there will be a physical location)
• Cost of equipment and supplies (including hardware and software)
• Payroll or salaries paid to staff
• Business insurance
• Taxes and permits
• Legal expenses

Attach your full financial projections in the appendix of your plan along with any supporting documents that make your plan more compelling. For example, you might include your office location lease or outlines of campaigns you are currently working on.   Summary Putting together a business plan for your social media marketing business is a worthwhile endeavor. If you follow the template above, by the time you are done, you will truly be an expert. You will really understand the social media marketing industry, your competition, and your customers. You will have developed a marketing plan and will really understand what it takes to launch and grow a successful social media marketing business.  

Social Media Marketing Business Plan FAQs

What is the easiest way to complete my social media marketing business plan.

Growthink's Ultimate Business Plan Template allows you to quickly and easily complete your Social Media Marketing Business Plan.

Where Can I Download a Social Media Management Business Plan PDF?

You can download our Social Media Management business plan PDF  here. This is a business plan template you can use in PDF format.

What is the Goal of a Business Plan's Executive Summary?

The goal of your Executive Summary is to quickly engage the reader. Explain to them the type of social media marketing business you are operating and the status; for example, are you a startup, do you have a social media marketing business that you would like to grow, or are you operating a chain of social media marketing businesses?

  OR, Let Us Develop Your Plan For You Since 1999, Growthink has developed business plans for thousands of companies who have gone on to achieve tremendous success.

Click here to see how Growthink’s professional business plan consulting services can create your business plan for you.   Other Helpful Business Plan Articles & Templates

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Create a Digital Marketing Plan: 9 Step Strategic Guide

Nov 27, 2020 | Read time: 11 min.

Patrick Lane , Sr. Marketing Manager

• A digital marketing plan helps you determine the most effective strategies for your business and then put those strategies into action.
• Without a well-defined digital marketing plan in place, you’ll likely end up wasting money and not making the impact you want.
• A digital marketing plan can include business and marketing goals, strategies you’ll use to meet those goals, timelines, digital channels, and more.

Contents Jump to

Digital marketing has become exponentially more complicated since the early days of the internet. Back then, businesses rarely created a digital marketing plan. And those that did, focused mostly on websites, banner ads, and email marketing.

Now, you have dozens of digital marketing channels and platforms to choose from. Should you focus on SEO or PPC ? Blogging or webinars? Social media or email? Podcasts or video marketing? Augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR)? How much should you spend and when can you expect to see results?

Trying to choose the best options for your brand can feel daunting, overwhelming even.

What you need is a digital marketing plan.

A clear plan helps you determine the most effective strategies for your business and then put those strategies into action. A digital marketing plan helps you organize your initiatives so that you’re continually connecting with your audience, engaging them, and driving them to action. With a digital marketing business plan, you think ahead, coordinate among departments, and integrate your digital marketing for greater impact.

Read on, and learn nine steps to structure a digital marketing plan.

What is a digital marketing plan?

MARKETING TERM DEFINITION Digital Marketing Plan A digital marketing plan is a document in which you strategically map out your digital marketing objectives, as well the actions you’ll take to achieve those objectives.

Among other things, it can include business goals, digital strategies, and competitive landscape analysis as well as timelines, budgets, digital channels, and more.

Think of a digital marketing plan like a roadmap of sorts. You know where you want to go, and the plan provides you with a specific route to follow. 

Without a well-defined plan in place, your digital marketing efforts will be inefficient and ineffective. You’ll likely waste money and see diminished returns.

Digital Marketing Plan Template

Create a winning digital strategy that connects with the right consumers at the right time.

How to create a digital marketing plan

Now, let’s talk about the various digital marketing plan components as well as the specific steps to follow as you develop your strategy.

1. Define your digital marketing goals and business objectives

Clear, measurable, and attainable digital marketing plan objectives help you define exactly what you want to achieve and measure. Be clear and concise when you set these goals. You should also include specific numbers and timeframes to benchmark your progress.

For example, avoid goals that state you will update your lead generation system , boost conversion rates, or improve digital customer experience . Those are a bit too vague. You can’t measure your results and it’s not apparent what steps you should take to reach that goal.

Instead, a much better goal is to double organic search traffic in the next 12 months. This provides you with a deadline, a framework for setting milestone goals, and specific actions to take (optimize your site, create amazing content, and conduct strategic outreach for SEO, etc.).

“ SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. TERAKEET

2. Define audience segmentation and buyer personas

A key reason why digital marketing is important is because it allows you to target your audience with great precision.

For any digital marketing campaign to be successful, you need to know who you’re targeting. Segmenting your audience and then building buyer personas for each of those segments can provide you with insights about what types of marketing will be most effective. 

For example, say you sell IT services. Part of your audience might be small businesses with less than $500,000 in revenue. You might also sell to large corporations with significant IT needs. Your buyer personas and marketing strategies for each of these segments will look very different. Messaging that resonates with a small business owner probably won’t resonate with the head of a large IT department, and vice versa.

Start by defining the different segments in your target audience. From there, begin building out the personas of your ideal customer within each segment. Here are 9 great examples of personas to get started.

Your buyer persona information will vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C and the price of your product/service. Some demographic and additional information you may want to include is:

• Social media platforms
• Pain points
• Products/features desired

Your goal in creating personas is to get inside the minds of your target customers and to see things from their perspectives. When you understand what matters most to them, you can make a digital marketing plan that speaks to their deep desires and big challenges. 

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3. Conduct a competitive analysis and determine market share

If you want your marketing efforts to be effective, you need to know who you’re up against. A competitive analysis allows you to identify your competitors, calculate your market share , and determine the marketing strategies they employ.

When doing your competitive analysis, consider the following types of things:

• Which audience segments are they targeting?
• What digital marketing channels are your competitors using? 
• Where are they strongest?
• Where are they weakest?
• What portion of their traffic is earned/owned/paid?
• What’s their positioning in the market?
• What’s their claimed differentiation?
• What type of messaging and specific language do they use?
• What is their tonality and brand personality?

A thorough competitive landscape analysis will give you insights into how you can use online marketing to surpass your competitors. For example, you may realize that your competitors’ positioning and differentiation are well known, so you’ll benefit from crystalizing your own in contrast. Or, you may discover they’re strong in social media marketing but weak when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) performance.

4. Conduct a SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is the counterpart to a competitive landscape analysis. It offers a framework to analyze your business against other forces in your market. Use this process to identify what’s working, spot potential organic growth opportunities , and prepare for external threats.

Start by analyzing the strengths of your company. What are your primary advantages over your competition? Which things do you do particularly well? What unique resources do you have at your disposal?

Next, look at your weaknesses. What elements of your business aren’t working particularly well? What things keep you from making sales? Where do you fall short of your competitors?

The third step is to look closely at the opportunities available to your company. Are there any market trends you can take advantage of? Can you utilize new technology that your competitors can’t? Is there an under-served segment in your audience? 

Finally, identify any potential threats to your business. Could a competitor steal market share? Are there any obstacles blocking business growth ? Are there potential financial issues on the horizon? 

