Marketing is never an easy affair – it always requires so many things to be done in a proper way that one can easily lose track of them. And although digital marketing has simplified it a lot, there are still dozens of things that need to be done.
In such a situation, it’s not uncommon to lose track and feel stuck. A checklist can keep your marketing team on track and make sure that your digital marketing campaigns are generating the maximum ROI.
Bonus: Digital marketing industry is one of the fastest-growing industries, and it is expected to reach around $807 billion by 2026. Get to know more about Digital marketing and its latest trends through our Digital Marketing Statistics post.
That’s why we prepared this digital marketing checklist. Let’s take a look at it!
Key Takeaway: Digital Marketing Checklist
If you find this page too long, here’s a quick overview of what lies ahead. Overall, there are 27 steps that you should follow while going for the digital marketing of your business, and they can be organized into 5 sections as you can see below:
1. Hire Your Digital Marketing Expert(s)
- Choose experts with expertise in specific domains of digital marketing (i.e. SEO, social media, etc.)
2. Content Marketing Checklist
- Understand your Audience
- Make a content strategy
- Set up your funnel to capture the leads
- Build an editorial Calender
- Write catchy headlines
- Promote your content on the most optimum marketing channels
- Cross-promote across multiple channels
3. SEO Checklist
- Setup Google Sitekit
- Install and Setup your SEO tools
- Perform other basic SEO tasks
- Keyword research and mapping
- Enable HTTPS
- Mobile Optimization
- On-page SEO
- Link-building and off-page SEO
4. Social Media Marketing Checklist
- Understand your audience
- Make a social media strategy
- Get your tools
- Build your following
- Use Hashtags
- Track the results and optimize your campaigns
5. Email Marketing Checklist
- Understanding email marketing
- Creating an email marketing strategy
- Optimizing your Emails
Now let’s understand each component in an elaborate manner.
#1. Hire Your Digital Marketing Expert(s)
The first thing to know about digital marketing for your business is that you can’t handle everything by yourself. A professional with specific domain expertise (i.e. SEO expert, social media expert, etc.) will have the skills necessary to reach your target audience through the correct marketing channels.
This may cost money, but not hiring any experts to take care of your digital marketing is the single most expensive mistake that’s made by most entrepreneurs. Remember, achieving growth without wasting time and resources is very important.
#2. Content Marketing Checklist
Content marketing is the science of winning customers by providing them with useful content related to the problem your product tries to solve. Here are the points you should take care of while doing content marketing for your business:
#2.1. Understand Your Audience
Identifying the needs and pain points of your audience is the key to the success of your content marketing strategy. You need to figure out what kind of content will be appreciated by your target audience at what stage of their customer journey in the funnel, and curate things according to that. So go out in the market, survey your customers, observe their behavior, and try to understand them in as much detail as possible.
#2.2. Make A Content Strategy
After you understand your audience, your next step should be to devise a content strategy. This strategy should include a number of things, like content types, relevant marketing channels, budget, objectives, etc. The goals and objectives that you want to achieve from content marketing (i.e. lead generation, sales, brand building, etc). Set SMART goals that are attainable and measurable.
#2.3. Set Up Your Funnel To Capture And Engage The Leads
Content marketing is all about capturing the leads who may be at different stages of their decision-making journey to purchase your products or services. That requires engaging with them through different types of content, depending on where they are in the funnel.
Fortunately, there are tools available to assist with that, and setting them up should be your next step in content marketing. You need to set up an email marketing tool, CRM, automation tools, etc.
#2.4. Build A Content Editorial Calendar
Content marketing requires creating a lot of content. If you don’t have a way to keep track of it, you can quickly stress yourself out.
That’s why you should create a content editorial calendar – it’s the best friend for every marketer as it allows you to see a bird’s eye view of your scheduled content with its associated keywords, target customer segment, lead stage, etc.
#2.5. Write Catchy Headlines/Titles
You might have written the best content in the world, but without a catchy headline, it won’t be opened by people. People check out a post if the title appeals to them, so catchy headlines can make a lot of difference to your content. Try to make your headlines inviting by using terms that play on the interest of your audience or tell directly what they can expect upon visiting the page.
