Stage 1

Website Launch Checklist

Creating the road map to your online success

As with any project, the key to success is planning! This first stage of the Web Rocket is geared to helping you put together a complete action plan for your Digital Marketing Campaign.

Using our FREE Digital Marketing Plan Template, this stage allows you to identify the key areas that you will need to cover when preparing to launch, or build on your online business presence.

Having a solid plan with set goals, metrics, and strategies in place is critical to creating an effective online presence. In this stage of the guide, we will address the key factors that need to be considered and help you formulate these into an actionable plan that will be referred to throughout your campaign.

Createing your Digital Marketing Plan includes;

  • Free downloadable Digital Marketing Plan Template
  • Example Digital Marketing Plan reference
  • Understanding the Digital Marketing Team
  • Writing your Company Overview
  • Establishing Business Goals and Identify Target Audience
  • Understanding and deciding Key Performance Indicators
  • Conducting Competitor & Industry Research
  • Creating an SEO & Content Marketing Strategy
  • Implementing a Social Media & Advertising Plan
  • Creating a Website plan

 

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Creating your Digital Marketing Plan - Let's get started!

In this first stage of the Web Rocket, we are going to take you through the creation of your Digital Marketing Plan.

Whether you are a start-up, small business or enterprise level company, everyone should have a plan in place to effectively manage their online presence. It is crucial to understand your target audience, competitors, and industry and have a clearly defined brand to promote and communicate your services and products.

You should understand how to effectively decide and monitor your business goals and have clear milestones in place to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. We will also address how to strategise for your website, Social Media, SEO, and advertising.

For each step below, you will find the relevant reading, guides and resources. Make your way through each step and complete your Digital Marketing Plan as you go in the template provided here. You can also use the completed example for reference.

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Step 1 - Full Content Check

Proofread your website content

Before you release your website to your adoring public, it is essential that your content had been checked, re-checked and checked again!

This means everything from your home page, about us, product, category and services pages, through to your contact page, terms and conditions and privacy policies.

You should work your way through every page on your main menu and navigation bars first. These will most likely be your priority pages. You can also use your website "Sitemap" (this link will often be found in the footer of your website). This will give you a full list of your pages, within the relevant folders and subsections. You can also work through these direct from your CMS admin area.

We advise you to look at each of your pages from the point of view of your customers.

For each page, you should;

  • Check spelling and grammar.
  • Pay attention to formatting, headings and paragraphs to ensure your content is sufficiently sectioned and user-friendly.
  • Be sure that all buttons links within your text and content are correct, leading to the expected destination.
  • Ensure the images on your page are displaying correctly in terms of size and spacing.
  • Check that you added ALT text to your images
  • Check you have added your SEO Overrides information where relevant

Additional checks for product pages;

  • Check pricing, VAT and product option price changes.
  • Are your product images correct and do they have appropriate ALT tags and titles where relevant?
  • Are your product descriptions correct and of sufficient length and detail?
  • Have you added related products?
  • Are any product attributes and additional information correct?
  • Are your products correctly categorised?

The content check will be one of the biggest tasks prior to launch, especially for larger websites. We recommend making a spreadsheet with a list of each of your pages as you go. Add in columns to indicate when you have checked of these factors.

We would also encourage you to enlist the help of your team for this task. During the development of your website, and even the creation of your content, you will have seen these pages so many times they will become overly familiar and so a fresh pair of eyes can really help highlight mistakes which may otherwise be missed.

 

 

 

Content Check Resources

 
Step 2 - Company & Contact Info

Is your company information & contact details consistent and correct?

You need to make sure your customers can contact you quickly, easily and successfully! Whether this is by using your online contact forms, calling you direct or by email, you need to provide them with accurate information to get in touch. Be sure to check your website company and contact information to ensure it is accurate.

This information will generally appear in the header or footer of your website (depending on your design) and also on the contact page.

You should check;

  • Company Name
  • Company Email Address
  • Company Telephone Number
  • Company Address
  • Company Registration Number
  • VAT Number (if relevant)
  • Individual Employee Contact Details (if relevant)
  • Links to Social Media Profiles and 3rd Party Listings

If you need to correct or update any of your company information on your EOS Website, you can do so via your admin area Company Info section >>

 

Be Consistent across the web

You should ensure this information is correct on your website, but also on anywhere else online where you have your business information listed. This is very important for how search engines such as Google and Bing index your company in terms of location and accuracy, so be sure that your details are formatted consistently across the board.