The data from your SWOT analysis will help you develop your digital marketing plan. Your plan should cater to your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, move toward opportunities, and proactively avoid potential threats. All in the name of helping you to increase sales.

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5. Calculate your digital marketing plan budget

The next step in creating the best digital marketing plan for your brand is to calculate your budget. The budget will define how much you have available to spend on digital marketing activities, as well as guide you toward specific channels, strategies, and tactics.

The amount you budget for digital marketing will vary based on a number of factors, including:

• Position within the industry
• Previous results
• Profitability of a strategy, tactic, or campaign

How much will you allocate to brand awareness campaigns ? What about to specific campaigns and offers? Are you going to allocate a certain amount of digital marketing budget for customer retention? Do you know how much to spend on SEO?

It’s important to establish your budget upfront. However, remain flexible so you can capitalize on opportunities for greater SEO ROI . If you notice that a certain campaign just isn’t generating positive ROI, then you may be better off eliminating that spend. Similarly, if you see that a certain campaign (or channel) is producing outsized results, consider shifting the budget and allocate additional dollars towards what’s working well. If you have a specific return-on-spend in mind that’s highly profitable, then keep increasing the budget as long as you’re keeping your acquisition costs under the target.

In this way, your budget can be a dynamic, evolving support mechanism of your digital marketing initiatives.

6. Define your digital marketing channels

Before you develop a content strategy , you’ll need to define the primary digital marketing channels you’ll be using. Your choice of channels needs to take into account your audience, goals, and budget.

For example, say your goal is to drive 30% more targeted traffic to your website. One way to do that is through PPC ads, which can give you an immediate boost. However, Google Adwords can also be expensive.

To improve ROI, turn to more cost-effective channels, like SEO and content marketing. These channels take longer to produce results but also deliver a far lower acquisition cost, giving you more bang for your buck. Plus, SEO and content marketing results compound over time, setting you up for longer-term sustainable success.

When defining your digital channels, consider where your audience spends most of their time. If you’re in a B2B industry, you may want to focus on channels like LinkedIn or webinars. If your audience is younger, you may want to consider influencer marketing on Instagram. Focus on how you can deliver value to your audience within the channels they favor most.

And don’t assume your audience doesn’t care about great content. Some of the best content marketing examples come from a broad range of companies with completely different customers.

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7. develop your digital marketing strategies and tactics.

After defining your channels, you need to develop the digital marketing tactics and strategies you’ll use within those channels.

For example, if you’re going to focus on search engine optimization, you need to determine the keywords you’re going to target and how you’re going to target them. You may decide to create a comprehensive content hub , online courses, SEO topic clusters , or a series of online tools. Or you may decide to provide more detailed, superior how-to information, or to deliver insights on upcoming trends, or to deliver content featuring celebrities.

If you’re focused on b2b lead generation , you may want to create case studies that showcase your results. As you think through your digital marketing plan look for ways to differentiate yourself from the competition. For instance:

• Dollar Shave Club caught people’s attention by being funny and irreverent in a traditionally boring industry. 
• Tableau offered a free online tool and garnered backlinks from more than 56,000 websites.
• LEGO created an online, interactive community with more than 300,000 in monthly organic traffic.

The more crowded the market space, the harder you’ll need to work to capture attention and achieve true optimization across your digital marketing portfolio. No matter what, when you build your digital marketing strategy , be true to your brand.

8. Create a marketing calendar

A marketing calendar allows you to map out exactly when you’ll implement your digital marketing campaigns and initiatives. It also creates accountability, ensuring that you hit deadlines and effectively execute the plan throughout the year. A calendar also helps ensure that you are consistently reaching each of your various audience segments throughout the year.

Try to map out 12 months in advance, and break down your calendar into each month of the year. This will provide you with an overall framework, along with sufficient time to prepare and execute on each delivery. For example:

• In January you’ll release a training webinar. Before you can release it, you need to create a slide deck, build a landing page, design social media graphics, etc.
• Throughout January and February, you’ll promote the training webinar across multiple channels, including social media, email, video, and PR. 
• In March, you’re going to start a blog that will be updated weekly. To make this happen, you need to decide on topics, assign them to writers, coordinate with a designer, create a blog calendar, organize videos to be embedded, etc.

Be realistic when creating your editorial calendar . Give yourself sufficient time to get everything done in a quality manner, and make sure that each deliverable is clearly assigned to a specific individual.

Popular marketing scheduling tools include CoSchedule , Contently , and Trello .

9. Measure the results and KPIs of your digital marketing plan

The final step in creating a digital marketing plan and strategy is to measure your results through the definition of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). You need to compare the outcomes of your marketing efforts to the baseline as well as original goals. If the results are underwhelming, adjust and optimize, and then measure again.

Be sure to measure each channel so that you, as a marketer, can identify what’s working most successfully for your brand, and what may need to be cut.

Keep your entire marketing team informed through dashboards. Popular marketing dashboard tools  include includes Klipfolio , TapClicks , Grow , and Domo .

Great digital marketing plans encourage integration

The process of developing a digital marketing plan encourages marketing integration which fuels greater business impact. Customers can’t ignore your brand when you consistently engulf them in your messaging, offers, and calls to action. As a result, you will achieve more, with less, by efficiently and intelligently repurposing and atomizing your marketing assets.

Whether your company is an established ecommerce brand or a brick-and-mortar juggernaut, you need to have a digital marketing plan. Although it takes time, effort, and coordination, it’s worth the work. Your marketing will be much more effective, and you’ll achieve greater marketing results for the business.

A digital marketing plan is like a blueprint. It should cover the steps and tactics to achieve the broader outcomes defined by your strategy. Your plan should cover all of the digital channels you use, including social media, email, advertising, public relations, and your website.

1. Set goals 2. Define your audience 3. Conduct a competitive analysis 4. Conduct a SWOT analysis 5. Determine your budget 6. Identify your channels 7. Develop specific tactics 8. Create a calendar 9. Measure results

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Social Media Planning

Creating a 30-Day Social Media Plan

This article offers a 30-day social media plan template to help you improve your social media marketing strategy. It includes steps to take each day for a month to set goals, define success metrics, brainstorm content ideas and finally, report on results.

Reading time  19 minutes

Published on  September 29, 2022

Table of Contents

• This guide offers a 30-day social media plan to help you create high-quality content, engage your audience and achieve business goals. It includes tasks to complete each week. Additionally, it guides you through defining goals, understanding your audience, building a content calendar and measuring success.
• Learn how to create content that resonates with your target audience. This guide dives into content brainstorming, resource allocation and content optimization techniques to maximize reach and engagement.
• By following this plan, you can develop a successful social media strategy that drives real business results. It includes steps to track content, compare results to goals and adjust your strategy based on valuable data insights.
• Setting realistic social marketing goals to align with your overall business goals
• Determining how you will measure the success of your social marketing efforts
• Integrating emerging trends and best practices into your strategy and content development

This 30-day social media plan template is designed to help you re-invent your social media management strategy so that what you share aligns with the interests of your community and contributes to overall business value.