#2.6. Promote Your Content On The Most Optimum Marketing Channels
Along with your content, the marketing channels you choose to promote it on also hold equal importance for content marketing. There are a large number of channels available nowadays from social media to search engines to OTT platforms. You might already have identified the most optimum marketing channels while drafting your content marketing strategy. Your decision in this regard should be based on the nature of the audience available on various digital marketing channels.
#2.7. Cross-Promote Across Multiple Channels
While you should focus most of your energies on the most optimum marketing channels, as explained in the previous step, it’s also important to not forget the importance of cross-promotion. Today, a consumer can be reached in various ways. The cross-promotion also increases the engagement between the brands and their consumers. So put arrangements in place to automatically promote your content across the various channels.
#2.8. Track And Optimize Your Campaign And Content Strategy
The last step is to track your progress and optimize your content as well as marketing strategy according to data. That way you can be sure that whatever content marketing efforts you make are delivering the best results. You can make use of tools such as Hubspot, Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and SimilarWeb to measure the performance of your campaigns and the results they are delivering.
#3. SEO Checklist
Like content marketing, SEO is also a very important part of any brand’s overall digital marketing strategy. The following checklist will make sure that you have performed all the important tasks related to the SEO of your site:
#3.1. Setup Google Sitekit
Google Site Kit is a WordPress plugin that can be used to connect your site to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console acts as a bridge between your site and Google, allowing you to keep track of how your website is performing in Google’s search results. Google Analytics, on the other hand, provides you with a complete overview of all the traffic you receive. So install the SiteKit plugin and set it up.
#3.2. Install and Setup Your SEO Tools
There are many reliable SEO suites available in the market to aid you in the process of planning your SEO campaigns and also offer technical insights and performance reports. Some examples include Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, etc. Buy any of them and set them up with the data of your website. In addition to that, you’ll also need to take care of your SEO plugin installation. A WordPress SEO plugin can help you take care of all on-page and technical SEO tasks, such as keyword placement, meta descriptions, sitemap submission, etc. Some examples of such plugins include Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO (AIOSEO), and SEOPress. You can install any of them.
#3.3. Perform Other Basic SEO Tasks
After the setup of your SEO suite and plugin, you can easily perform the remaining basic SEO tasks that, which include sitemap submission, Robots.txt file submission, crawlability, and indexability check, etc. Do each of them.
#3.4. Keyword Research and Mapping
Keyword research is the most important part of SEO. You can identify keyword gaps based on the rankings of your competitors to boost your traffic faster and content gaps to develop content that helps you rank better than them for the same keywords. If yours is a new business, instead of short keywords, go for long tails ones because they are easier to rank and allow you to develop more specific content.
#3.5. Enable HTTPS
Google made HTTPS a ranking factor way back in 2014, so if your site lacks this part, it will struggle to appear on the first page of Google search results for any keyword. So install an SSL certificate on your site and enable HTTPS if it’s not enabled already.
#3.6. Perform Technical SEO Tasks
There are a number of technical SEO tasks as well that need to be done in order to make your website rank in Google. They include fixing duplicate content, slow site speed, broken links, etc.
#3.7. Mobile Optimization
Mobile has become the default way of searching for information. The majority of internet users browse the web on their smartphones, so it’s very important that your site looks and works as well on them as it does on computers. Use a responsive theme on your site and make sure it’s mobile-optimized using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
#3.8. On-Page SEO
There are a number of on-page SEO tasks as well that should be done while publishing your content. Follow the steps below to do them:
- Keep an eye on your Meta descriptions and include your keywords in them;
- Optimize your H1 tags by including keywords in them;
- Add Schema Markup to help your website utilize the other features of search result pages, such as shopping results, featured snippets, or knowledge graphs.
#3.9. Link-Building And Off-Page SEO
This is the last part of any kind of SEO campaign. Backlinks are the key to ranking in search results, so you should work to get them from high-authority websites. To generate backlinks, you can do a Backlink Gap Analysis, which reveals websites that are linking to your competitors but not you. By reaching out to them, you can get a backlink for your site as well. Moreover, you can also get backlinks from the unliked mentions of your site.
