This bumper 100-question digital marketing checklist will help make sure you've got a robust digital marketing strategy which is appropriate to the state of the market in 2021 under Covid-19.
A lot may have changed during the pandemic. Maybe your core offering is radically different, maybe it's just a tweak. But don't forget the perception of what you're offering may well have changed in the eyes of your potential clients, particularly when they're looking for you online.
If it's your job to deliver digital marketing for your organisation, use this checklist to make sure you have confidence in your own digital marketing strategy before your boss, your board or your shareholders check for you.
If you're the boss, forward this digital marketing checklist to your digital marketing person and give them time to reflect. Go easy, mind. It's a tough role to be in right now, and they probably need more of your support than your scrutiny.
Overall mission, vision and values checklist
Whilst this doesn’t necessarily belong on a digital marketing checklist, during Covid it is particularly important to be clear whether any significant change in what you’re trying to achieve and your direction of travel is accepted as being temporary, or whether it’s already clear that everything about you has now changed for good.
Here are your first 10 digital marketing checklist questions:
1. Has anything changed in your organisation’s reason for being?
2. Are you now targeting a different market or market segment than before, e.g. due to everything switching online?
3. Do the changes in focus alter your stated mission?
4. Have any of your stated values and beliefs shifted?
5. If so, what does that mean for your approach and your brand messaging?
6. Are you thinking more about the environment now?
7. Are real environmental changes afoot that deserve to be trumpeted more?
8. Is the business now officially heading in a new direction?
9. Has this new direction been sanctioned by leaders and board members?
10. Do all key stakeholders have a clear understanding of your (new) direction?
It’s fine not to know where you’re heading, if you’re in a state of uncertainty or paralysis or if you’re agreed that you’re waiting for the known market to return.
Getting board approval or buy-in is critical to make sure there is consensus for your actions, whether you're sticking to plan A, or switching to a plan B.
Strategic objectives during Covid
Again, not strictly digital marketing checklist fodder, but if you don’t know what success now looks like in the eyes of the board or senior leaders, no one is going to understand whether you’ve got there or not. And even your bosses won't know whether to congratulate you, commiserate you, grill you or worse.
If there is general agreement around (likely lower) financial targets, you will feel less straitjacketed and less of a victim with a bit more of a chance of getting to a reasonable place again. It's pretty obvious that it's not a time to take your foot off the gas, so don't do that.
Especially when it comes to being answerable to board members, they tend to be a lot less twitchy when the number you’ve achieved is bigger than the one in the objectives! So obvious as it sounds, you'll waste a lot less of your valuable time having to report upwards or being endlessly scrutinised if it looks like you're coming in on (albeit downgraded) target.
So here are your next 5 digital marketing checklist questions:
11. What specific financial targets are you now working towards?
12. Is there a sufficient breakdown between different business areas?
13. Is the breakdown by product or service area logical in view of your knowledge of the market right now?
14. How much certainty do you have about these targets?
15. Are your digital marketing budgets divided up in the right proportions to give you the best chance of hitting those targets?
Digital marketing strategy checklist during Covid-19
If you know you’re clear on any updates to your vision, mission, values and strategic objectives, we can get into the proper digital bit of the digital marketing checklist:
A digital marketing strategy is your formally stated approach which seeks to fulfil the strategic objectives of the organisation in line with its mission, vision and values via a carefully planned set of digital marketing activities.
If something or everything has now changed, it’s vital you go back through your digital marketing strategy to make sure it all adds up. And if you didn’t have a formal digital marketing strategy in the first place, now might actually be a good time to come up with one.
Here are your checklist questions:
16. Do you have a digital marketing strategy document?
17. Is your formal digital marketing strategy still up to date?
18. Have the board and senior leaders seen it?
19. Has the latest version been approved?
20. Does the allocation of tasks and budget match up with the business areas or products you’re now pursuing?
21. In view of your expenditure to date, do you have the budget still to go through with your planned actions?
22. Is there more budget available if you need it?
23. Have you asked for a contingency fund, given what you have to achieve just got harder in a more competitive environment?