You will learn how to:

• Create an effective social strategy that aligns with audience interest
• Diversify your content and build a robust content calendar
• Determine business value driven by social

Use the social media plan template below to track your progress as you work through the plan. By completing just one task each day for the next 30 days, you can fully transform your social marketing strategy.

Week 1: Establish your goals and define your metrics

Day 1: establish goals for social.

Establishing clear social media goals is the first step toward transforming your strategy . Determine exactly what you want social to achieve. Here are several examples of goals you might consider:

• Drive website traffic
• Raise brand awareness
• Boost brand engagement
• Generate new leads
• Nurture leads
• Build a community around your business
• Establish authority and industry expertise
• Improve customer support
• Shift brand sentiment

The objective here is to give purpose to your social efforts. Once you’ve established your social goals, the content you produce and share should continually support those goals.

There are several methods to help you write out specific social media goals, including the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method.

The OKR method asks you to set a broad objective statement and list out key results that describe what successfully achieving that objective looks like. Here’s an example of a broad objective statement supported by clear, result metrics that define meeting the objective.

According to this example, if your objective is to boost brand engagement, you must increase the number of likes, shares, mentions and comments by 20% by the end of the fourth quarter.

Day 2: Define your success metrics

How are you going to define the success of your social efforts? Decide which metrics will provide the right data to determine whether or not social is supporting your business goals.

As you identify your success metrics (e.g. organic mentions, share of voice or conversions), set clear standards for your social campaigns so that you know when you achieve success. If you are tracking audience engagement, what exactly do you consider successful engagement rates for your social content?

Depending on the type of content you produce, where you share and the goals you set for your social marketing efforts, the metrics you track will change.

If you’re at a loss for the goals your team should set, use the Social Media Metrics Map to assess options for owned, earned and paid social.

Day 3: List out your challenges

The task is simple: Make a list of the challenges you face when it comes to social media marketing. Think of any barriers that are keeping your social content from making its biggest impact.

As you list out your challenges, write out simple explanations of how these barriers are impacting your marketing efforts or overall business success. Here are a couple of examples to help you get started.

Challenge 1:

Although we consistently post on social, we are not achieving ideal engagement levels.

Challenge 2:

We have seen a dramatic drop in our social content’s organic reach.

Not sure what your specific challenges may be? Our 2022 Sprout Social Index ™ surveyed social marketers and found these five challenges are the most common.

Day 4: Brainstorm solutions

Round up your marketing team and brainstorm possible solutions to the challenges you previously listed.

Be sure to provide evidence to justify effective solutions so that you’re prepared when the time comes to gather resources and advocate for your budget .

Solution to Challenge 1:

We can use creators to engage with our social content and drive conversation.

Justification: In 2022, most marketers (74%) planned to spend at least a quarter of their social media budget on partnering with a content creator. With loyal followings, creators can boost engagement and keep relevant conversations going on social.

Solution to Challenge 2:

We can invest in paid social media advertising to run highly targeted campaigns and reach the right people.

Justification: Almost half of consumers report they “find the perfect products” by seeing targeted ads. By 2025, social shopping is set to become a $1.2 trillion channel .

Day 5: Analyze the competition

If you’re running out of ideas, try running a competitive analysis . Be careful not to mimic your competitors’ content, but use your analysis to determine your brand’s unique positioning instead.

Your brand and its competitors have similar ideal customer personas, so focus on the type of content that is resonating, both within your own social efforts and those of the competition.

Here are a few questions to consider as you analyze your competitor’s social marketing efforts:

• Which marketing channels are my competitors using and are they successful in those channels?
• What are my competitors talking about and are those topics generating high audience engagement?
• Are there areas within our social strategy where we are outperforming our competitors?

Social analytics solutions are an effective way to compare your efforts against your competitors. Using Sprout’s Analytics , you can directly benchmark your efforts against one or more competitors.

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You can pinpoint days when competitors experienced peak engagement and dive deeper into what content was shared on those days to understand what resonates most with target audiences.

Week 2: Optimize your profiles and brand voice on social media

Day 6: determine your strengths and weaknesses.

Take a deep dive into your social strategy and determine where you are successful and where there is room for growth.

Conduct a survey among your marketing, sales, customer service and product teams to gauge where they see areas of success or room for improvement.

For each criteria regarding your social marketing strategy, determine whether it’s one of your strengths or weaknesses. This will help identify what you should focus on over the next five weeks.

Day 7: Audit your content

Run a social media audit to identify your best-performing content and most popular channels. Take time to understand what’s working and why. Your metrics can help you identify which posts effectively cater to the interests of your audience.

If your posts aren’t engaging and resonating with your followers, your social media content strategy needs to shift. Use your audit to review the content you’ve shared and identify which posts had the biggest impact.

You can use Sprout’s Post Performance Report to parse through your most popular posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Day 8: Create a list of relevant keywords

Use social media listening tools to identify the keywords most often associated with your brand. These keywords can help your team throughout the content brainstorm and creation process.

Social listening can help you uncover unique opportunities to tie trending conversations to your business and products.

For example, our team of analysts found that a new TikTok sound titled “Corn but it becomes a song and unites world” spawned over 607,000 videos . Nando's UK went all-in on this trend by showcasing their grilled corn to the sound, garnering 11.6 million views and over a 330,000 likes.

Day 9: Determine your brand voice and social persona

When it comes to building a social audience, consistency is key. Creating a brand voice and identifying a persona will enable you to remain consistent across all of your social channels.

Take this 3-minute assessment to help you characterize your brand and determine the business goals you’re trying to achieve. Select the responses that best describe your objectives, vision and audience.

After you narrow in on your persona, choose three words that describe your brand then explain what they mean for your brand and create dos and dont’s to guide content creation .

Day 10: Optimize your social profiles

While much of your time is spent planning and creating content, the information included on your profiles is vital to the success of your social marketing efforts.

After you’ve determined your brand’s persona, build out your profiles to align with your voice.

At a quick glance, your profile should speak to your brand with relevant visuals and engaging copy. Here are a few tactics to optimize your social profiles.

1. Use a consistent profile picture

If you own multiple social channels for your business, it’s important that your profile picture is consistent across every channel. Most businesses will use their company logo or variations of their logo that have been designed specifically for their social accounts. Staying consistent across your profiles will increase opportunities for brand recognition.

2. Complete every section of your profile

If there is a field for information, take advantage of the opportunity to tell your brand’s story. In creative and succinct ways, you should be able to describe what your business does, the offerings you can provide and how you add value to the lives of your customers.

3. Add keywords to boost SEO

On Day 8, you compiled a list of keywords relevant to your industry, brand and its offerings. Use these strategic keywords in every section of your profile to boost SEO. They should appear in your bio copy, in photo names, interests and experiences.

Week 3: Find and listen to your community to better understand your industry

Day 11: develop your buyer persona.

Transforming your social marketing strategy may require you to either revisit your current buyer personas or to create new ones from scratch.

Buyer personas help you better understand current and future customers, so you know exactly who you are marketing to and can create relevant content and offerings. Start by writing down everything you know about your target customer and perform research to fill in any gaps. For a robust buyer persona, try to capture the following information.