#4. Social Media Marketing Checklist
Social Media has now become an integral part of our lives, and as a result, it contributes to the marketing industry as well. The following checklist explains all the points that will help you establish a successful social media marketing campaign:
#4.1. Understand Your Audience
Without knowing your audience, you can never curate relevant marketing strategies. So try to know them by conducting proper market research and due diligence on their social behavior. Talk to them, observe their behavior, and analyze their demographics and their entertainment habits. All of these things will come in handy for drafting your social media marketing strategy.
#4.2. Make A Social Media Strategy
Nothing can succeed without a proper strategy, and social media marketing is no different. It’s important to create a proper social media strategy because it acts like a guide and plays a major role in defining whether you will succeed or fail. The things you should include in your social media strategy include objectives (SMART goals), channels to use, content calendar, competition analysis, and methods (i.e. Influencer marketing, social media ads, collaborations with other popular accounts from your space, etc).
#4.3. Get Your Tools
To have a successful social media marketing campaign requires a lot more than skills, knowledge, and strategy. The right marketing tools are also one of the most important things to succeed in your digital marketing campaign. Two such tools are Buffer and Hootsuite, both of which offer a complete set of features to streamline all social media marketing tasks. There are other special-purpose tools too, such as Mention (to track your social mentions), Canva (to create content), Zapier (to automate your social media), etc.
#4.4. Build Your Following
Building a following is important for long-term social media marketing because ads and influencer marketing etc. give you traffic only for as long as you keep doing them. If you’ve to get constant results, you need to build your social media following. So try some methods that help you build your social media following faster, such as running contests, collaborating with influencers, and running ad campaigns with like or follow buttons.
#4.5. Use Hashtags
The hashtags help to promote your brand on various social media channels by making them discoverable to a captive audience. Keeping a minimum of one to three hashtags can turn out to be great for your profile. Also, don’t make your hashtags too long, and try to keep them short but relevant to the topic.
There are a lot of hashtag research tools, such as Keyhole and Hashtagify, that can help you find good hashtags for your posts. The tools will also help you to keep track of the number of posts made on a specific hashtag.
#4.6. Track The Results And Optimize Your Campaigns
Finally, don’t forget to track and optimize. Social Media Marketing can help you connect on a wider range, but if you don’t know how well your strategies are working and what results they are bringing in, they’re of no use. So make use of in-built analytics and reporting tools offered by various social media platforms such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Reports, YouTube Analytics, etc. These tools can tell you everything you need to know about the performance of your social media marketing campaigns, so you can optimize them.
#5. Email Marketing Checklist
To run successful digital marketing campaigns, you need to create a community around your brand and have loyal followers. To do that, you need to follow this email marketing checklist.
#5.1 Understanding Email Marketing
- Email is one of the most effective marketing channels. Using email marketing as a medium, you can easily communicate with your audience.
- An email has a high ROI compared to other channels. But you need an email list to start email marketing.
- Build your list by offering lead magnets, having signup forms on your site, and importing contacts. Get permission before emailing purchased/imported lists.
- Focus on relevance and value over sales pitches in your emails. Use email to nurture relationships.
#5.2 Creating An Email Marketing Strategy
- Determine your email marketing goals. Do you want to drive sales, traffic, engagement, etc? Align emails with broader marketing goals.
- Identify your target audience. Tailor email content and tone to their interests, pain points, and preferences.
- Choose your email frequency based on audience expectations. Avoid sending too many or too few emails.
- Have a mix of educational, promotional, and transactional emails. Vary content types to keep it interesting.
- Segment your list based on demographics, interests, and actions. Send targeted emails to each segment.
#5.3 Optimizing Your Emails
- Write compelling subject lines to get open. Convey value, use curiosity triggers, and urgency as needed.
- Focus on a single CTA per email. Make it easy to take action.
- Personalize emails with name, location, and interests. This boosts open and click-through rates.
- Optimize for all devices. Emails should be mobile-friendly, with easy-to-tap buttons.
- Test and iterate. Try different content formats, calls to action, and subject lines. Analyze metrics to optimize.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into the digital marketing of any business. Therefore, this checklist can play a major role in keeping you on track. Always keep in mind that digital marketing is not a one-time thing and you have to monitor your progress to grow your business constantly. So bookmark this page to visit again later on whenever you feel stuck in the digital marketing activities of your business, and thank us later!
