Building a Digital Marketing Playbook

It’s the time of year when goal setting is top of mind for most people.  Unfortunately, it’s more common than not for people to make resolutions and quickly disregard them or revert back to bad habits.  Last year we posted about the importance of setting a plan. Obviously a goal needs a plan to achieve it.  But as Mike Tyson famously put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It’s not enough to just have a plan, it needs to be broken down into actionable behaviors.

One common strategy is to build a content calendar and use that as a plan.  There are three problems with using a calendar as a plan:

• Calendars typically are not forward looking enough. They rarely project out more than three months.
• Often times the content calendar gets disregarded as schedules become hectic and priorities shift.
• Calendars are typically schedule based rather than goal based.

The best way to set behaviors designed to meet your goals is to build a playbook.  Just like a football playbook, these are the predesigned activities that you are going to run to meet a set goal.  That playbook will be derived from your marketing plans which should be set from your goals.

Here’s an example:

A training firm wants to generate 20% more leads to meet a set revenue goal from marketing.  The 20% increase would be determined from past metrics on closing/conversion percentage on leads and average revenue per deal.

The firm has established that they want 5% of the additional leads to come from social media.  Using the past conversion ratio of social media user to lead, they find that they need to pull 10% more activity from the social accounts.

To meet that 10% increase, the playbook for that particular channel includes two extra posts a week for CTA’s and a monthly video post that has historically converted at a higher percentage. 

This example shows how working backwards from the goal leads to a plan, like which channels will be in your digital marketing matrix.  Then the plan needs to be broken down into a playbook to assign specific behaviors to meet stated goals.  Of course, a full playbook would include behaviors for every channel that would add up to the stated goal.

It’s important to verify most of your playbook with historical data to avoid assigning unrealistic results to intended behaviors.  As you move into the year, a playbook is easier to review than a plan or calendar because it can be benchmarked against expected results.  If you find that the playbook is not generating the expected results or priorities change through the year, it’s easier to adjust the specific activities to meet those new realities.

A digital marketing plan is good but runs a high risk of becoming irrelevant as the year goes on.  Setting a playbook will give you a set list of activities to execute on the plan.  It will also provide flexibility when changes and problems inevitably impact the pre-set strategies.