• Demographics
• Purchase behaviors
• Goals, challenges, pain points

Day 12: Listen to your audience

Listening to your community can help you gain insight into the minds of your followers, so you can be more strategic in your social marketing efforts.

Using social media listening , you can learn a lot about your community (even when they’re not directly interacting with your brand) to inform a more effective strategy.

Here’s what you should listen for on social media:

• What your audience is talking about and what they share most often
• What your audience is saying about your brand, industry, products, services and competitors
• What your audience is sharing on forum-style platforms like Reddit or Quora
• How your audience engages with creators, trending topics and industry events

Day 13: Research industry trends and topics

To create relevant content and establish your brand as an authority on social, you must stay up to date with what’s happening in your industry.

Join conversations surrounding high-interest topics. Perform ongoing research to make sure the content you produce and share aligns with the current interests of your community. Here are a few resources that will help guide your research.

Newsletters

As social marketers, research is one of our most valuable skills. Instead of browsing aimlessly through content, rummaging through thousands of social profiles or running endless Google searches, an easy way to streamline research is to sign up for a solid mix of newsletters.

Newsletters provide insights into the state of the industry, changes in technology, updates to social networks and emerging trends and best practices.

Here are a few newsletters that social media marketers should add to their resource list:

• Link in Bio features expert interviews from industry-leading social media managers. The newsletter shares actionable advice and relatable experiences to inspire their community.
• Social Media Today focuses on sharing original analyses of what’s happening in social media. Their content is platform-focused, providing social marketers with insights on how to adopt new features and where other brands are finding success.
• SocialMedia.org is a membership organization for leaders in the social media marketing space. Their weekly newsletter, The Shortlist , highlights member stories as they share what they’re working on and what they’re keeping an eye on in the space.

Webinars can have a significant impact on social marketing strategies by generating new leads and prospects, nurturing existing relationships and demonstrating expertise in our industries. During webinars, many businesses will live-Tweet along with their users to answer questions and keep the online conversation going.

Webinars can also provide a way for us to learn, which can spark content ideas during our brainstorming sessions. Social Media Today provides a wide variety of webinars specific to social marketers. You can register for upcoming webinars or watch from their library of on-demand sessions .

Forums give marketers an effective way to identify the topics that spur the most conversation online. Quora is a great resource to discover topics of interest, ask questions and engage in conversations relevant to your brand. As a brainstorming tool, forums can help social marketers build social content plans that address questions people are already asking.

Adweek (and publications like Digiday and Marketing Land ) present the anatomy of the latest, most creative campaigns out there, and also fill you in on the most recent news. The Mission (and Medium generally) is great to turn to for thought leadership and gauging the pulse of our industry and the visionaries in it.

Day 14: Connect with other departments

As you continue researching industry trends and topics as inspiration for your content, connect with other departments within your organization.

Social is no longer limited to marketing, with functions across the business weighing in on strategy. But as a more diverse set of stakeholders gets involved, core social teams will need to adapt. Figuring out who owns what, and which proficiencies are needed across teams, has to be addressed as social strategies become more sophisticated.

For example, try speaking with members of your sales team: they are often the first points of contact for consumers, and they can provide insight into customers’ needs, challenges and successes. This insight can help generate content that addresses these needs or highlights successes.

Your human resources team can also provide insight into ongoing employer brand initiatives. Collaborate with HR to investigate how employees and potential hires are engaging with your brand on social. Their understanding of your workforce can help you identify what content is most effective for this important group of stakeholders.

A social media collaboration tool can help you streamline your efforts and manage cross-functional initiatives.

Day 15: Choose your content types

Start thinking about the types of content that will benefit your brand the most, while keeping your audience engaged.

Refer back to the buyer personas you created to determine if an image linking to a blog post would perform better than a Twitter chat or an Instagram Live event. Consider the resources available to you to determine if you can create a high quality how-to video, or if you need to scale down your efforts and create an infographic using the same content.

For the best results, diversify your content to keep your audience interested. If you post the same type of content day after day or week after week, your audience will inevitably disengage.

Here’s a list of possible content types you can start incorporating into your social marketing strategies:

• Infographics

User-generated content

• Photo and video
• Live streaming

Before you start searching for content to share on social, figure out what your audience actually likes. One way to do that is to look at past social media posts to see which were most successful.

Pull all of your unique social media analytics with a tool like Sprout Social , Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights . Below is an example of how to view your published posts with Sprout ( available with a free, 30-day trial ).

Make sure you sort your posts by the metric that is most important to you, whether that’s clicks, responses or total reach. Once you have an idea of what kind of content works best, you can move onto the next step.

Week 4: Fill out your social content calendar to increase reach and engagement

Day 16: develop a posting schedule.

Your publishing cadence depends on a handful of factors including your company, your audience, the campaign in question and the social networks being used. We cover this more in our guide on how often to post on social media , but here are some recommended cadences for each network:

• TikTok: 1-4 times per day
• Instagram: 1-2 times per day
• Facebook: 4-5 times per day
• LinkedIn: No more than 1 time per day
• Twitter: 3-4 times per day
• Pinterest: No more than 1 time per day

There’s a good chance your post frequency will depend on the size, experience and authority of your social media team, so don’t feel like you have to send out less than stellar content to meet these guidelines.

Your brand’s analytics can help you determine your best posting frequency. You can use a tool like Sprout to see how often you post on each social network, then compare that to how much engagement you received over that same time period.

Look for trends between publishing rate and engagement. The screenshots above are from our Facebook Page Report , but you can do the same for Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn posts as well.

Day 17: Brainstorm content ideas

Now’s the time to gather your inspiration and plan out content you know will resonate with your audience. The key to effective brainstorming is to put yourself in the mindset that inspiration can come from anywhere.

Think of what your business does well and how you can turn that into an engaging content piece. Look through some of your older content and see if you can repurpose or reformat it for a different channel.

Based on the conversations you’ve discovered are popular among your audience, how can you contribute to those conversations with fresh content? Here are some of 2022’s most popular content types.

About 66% of consumers cite short-form video as the overall most engaging social content, while 37% prefer live video and 24% prefer long-form video. Even if you don’t have the budget to hire a videographer, don’t rule this medium out. Tools like Canva and Biteable have democratized the creation process. Anyone on your team can make professional, on-brand videos, even while working remote .

Images and text-based posts 

In the era of video, images and text-based posts still pack a punch with today’s social users. In fact, 61% of consumers find images to be the most engaging social content. From Instagram carousels to Twitter threads, these posts are key pieces of leading content strategies.

Marketers have been able to amplify user-generated content to increase brand awareness, promote products and services and use the digital word-of-mouth concept to build brand trust and increase sales. In fact, 39% of consumers like to see brands share customer testimonials or real customer demos.

Day 18: Gather resources

Once you’ve determined the types of content best suited for your business and have decided on a publishing cadence, start gathering your resources.

Think back to the types of content you decided to incorporate into your social strategy and what resources you need to bring them to life. Here are several questions for you to consider as you start collecting your resources.