24. Have you tried negotiating down the cost of services you’ve booked or plan to use? A lot of digital service providers are up for tweaking their pricing if you ask them.
25. Can you hit the timelines in your digital marketing strategy if resources such as time, money and staffing levels are down?
26. What can you safely dump from the strategy in light of Covid-19?
27. What elements of your digital marketing should you keep at all costs?
28. Where have you got the biggest return on investment so far?
29. Will this still be the case during and after Covid-19?
30. Can you cross-check your strategy with other companies in the same industry? (Board members adore evidence of you comparing yourselves with other companies, particularly if you’re doing better!)
Product strategy checklist under Covid
It doesn't matter whether you offer products or services, it could be that something quite fundamental has had to change around your offering during Covid. You may not know whether the adaptations to your offering will be temporary or permanent, but what does matter is that everything else you do from now on swings into alignment to promote what you're offering now, as opposed to what you offered before. To whatever extent you return to normal in the future, you'll have to go through this exercise again to readjust.
31. What are the major and minor changes to our product/service?
32. What are the key features of the changed offering?
33. What can you retain from your old approach, and what do you need to rethink?
34. What are the perceived benefits of your new or adapted offering?
35. What are the pricing implications of your new product or service?
This last point about price is quite interesting in that it may be fair and right to charge more for something than before, especially if it is costing you more to produce. Where demand has grown but supply is limited, you will potentially be justified in upping your prices. Face mask, anyone? But if you're hiking your prices, do watch out for the risk of disenfranchising your loyal clients for the sake of short-term gain.
Market segmentation checklist during Covid
36. Are you still marketing to the same people?
37. Are there new or different sectors you should be targeting?
38. Have you conducted any work to segment the market?
39. Could you usefully review geographical segmentation, particularly if your market has moved online?
40. What about demographic segmentation? Can you appeal to an audience you've not (needed to) target until now?
41. What has shifted in the psychology and behaviour of your clients? (Probably quite a lot)
42. How does your core digital marketing strategy need to be changed to reflect the new segments you're targeting?
43. What aspect of your offering has the greatest value in the eyes of your target audience now?
44. Where do you need to tweak your messaging?
45. If you have begun to target any new segment, has this placed you in a new competitive group?
46. Do you know who your new competitors are?
47. How will you now need to differentiate your organisation?
It is likely that something will have shifted either in who you can and should be speaking to, and what you need to be saying. With so much else to think about, it's easy to fall into the trap of keeping on doing as much digital marketing as possible, without necessarily reviewing the appropriateness of your messaging.
SEO and keyword strategy checklist during Covid
Depending on how you've answered the questions so far, there is a likelihood that the changes to your strategy, your targets and your target segments will affect the very heart of your digital strategy - the keywords you're focussing on and content you're creating to talk to your tribe.
48. Has there been any shift in the keywords people are using when they are searching for the kind of thing you offer, e.g. a switch to ‘online’, ‘virtual’, ‘via Zoom’, ‘at home’, etc.?
49. When did you last update your keyword audit?
50. Do you have an up-to-date report on your keyword rankings?
51. Are you still targeting the right keywords?
52. Do you need to identify and target new keywords?
53. Have you noticed any improvements or drops in keyword positioning?
54. Which 20% of keywords have, until now, been responsible for 80% of your business?
55. Are you focussing enough on the keywords that will make the biggest difference to your fortunes from this point on?
56. Have you adequately communicated your keyword focus across the relevant teams, so others can prioritise content which will relate to what they know is important?
We’re into keywords because at the heart of any digital marketing checklist, especially during Covid, you need to be certain that you're aligned with what your market or potential market is now talking about, thinking about or actively looking for.
Conducting an SEO, keyword & competitor audit, even a very quick audit, will be a fast way of checking you’re focussing on where your market is.
During Covid, that could have shifted rapidly. It could be those search terms you relied on for most of your online and website derived visits and bookings have changed.
At an advanced level, keyword research is arguably the best form of market research, because it taps directly into the psyche of your people.
