Our Digital Marketing Research and Planning Training Course aims to attain a 'birds-eye' view of the business, with a specific view to the it's current and future digital marketing requirements.

Whilst not strictly part of the digital marketing domain, it is best practice at the start of any online web development project to engage in developing a wide-ranging overview of the business, it's objectives, goals, products and services, and its current marketing plans, in order to gain the fullest picture possible of the entire business footprint, and how the business can be best be represented in the online marketplace.

In many instances, this can involve speaking to a businesses various departments in order to gain some insight into their own specific processes, but inevitably at some point it is the role of the chief digital marketer to draw all of the various threads together in order to construct a cohesive road-map of the companies future digital marketing endeavours.

During this class, we work with you to answer many of the defining questions that any chief digital marketer would ask of his client, which are as follows:

Digital Marketing Checklist: Primary Questions

• What are the businesses primary goals and objectives?
• Who are it's main competitors?
• What kinds of products and services will be on offer?
• How will these products and services be categorised and sub-categorised on the website?
• Will an e-commerce solution be required?
• What volume of images and text will be required? From where can these media elements be sourced?
• What external platforms and social channels will likely be the most useful for marketing purposes?
• Does a logo already exist? Company colours? Is there an official 'brand identity' document?

Following on from this process, it often becomes clear as to what types of digital media will be required for the businesses marketing purposes, including:

• Photographs - What types or styles of photographic images will suit the businesses ethos?
• Infographics - Could the business marketing be enhanced by the creation and promotion of infographics?
• Text - What kinds of subjects should our social media and blog posts be about?
• PDFs / E-books - Would the creation of an e-book benefit the business?
• Email lists - What mailing lists exist for the business? Are there more than one?
• Newsletters - What kinds of newsletters should the business be mailing to it's customers?
• Social media posts - What are the themes we should be employing for our social media strategy?
• Videos/YouTube - Would a video, or a series of videos, be of benefit to marketing the business?
• Blog posts - What subjects/categories should our blog posts be addressing?

As you can see, there's a lot to cover in the research and planning process, but time and again this has proved to be an essential and time saving process to employ as the first stage to any businesses digital marketing strategy.