• Have you decided on the type of creative assets you’ll use and how you’ll store them?
• Who within the company needs to be involved in order to create this specific content piece?
• Do you need any sort of creative support for visual elements?
• Do you already own content (guides, e-books, blog posts) that can easily be repurposed for social?

Day 19: Draft your social media plan calendar and create your content

It’s time to get to work. Start the content creation process and set reasonable timelines for project completion.

Be sure to build social content that speaks to your customer personas, stays true to your brand voice and can easily fit within the posting schedule you’ve established.

Day 20: Optimize your content

During the creation process, it’s essential for you to optimize your content so that your efforts don’t go unnoticed in consumers’ crowded social feeds. Every net new content piece you create should be able to be repurposed for another use down the line.

Consider your video strategy . A video can be broken down into short clips, quote graphics, still images and more. Think through your options while creating content so you can fill out your social calendar with less effort going forward.

Here are a few additional tactics to optimize your social content to maximize reach and increase engagement:

• Include hashtags
• Shorten links
• Include images
• Adapt content for various social channels

Week 5: Supplement and boost your social media content calendar for the best results

Day 21: create a call to action.

Not all of the content you share on social needs to encourage customers to take action. You may even find that some of your most popular posts are those that simply showcase your brand personality or provide a good laugh for your audience.

If the primary goal of your social marketing is to generate new leads and guide people into your sales funnel, you need to give your audience a clear next step. Include direct CTAs (call to action) on the posts you are using to drive action.

For copy inspiration, check out this article on effective social CTA phrases .

Day 22: Connect to more resources

By connecting your audience to more resources (especially owned resources) you are establishing your brand as an authority on your space while inviting them to engage further. The more they learn about you and stay engaged with your brand, the more likely they are to convert.

At Sprout, we often share links to some of our favorite blog posts for our audience to learn more about social networks, best marketing practices and trending topics.

Day 23: Amplify your efforts

Once you’ve started promoting your content on social, think of ways you can amplify your messages to reach a larger audience.

Here is a short list of methods to consider in order to extend the reach of your content:

• Leverage your employees by using Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform to amplify your content
• Give incentives for customers to share on their social channels
• Use creators to extend the reach of your content

Day 24: Invest in your best content

As you promote and amplify your content, you may quickly notice that some types of content perform better than others in terms of engagement and conversion.

Extend the reach of these high-performing pieces through paid ads. You can target a highly specific audience, attract qualified traffic and leads and grow your customer base.

The algorithms for social networks like Facebook and Instagram are now starting to favor paid content over organic content, making it increasingly important to invest in paid to give your content a fighting chance for discovery.

Which social media network you choose will depend on three important factors:

• Where your target customers are most concentrated
• Where your target customers are most accessible
• Where your target customers most actively engage with ads

Day 25: Engage with your audience

About 80% of consumers expect brands and companies that have a social media presence to interact with their customers in meaningful ways.

It’s important to engage with and respond to your audience. Engaging with your audience in a two-way dialogue builds brand trust and adds authenticity. As you monitor your audience’s reaction to your content, you can also gain valuable insight into its effectiveness.

Read through comments on your social posts and respond to questions and insightful comments. The comments section is a great tool for social marketers looking for feedback and can even inspire ideas for future content.

Week 6: Report on your social media results and celebrate your success

Day 26: track your content.

Content tracking is an effective way to gauge engagement and track the movement of your content across social channels.

You can track all of your content with the Sprout Social Post Performance Report. Use the Post Performance reports to analyze published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience.

Here’s an example of how to view your cross-channel post performance with Sprout ( available with a free trial ).

Day 27: Compare results to goals

Think back to the objectives you set at the beginning of these 30 days.

For example, if your objective was to boost brand engagement, you needed to increase the number of likes, shares, mentions and comments by 20% by the end of the fourth quarter.

Using a social media analytics tool, you can compare month-over-month engagement for all of your social profiles to determine if you are on track to meet your social marketing goals.

Day 28: Report out

Share the results of your social marketing efforts with your marketing team and leadership. If you’re new to reporting or need to brush up on best practices, here’s a suite of resources that can help you create a routine reporting system.

This is your opportunity to showcase the goals you’ve established and your progress toward them. You should use hard evidence, like the data you’ve gathered through listening and analytics, to report on the success of your social marketing efforts.

Depending on your goals, you may want to build a custom report that zeroes in on what matters to your team. With Sprout’s Report Builder , you can customize performance reports to meet your exact business needs. Once you’re happy with your report, you can customize your branding and export it as a .PDF or a .CSV file for easy sharing.

Day 29: Revisit and readjust your strategy

The most savvy marketers know that marketing strategies are in constant flux. Revisit your strategy , revise your marketing goals and adapt your strategies based on the data you’ve collected.

Day 30: Celebrate your transformation

Congratulations, you’ve successfully made it through the 30-day social marketing transformation program.

Celebrate your new strategy and the effort you’ve made to enhance your social marketing.

Plan with Sprout Social: Create your social media marketing plan with Sprout Social

This social media plan was created to help social marketers refine their strategies. Our goal is to provide you with actionable steps to transform your social marketing strategies to help you create content that is purposeful, engaging and, ultimately, delivers real business results.

Keep in mind that transforming your social media strategic planning doesn’t end with these 30 days—continue to identify challenges to your social marketing strategy, analyze your competitors, discover ways to optimize your content and social profiles and remember to always revisit and adjust your strategies as needed.

Want to learn how Sprout Social’s features and solutions can help you create an even better social media plan? Start a free, 30-day trial to try Sprout for yourself.

Use this worksheet to stay on track with the social media strategy template outlined in this guide.

Additional resources for Social Media Planning

• Social Media Content

Your downloadable social media calendar template for 2024

• Branding & Creative
• Marketing Disciplines

Complete guide to content calendar creation

• Social Media Engagement
• Social Media Scheduling

A complete guide to creating a social media calendar

• Social Media Strategy

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Free PDF Business Plan Templates and Samples

By Joe Weller | September 9, 2020

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We’ve gathered the most useful collection of business plan PDF templates and samples, including options for organizations of any size and type.

On this page, you’ll find free PDF templates for a simple business plan , small business plan , startup business plan , and more.

Simple Business Plan PDF Templates

These simple business plan PDF templates are ready to use and customizable to fit the needs of any organization.

Simple Business Plan Template PDF

This template contains a traditional business plan layout to help you map out each aspect, from a company overview to sales projections and a marketing strategy. This template includes a table of contents, as well as space for financing details that startups looking for funding may need to provide. 

Download Simple Business Plan Template - PDF

Lean Business Plan Template PDF

This scannable business plan template allows you to easily identify the most important elements of your plan. Use this template to outline key details pertaining to your business and industry, product or service offerings, target customer segments (and channels to reach them), and to identify sources of revenue. There is also space to include key performance metrics and a timeline of activities. 

