4 Best Templates for Creating Online Marketing Strategies

Online marketing is a content promotion strategy that all businesses should implement alongside more traditional marketing techniques, and doing so takes careful planning and execution. Because so much of people’s interaction comes on the internet, it’s important to put a lot of effort into developing an effective online marketing strategy that reaches your target audience and helps accomplish your marketing goals.

In this article, we will run through some templates that can help push your marketing goals towards success and realize their potential. Keep reading to learn how you can create an amazing online marketing campaign!

Best Online Marketing Templates

When creating an online marketing strategy it’s important to build the groundwork of what needs to be accomplished before you can figure out how to get there. Using online whiteboards and building a shared vision is the most important piece of planning that creates the framework for a successful online marketing strategy.

You can also create a template using sites like surveysparrow. These templates won’t be the final piece to creating your overall strategy but they will be crucial in planning it out and organizing it so that your team can execute.

The best way to use these templates is through visual collaboration with the rest of your team. By collaborating on all of these boards your strategy becomes fully transparent to everyone that’s working on it, and your teammates can better understand the thought process behind the strategy.

Not only do people gain an inside look into the process, but they get their own opinions integrated into the marketing strategy. This inclusion helps people commit to the plan and feel connected to the larger success of the marketing strategy. When your whole team buys into this plan, your chances of succeeding are much higher.

Having a shared interface also helps organize the team and provides a solidified vision for people to reference. This board can be revisited at any time, or even exported to another tool in order to ensure everyone shares the same baseline knowledge. When your team has a platform that they share it provides a sense of unity throughout the team and helps keep people on track with their goals and daily tasks. This alignment is critical when developing new online marketing strategies and online whiteboards help tremendously in creating them. Here are the four best templates for creating online marketing strategies.

Moscow Analysis

The Moscow Analysis is a great prioritization tool that allows you to organize what features you want to exist within your online marketing strategy. This is a great opportunity for your team to determine which opportunities must be included in your strategy and which will be left for another time.

The Moscow analysis focuses on constructing a table that has four columns: must have, should have, could have, and won’t have. By sorting different notes into these four columns you are able to gain a clear picture of what your online marketing strategy will consist of and what needs to be included.

One of the best parts about the Moscow analysis is that it includes not only what things must be included but what must be omitted. Especially in marketing campaigns, it can be incredibly easy to fall victim to scope creep, where slowly things that are out of the scope of the project weasel their way in and create a wholly unreasonable ask. 

When selecting certain items that will be purposefully left out, however, you can eliminate this possibility and remain focused on the things that matter. Through this organization, the Moscow analysis proves itself to be a very helpful template when creating an online marketing strategy.

Engaging New Customers

The engaging new customer’s template is a perfect place to start when creating a new online marketing strategy and can be used effectively for a content marketing strategy as well. This board focuses on the different stages of interaction that a potential user has with your content and their journey through your website.

The first portion of the template is the “reach” section, which might involve what your advertising looks like, where people can find you, and how your website attracts users. This is where you aggregate a strategy for what kinds of outreach you’ll do online, and how you want this outreach to look. 

In this section, it’s important to think about how your strategy will touch different corners of the web while specifically pushing interactions with your target market.

The next stage of the template is the “impress” section. This is similar to the reach section but instead focuses on the design elements that help make your advertising/website stand out and engage users. Think about the specific design elements and modes of transport that you’ll use to reach your customers. It could be banner ads on a website, it could be an email campaign, or it could be some content marketing on your landing page. 

Whatever you choose to emphasize, this is the place where you should hash out some details about the look and feel of your content marketing campaign.

When working on the “engage” section, you should focus mainly on your website/product. Think about when people use your advertisement, or visit your website; the next step is engaging them with your content or your product. Specifically, how will your design allow users to use your site? What do you want to stand out to users and how do you want it to look? The answers to these questions will help determine the specific methods of interaction that will be used in your online marketing strategy.

The last two sections on the template are the exit and return sections. These two are devoted to understanding the lasting impressions that the user leaves your website/product with and why they are attracted to return again. 

The user’s reasons for returning could be personal, but there are things you can do from a business perspective to increase their likelihood to return. These could be another ad campaign, repeat contact over email, or important content elements that draw their attention. Regardless of the specific strategy, you use this is a great opportunity to think about the lasting engagement you can draw in with an online marketing strategy.

Persona Diagram

Being able to interact with your principal users and create engagement online means you need to have a specific idea of the target market that you’re reaching out to. Creating a persona diagram is the best way to organize the traits that your consumers share and construct a principal user that you can target with your online marketing campaign.

When creating a persona diagram you map out a principal user’s identity, demographic, frustrations, and overall goals. By doing this you are able to understand their needs on a deeper level and target them in a meaningful way that seeks to meet their demands.

After breaking down the persona of your principal users you can easily target their needs and move from there to thinking about specific online marketing strategies that will best reach your target market.

SWOT Matrix

The SWOT Matrix is one of the most common templates to use on a collaboration platform and can be repurposed for many different activities. One of the ways it can be used effectively is to create an online marketing strategy and analyze the internal and external opportunities available to your business.

The entire strategy of your business will be influenced by your online marketing campaign, and using this template is a good way for marketers to analyze their ecosystem to find out how to best seize their opportunities. Especially when working online it’s critical to have a strategic approach to marketing because the ecosystem is constantly evolving and increasingly competitive.

A SWOT analysis separates the internal factors of your plan, the strengths and weaknesses, from the external factors, the opportunities and threats. By breaking these down the template seeks to create differentiation between you and your competition by focusing on what you can improve internally and how that translates to external opportunities.

Here are some questions that you can ask at each phase of the template to help promote innovation and new ideas:

Strengths 

• What resources are currently available to help reach our marketing goal?
• How are we specially positioned to succeed?
• How can we use previous marketing campaigns to leverage our future endeavors?

Weaknesses

• Where do we know we could improve?
• Where are we losing efficiency in the creation of our marketing strategy?

Opportunities

• What trends can we capitalize on to our advantage?
• How can we increase our efficiency?
• How can we incorporate a unique personality into our strategy?

Threats

• Where are we overlapping too much with the competition?
• Where are we lagging behind the competition?
• What might prevent us from reaching our goals?

These are all examples of questions that help prompt innovation for your online marketing strategy and are organized easily with the SWOT matrix.

Conclusion

Creating an effective online marketing strategy is critical to seeing success in your marketing campaign, and using these four templates creates a great gateway to a successful campaign. If you’re interested in how you can better integrate these templates into virtual workshops, check out Fresco.