Website checklist during Covid
57. Have you made it absolutely clear to website visitors what is going on for you during Covid?
58. Is all information about availability of your products and services totally up to date?
59. Do you need to suspend and/or redirect certain pages which are currently not appropriate?
60. If you regularly undertake website redevelopment work, have you reviewed the necessity and priority of this work?
61. Do you need to pause, re-work or quit any website work?
62. Do you need to make changes to your website content, titles and meta data in view of changes in the keyword landscape and your place in it?
63. Have you updated any pages which speak to your brand, brand values, overall objectives?
64. Do you need to change and update staff pages?
65. Have your terms and conditions changed?
66. Have you created new pages for new products and new delivery channels?
It’s important during Covid that your digital marketing checklist prioritises all of your public facing digital assets to make sure they fully reflect your changed reality during Covid, and that’s the case even if the changes are temporary. With everyone’s patience being tested, it’s vital you can give people realistic expectations. Equally important is to make sure that you are using your website strategically to position in front of people when they are making online searches relevant to your offering.
Social media checklist during Covid
Social media content doesn’t stay fresh for long, and will always be swiped over more regularly than it is viewed. But its instantaneousness also makes it the ideal channel for keeping everyone informed and up to date. It can also serve the purpose of laying down the foundations of future demand during Covid when people can’t necessary do or buy what you have on offer, but they will have the time to look and build up the desire to do it later.
67. Have you set clear goals about what you intend to achieve through social media?
68. Do you have a clear plan in place so you are posting regularly?
69. Has anything shifted in your customers’ needs which could be addressed in social media?
70. Do any changes to demand, or changes to your product or service offering mean that new or different social media channels would be more appropriate?
71. Are you giving people a vision of your organisation which is in line with the new reality?
72. Are your changed brand values clear on social media?
73. Are you being pushed into posting more often in desperation to get more business in?
74. Do you have evidence that what you are doing is having the desired effect?
75. Is there anything you could reasonably stop doing right now?
76. What should you start doing more of to meet the needs of your clients?
77. Do you advertise on social media?
78. How would that effect your reach?
79. How would greater reach affect your enquiry and booking levels?
80. How would greater reach improve your brand messaging?
81. What kind of content are you posting on social media?
82. How does the content you’re posting match up with what your clientbase needs, likes, wants the most?
83. Do board members all follow you on social media channels?
84. Do you follow them?
85. As they are stakeholders too, what would they like to see more or less of?
Email marketing during Covid checklist
If you manage a data base of past and present and potential clients, you may be tempted to up the ante and borderline spam them in the hopes of getting a precious few bookings. Or maybe you have people on your list that you never contact who would probably love to hear from you and even buy from you.
86. How up to date is your list of contacts?
87. In view of GDPR, do you legally have the right to contact them?
88. Do you need to tweak any existing campaigns so the tone of your messaging is still appropriate to your changing circumstances?
89. Are you monitoring the response statistics to your emails, such as open rate, unsubscribe, click through?
90. What do these statistics tell you?
91. How should you adapt your campaign accordingly?
92. Are all board members signed up to your email marketing?
93. Are you using the email marketing channel to communicate important updates?
94. Is the information always correct?
95. Are you still being creative and experimental with what you include in your email marketing or have you fallen into a trap of over-automation?
Digital marketing people checklist
When targets shift, there can sometimes be a disconnect in how you allocate everyone’s time. Maybe you brought new people in to work on a specific business area years ago, so that in your mind it’s their job to focus on one business area. But in view of the changes to the financial targets and priority areas, it’s good to check your digital marketing staffing matches up with the tasks that need doing the most. Back to the checklist:
96. How many people do you have working on digital marketing right now?
97. What digital marketing disciplines are being covered?
98. Are there any gaps in your digital marketing you’ve not got covered?
99. When did you last complete a skills audit of staff?
100. What else could your existing people be doing to fill in any gaps in your digital marketing provision?
We could go on, but hey, congratulations for wading through this 100-question digital marketing checklist. A bonus question:
101. Has this been helpful?
If so, please share the love and drop us a line if you need anything else, or if you think you might fancy one of our online digital marketing consultancy sessions.