Download Lean Business Plan Template - PDF

Simple 30-60-90 Day Business Plan Template PDF

This template is designed to help you develop and implement a 90-day business plan by breaking it down into manageable chunks of time. Use the space provided to detail your main goals and deliverables for each timeframe, and then add the steps necessary to achieve your objectives. Assign task ownership and enter deadlines to ensure your plan stays on track every step of the way.

Download Simple 30-60-90 Day Business Plan Template

PDF | Smartsheet

One-Page Business Plan PDF Templates

The following single page business plan templates are designed to help you download your key ideas on paper, and can be used to create a pitch document to gain buy-in from partners, investors, and stakeholders.

One-Page Business Plan Template PDF

Use this one-page template to summarize each aspect of your business concept in a clear and concise manner. Define the who, what, why, and how of your idea, and use the space at the bottom to create a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) for your business. 

Download One-Page Business Plan Template

If you’re looking for a specific type of analysis, check out our collection of SWOT templates .

One-Page Lean Business Plan PDF

This one-page business plan template employs the Lean management concept, and encourages you to focus on the key assumptions of your business idea. A Lean plan is not stagnant, so update it as goals and objectives change — the visual timeline at the bottom is ideal for detailing milestones. 

Download One-Page Lean Business Plan Template - PDF

One-Page 30-60-90 Day Business Plan Template

Use this business plan template to identify main goals and outline the necessary activities to achieve those goals in 30, 60, and 90-day increments. Easily customize this template to fit your needs while you track the status of each task and goal to keep your business plan on target. 

Download One-Page 30-60-90 Day Business Plan Template

For additional single page plans, including an example of a one-page business plan , visit " One-Page Business Plan Templates with a Quick How-To Guide ."

Small Business Plan PDF Templates

These business plan templates are useful for small businesses that want to map out a way to meet organizational objectives, including how to structure, operate, and expand their business.

Simple Small Business Plan Template PDF

A small business can use this template to outline each critical component of a business plan. There is space to provide details about product or service offerings, target audience, customer reach strategy, competitive advantage, and more. Plus, there is space at the bottom of the document to include a SWOT analysis. Once complete, you can use the template as a basis to build out a more elaborate plan. 

Download Simple Small Business Plan Template

Fill-In-the-Blank Small Business Plan Template PDF

This fill-in-the-blank template walks you through each section of a business plan. Build upon the fill-in-the-blank content provided in each section to add information about your company, business idea, market analysis, implementation plan, timeline of milestones, and much more.

Download Fill-In-the-Blank Small Business Plan Template - PDF

One-Page Small Business Plan Template PDF

Use this one-page template to create a scannable business plan that highlights the most essential parts of your organization’s strategy. Provide your business overview and management team details at the top, and then outline the target market, market size, competitive offerings, key objectives and success metrics, financial plan, and more.

Download One-Page Business Plan for Small Business - PDF

Startup Business Plan PDF Templates

Startups can use these business plan templates to check the feasibility of their idea, and articulate their vision to potential investors.

Startup Business Plan Template

Use this business plan template to organize and prepare each essential component of your startup plan. Outline key details relevant to your concept and organization, including your mission and vision statement, product or services offered, pricing structure, marketing strategy, financial plan, and more.

‌Download Startup Business Plan Template

Sample 30-60-90 Day Business Plan for Startup

Startups can use this sample 30-60-90 day plan to establish main goals and deliverables spanning a 90-day period. Customize the sample goals, deliverables, and activities provided on this template according to the needs of your business. Then, assign task owners and set due dates to help ensure your 90-day plan stays on track.

‌Download Sample 30-60-90 Day Business Plan for Startup Template 

For additional resources to create your plan, visit “ Free Startup Business Plan Templates and Examples .”

Nonprofit Business Plan PDF Templates

Use these business plan PDF templates to outline your organization’s mission, your plan to make a positive impact in your community, and the steps you will take to achieve your nonprofit’s goals.

Nonprofit Business Plan Template PDF

Use this customizable PDF template to develop a plan that details your organization’s purpose, objectives, and strategy. This template features a table of contents, with room to include your nonprofit’s mission and vision, key team and board members, program offerings, a market and industry analysis, promotional plan, financial plan, and more. This template also contains a visual timeline to display historic and future milestones.

Download Nonprofit Business Plan Template - PDF

One-Page Business Plan for Nonprofit Organization PDF 

This one-page plan serves as a good starting point for established and startup nonprofit organizations to jot down their fundamental goals and objectives. This template contains all the essential aspects of a business plan in a concise and scannable format, including the organizational overview, purpose, promotional plan, key objectives and success metrics, fundraising goals, and more.

Download One-Page Business Plan for Nonprofit Organization Template - PDF

Fill-In-the-Blank Business Plan PDF Templates

Use these fill-in-the-blank templates as a foundation for creating a comprehensive roadmap that aligns your business strategy with your marketing, sales, and financial goals.

Simple Fill-In-the-Blank Business Plan PDF

The fill-in-the-blank template contains all the vital parts of a business plan, with sample content that you can customize to fit your needs. There is room to include an executive summary, business description, market analysis, marketing plan, operations plan, financial statements, and more. 

Download Simple Fill-In-the-Blank Business Plan Template - PDF

Lean Fill-In-the-Blank Business Plan PDF

This business plan is designed with a Lean approach that encourages you to clarify and communicate your business idea in a clear and concise manner. This single page fill-in-the-blank template includes space to provide details about your management team, the problem you're solving, the solution, target customers, cost structure, and revenue streams. Use the timeline at the bottom to produce a visual illustration of key milestones. 

Download Fill-In-the-Blank Lean Business Plan Template - PDF

For additional resources, take a look at " Free Fill-In-the-Blank Business Plan Templates ."

Sample Business Plan PDF Templates

These sample business plan PDF templates can help you to develop an organized, thorough, and professional business plan.

Business Plan Sample 

This business plan example demonstrates a plan for a fictional food truck company. The sample includes all of the elements in a traditional business plan, which makes it a useful starting point for developing a plan specific to your business needs.

Download Basic Business Plan Sample - PDF

Sample Business Plan Outline Template

Use this sample outline as a starting point for your business plan. Shorten or expand the outline depending on your organization’s needs, and use it to develop a table of contents for your finalized plan.

Download Sample Business Plan Outline Template - PDF

Sample Business Financial Plan Template

Use this sample template to develop the financial portion of your business plan. The template provides space to include a financial overview, key assumptions, financial indicators, and business ratios. Complete the break-even analysis and add your financial statements to help prove the viability of your organization’s business plan.

Download Business Financial Plan Template

PDF  | Smartsheet

For more free, downloadable templates for all aspects of your business, check out “ Free Business Templates for Organizations of All Sizes .”

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What Is a Digital Marketing Plan? (Steps to Create One + Examples)

Learn how to create an effective digital marketing plan in 7 steps. What to include and view examples to guide your strategy for success.

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What Is A Digital Marketing Plan?

Why do you need a marketing plan, 7 steps to create a digital marketing plan, example of a digital marketing plan, learn more about digital marketing.

In today’s world, Digital marketing is the only way to increase your visibility on Google and social media networks and get valuable leads and clients for your business.

To make this happen, you must have a good and effective digital marketing plan that will account for all important aspects of online marketing, and this is exactly what you’ll learn in this post.

A digital marketing plan is a document that describes in detail how to promote a company’s products or services online. It outlines what techniques to use to connect with your target audience and which digital marketing channels to utilize to drive online traffic and increase conversions.

Here is a quick example to help you understand this better. John owns a SAAS company selling accounting software to B2B companies.

A digital marketing plan for his case will include things like:

• How to identify his target audience
• How to set SMART digital marketing goals
• An analysis of competitor’s marketing strategies
• What channels to use to reach his audience
• What kind of content to publish on his website
• Which keywords to target with SEO
• Email campaigns to nurture and engage with potential customers

And other marketing tactics to help him achieve his business objectives.

A digital marketing plan will outline the strategy, focus on the most important actions, and help you use your marketing efforts and money wisely. It will also ensure that your company can quickly adapt to any changes and stay ahead of the competition.

I always tell my clients and students that without a solid plan, it’s like driving with your eyes closed. Don’t underestimate the importance of creating a plan before starting your campaigns.

Let’s see the steps to follow to make a good plan.

• Set Your Digital Marketing Goals and Objectives
• Define Your Target Audience and Build Buyer Personas
• Analyze Your Competitor’s Strategies
• Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels
• Define Your Marketing Budget
• Create a Marketing Calendar & Execute Your Plan
• Monitor Results & Adjust Your Strategy

1. Set Your Digital Marketing Goals and Objectives

Before you do anything else, you should set long-term and short-term goals for what you want to achieve with digital marketing .

Any goal you define should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and align with your business objectives.

For example, if your goal is to get more traffic to your website, you can set a long-term goal of increasing your traffic by 20% in 2 years. To achieve this goal, you should set short-term goals to increase your traffic by 5% in the next 6 months.

To align marketing goals with business objectives, think about what it takes to grow your business and set one or more goals to achieve that.

For example, if your business objective is to increase monthly revenue, you can translate that into the following marketing goals:

• Get more traffic from Google by ranking higher for these transactional [create a list] keywords.
• Optimize landing pages to increase conversion rate by 0.5%.

When setting goals, always look at your current performance and set challenging but realistic goals.

For more information, read: How to set digital marketing goals for long-term success .

2. Define Your Target Audience and Build Buyer Personas

The next step in crafting a winning plan is to define, in as many details as possible, who your target market is. I know from experience that this is a step many companies leave behind, believing they know their customers well.

Creating detailed buyer personas will help you uncover the unique characteristics of the different types of customers you should target in your campaigns.

For example, creating campaigns for young women with children differs from targeting single men. That’s the beauty of digital marketing. You can use your buyer personas to set up sales funnels for each group and market them based on their interests and needs.

When creating buyer personas, you should gather information about your customers, including:

• Personal Information
• Professional Information
• Goals and Challenges
• Ways of Learning
• Purchasing Behavior

You can use our template below to get started.

3. Analyze Your Competitor’s Strategies

When creating your digital marketing plan, you should closely examine your competitor’s strategies, particularly SEO techniques and paid ads campaigns. The reason is simple: your digital marketing campaigns don’t have to be perfect, but they need to be better than your competition’s because this is how you’ll win customers.

For example, to rank higher for a keyword in SEO, you don’t have to create superb content—you just have to create better content than your top competitors.

Find out who your main competitors are, examine their market share, promotional strategies, and, in general, their online presence. Don’t copy them, but get ideas and look for gaps in their marketing that you can exploit.

You can use the guides below to perform a competitor analysis.

• How To Find Your Competitor’s Ads
• How To Find Competitor’s Keywords
• How To Do An SEO Competitor Analysis

4. Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels

The next step is to specify which digital marketing channels you’ll use in your campaigns. As mentioned above, you can set multiple goals (long-term and short-term) involving one or more marketing channels.

The most common types of digital marketing to use in your plan are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Video Marketing

For each channel, you should set SMART goals and assign ownership to those responsible for the implementation. For example, if you work in a company with an in-house digital marketing team, you can agree with the SEO manager about the goals of SEO for next year and how these can be achieved.

5. Define Your Marketing Budget

When setting your marketing budget, it’s important to consider various factors. Digital marketing packages cost a few hundred to several thousand per month if you outsource all your marketing.

Follow these tips to utilize your budget efficiently:

Allocate a portion of income on marketing: The first thing to decide is how much to spend on marketing. A higher percentage might be necessary for startups and businesses looking to grow aggressively, while a lower percentage for established businesses aiming for steady growth might be more appropriate.

Choose which services to outsource and what to do in-house: Outsourcing all your marketing to an agency will incur a higher cost than following a hybrid model. Some tasks (like posting content on your social media pages) don’t require expertise. To save money, it’s better to handle these tasks in-house and hire an agency or consultant for the tasks that require expert knowledge, such as ongoing SEO work and PPC management.

Allocate your budget to the channels that generate the highest ROI: In an ideal world, you could use all marketing channels to promote your business, but that’s not the best approach. Run pilot campaigns on different channels to see what’s working best, and then allocate your budget to the most profitable channels. From experience, these are likely to be SEO and Google Ads.

Start with a low budget and gradually increase it: Even if you can afford to spend more on particular campaigns, starting with a low budget is highly recommended. As a rule of thumb, you should keep spending money on a campaign as long as it generates a positive ROI. When you reach top performance, move your budget to other channels.

This is usually the case with Google and Facebook Ads. Allocate a low budget to give the system time to optimize your campaigns, and then gradually increase it until the CPA (cost per acquisition) is at acceptable levels. When the cost to get a lead or make a sale exceeds a certain threshold, it’s time to spend money on other campaigns or channels.

6. Create a Marketing Calendar & Execute Your Plan

Once you gather all the information in your document, it’s time to create a marketing calendar and set a date for each important task or campaign. Normally, you won’t execute all actions at once. As noted above, your plan should include both short-term and long-term goals.

To stay organized, create a calendar and decide who will execute a task and when. Your plan should include specific dates to review your progress and adjust your strategy.

Remember to account for holidays and the time needed to prepare the necessary material for each campaign. This includes time-consuming tasks like creating content (blog posts and videos), researching, etc.

Once your calendar is ready, you’ve completed the first step in executing your digital marketing plan, but you should not stop there. It may sound unnecessary to stress this, but we’ve seen many companies fail to execute their plan.

The most common reasons were setting unrealistic goals and overestimating the return from paid campaigns, resulting in running out of budget faster than expected.

7. Monitor Results & Adjust Your Strategy

No marketing plan can be executed from start to finish without changes. I’ve been doing this for 20+ years and have never seen a campaign perform as originally planned. This means monitoring your campaigns regularly is crucial to your success.

You must track the right metrics and KPIs to monitor a campaign effectively. Each channel has its own set of important metrics you should track. For instance:

For SEO campaigns – you should track keyword rankings, website traffic, impressions, and organic CTR .

For PPC campaigns – you should track ad CTR, keyword quality score, impressions, and cost-per-click (CPC).

The above is just a small example. Read our digital marketing metrics post for a complete list of all KPIs and instructions on measuring them.

Here is a pro tip for you: To make data-driven decisions, you should try to gather all data in a single place, and Google Looker Studio (Free) is a great tool for this. Looker Studio can connect to several sources, including Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Google Analytics, and you can combine the data into meaningful reports and dashboards.

View the gallery of ready-made report templates to get started.

Here is a short overview of how the above tips can be transformed into an actionable plan for a website selling dog food.

Step 1: Set Your Digital Marketing Goals and Objectives

• Improve website traffic, enhance brand visibility, and optimize conversion rates to increase online dog food sales by 30% within the next two years.
• Short-term objective: Increase website traffic by 15% through SEO and content marketing.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience and Build Buyer Personas

• Buyer Persona: Dog Owners
• Personal Information: Pet owners aged 25-45. They value the health and well-being of their pets.
• Professional Information: Middle to upper-income professionals or families.
• Goals and Challenges: Looking for nutritious, convenient dog food options. Challenges include finding affordable, high-quality dog food.
• Ways of Learning: Social media, blogs, online reviews.
• Purchasing Behavior: Prefers shopping online, responsive to recommendations and loyalty programs.

Step 3: Analyze Your Competitor’s Strategies

• SEO Analysis: Identify the top three competitors with strong organic visibility for high-value keywords such as “organic dog food” and “best dog food brands.”
• Content Gaps: Lack of comprehensive guides on dog nutrition and health which can be an opportunity to create value-added content.
• Social Media Presence: Competitors have moderate engagement rates, so there is an opportunity to create a more engaging, community-focused social media strategy.

Step 4: Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels

• SEO: Focus on content creation around high-value keywords and on-page SEO improvements.
• Content Marketing: Write pillar content on dog health and nutrition.
• Social Media Marketing: Post regularly on Instagram and Facebook, showcasing customer stories and behind-the-scenes videos on how our products are produced.
• Email Marketing: Monthly newsletters featuring exclusive promotions, nutritional tips, and new product launches.

Step 5: Define Your Marketing Budget

• Allocate 40% of the marketing budget to content creation and SEO optimization.
• 30% to social media advertising and influencer partnerships.
• 20% for email marketing tools and campaigns.
• 10% reserved for unforeseen opportunities and marketing tools.

Step 6: Create a Marketing Calendar & Execute Your Plan

• SEO: Publish bi-weekly blog posts. Begin on-page optimizations.
• Social Media: Host monthly live Q&A sessions with a veterinarian.
• Email Marketing: Send a weekly newsletter sharing new blog posts and exclusive discounts for subscribers.
• Content Marketing: Release a free eBook on dog nutrition.
• Social Media: Partner with dog influencers for product reviews.

Step 7: Monitor Results & Adjust Your Strategy

• SEO: Monitor keyword rankings and website traffic using Google Analytics.
• Social Media: Track engagement rates and follower growth.
• Email Marketing: Analyze open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Remember, success in digital marketing doesn’t happen overnight. It requires constant monitoring, tweaking, and a deep understanding of your audience. Making a digital marketing plan is just the beginning.

• How to Create Digital Marketing Campaigns
• Examples of Successful Digital Marketing From Known Brands
• How To Design An Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
• Best Digital Marketing Certificate Programs

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

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Digital Marketing Plan

What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘ digital marketing ?’ No doubt it involves blog posts, online articles, and search engine optimization, just to name a few things. If you’re going to get involved in digital marketing, then you need to come up with the right plan. Due to the broad nature of what you’re about to get into, it definitely pays to know more about what a digital marketing plan entails. Scroll on not just to discover the nuances of these plans, but also to browse through our list and get the best digital marketing plan template out there.

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What Is Digital Marketing?

To put it simply, digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that utilize the Internet or an electronic to conduct a variety of advertising campaigns. Here, businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines (for SEO marketing), social media , email, mobile apps, websites, and even digital billboards to connect with current and prospective consumers. With technology dominating today’s marketing scene, businesses have managed to keep up with the latest trends by implementing several digital marketing strategies to establish themselves in the industry. Though we haven’t quite reached the age of hovercars and teleportation devices just yet, digital marketing has made it easier and more convenient for a business to reach its audience creatively and innovatively.

How to Create a Successful Digital Marketing Plan

A good marketing plan isn’t a product of an overnight task. It takes intense research and proper analysis to come up with something good enough to help your company prosper. Even the act of downloading a digital marketing plan sample, a digital marketing plan PDF template, or a free digital marketing plan from our list above will still require a ton of work. To help you with this, we’ve gathered five of the most crucial steps in developing a well-defined digital marketing plan for you to be guided.

Step 1: Know Your Goals

Before anything attempting any kind of plan—be it a digital marketing action plan or even a one-page digital marketing plan—always define your mission and objectives first. You need to be specific with your marketing goals so that your plan may be tailored toward achieving them. Without a clear path to follow, your team could end up wasting a significant amount of resources on useless strategies.

Step 2: Develop Buyer Personas

Remember who you’re talking to. Individuals from certain demographics may possess different interests from those of another group, which is why your marketing plan must be centered on the problems held by your target  audience . This includes their emotional desires, aspirations, fears, and goals.

Step 3: Analyze Past Mistakes

Past successes and failures are all part of growth. By learning to accept them, you’ll also learn to analyze how you can improve your current operations to obtain better results. Having a record of your analysis will also help enhance plans for continuous brand development.

Step 4: Identify Your Means

There are three vital components in executing a digital marketing plan: the people, the budget , and the channels. All of these resources must be taken into account before any decisions are implemented in the plan. It needs to be realistic, measurable, and attainable, otherwise, you’ll find yourself scrambling for resources that go beyond your capacity.

Step 5: Create Specific Strategies.

No matter how hard you try, your plan is never going to be perfect from the get-go. Unforeseen circumstances may cause drastic changes to your plan, forcing you to be as flexible as possible. This is why you need to create manageable strategies , one that allows adjustments without losing sight of the company’s primary goal.

What is the purpose of a Digital Marketing Plan?

The purpose of using a digital marketing plan for any organization is to force you through the process of researching and clearly explain all the aims and goals of your digital initiatives. This is along with clearly targeting digital personas and methodically choosing ways to go after them.

What should be considered while making a Digital Marketing Plan?

A digital marketing plan must include the following: One, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Two, web positioning and strategies. Three, the social media market . From there, you must put digital marketing actions into motion with previously made plans or strategies. Always consider all aspects that impact development indirectly and directly.

What does A Marketing Plan do?

Unlike a business plan, a marketing plan mainly focuses on working and keeping customers intact. It has several strategies and includes numbers, facts, and objectives. A good marketing plan has all the tools and tactics you will use to achieve your sales goals most effectively. It helps draw in and keep customers.

With its use of modern and ongoing technological developments, digital marketing is a truly exciting thing to be a part of. Now that you are better informed about what a digital marketing plan is, you can begin experiencing its nuances for yourself. All that’s left for you to do is choose how your own internet marketing journey will begin. Decide wisely and act as boldly as you can!

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