Check platforms such as;

  • Google business listing
  • Facebook business page
  • Twitter account
  • Linkedin business page
  • Instagram account
  • Directory and review websites such as Trip Advisor, Yell and Free Index

 

Writing your company overview

 

Company Info Resources

Step 3 - Establish your Business Goals

Business Goals are needed to monitor your success

A critical part of your digital marketing plan is establishing clearly defined, quantifiable goals. You should think about exactly what you are looking to achieve from your digital marketing and assign goals that reflect this. Creating goals for your business can be anything from financial to process based. Both quantitative and qualitative goals are extremely important. Such goals can be related to leads and sales or the quality of feedback about your services. For each goal you should identify what you want to achieve, the strategy to do this, how you will measure it, and the time in which you want this to happen.

These “Smart Goals” should be measurable and include deadlines as markers for success.

You should look to break your business goals down into smaller milestones so that you can track your progress.

Later in the guide, we will look at using these goals to introduce our metrics and defining how each will be measured. So for now, just identify the business goals, and we will expand on them later in your marketing plan to complete them with Key Performance Indicators.

You can read our article on "How to identify and set effective Business Goals" to learn more. 

 

Identify your business goals

 

Business Goals Resources

 
Step 4 - Decide your KPI's

Key Performance Indicators

Once you have established your business goals and target audience, it's a good time to start thinking about how you will measure the performance of your digital marketing campaign.

To do this, we use Key Performance Indicators.

A KPI is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for your business progress, milestones, and insights that assist you in measuring success and making important decisions for your company.

There are KPIs for every aspect of business, whether it's financial, marketing, sales, or operational. We look at the defined business goals and decide the metrics which will give us the best insights. We recommend that you create a spreadsheet or table with each of your business goals listed, the KPI for each of these goals and an area to add the value each month for ongoing comparison.

To understand more about KPI's, how to use them and see some examples, read our resource here - "What is a Key Performance Indicator? KPI's in simple terms"

 

 

Key Performance Indicators

Understanding KPI Resources

 
Step 5 - Identify your Target Audience

Understand your Target Audience and Demographic

The next essential part of your plan is to identify who your marketing efforts will be geared towards. Before you launch any sort of marketing campaign or website, it is crucial to establish who you are communicating with.

This will affect every decision for your campaign, from the writing style and content, the use of images, the places you advertise and promote, even your branding style. Understanding your target demographic is extremely important, so let's define who our audience actually are.

We need to profile our audience, looking at factors including;

You can profile your audience in a number of ways, and once you understand who your audience is, you can make decisions on how best to reach them, and how to effectively manage your brand to resonate with them.

For some useful advice on how to identify your target audience, read our article here - "How to determine the target audience for your business"

 

Identify your target audience

 

Target Audience Resources

 
Step 6 - Conduct your Competitor Research

Understanding and Assessing your Competitors

Competitor research is the process of identifying businesses in your industry that offer similar products or services and evaluating them based on a set of predetermined business criteria and Key Performance Indicators.

This will help you assess the ongoing performance of your business comparitively from the point of view of your customers. It is important to know how your customers view you in comparison to your competition. A competitor analysis will give you a better idea of what services are currently available to your target customer and what areas are being neglected.  

It is important to conduct routine competitor research throughout the lifecycle of your business to stay up to date with market trends and product offerings. This will reveal important information about market saturation, business opportunities and industry best practices.

Key points to address in competitor research

  • We recommend selecting 3 - 5 of your key competitors based on similar services, location and target audience with which to run your research and comparisons. If you are unsure who your main online competitors are, try searching on Google for a key phrase that customers may use to find you and see who is coming up first - for example if we search "Plumber in Shrewsbury" we would instantly get a list of businesses competing for the top spot in that location.

  • Where are your competitors promoting? Where are they active and engaging with customers? How are they positioned in search results and how user friendly are their websites?

  • It's a good idea to monitor your competitors in relation to your own metrics. You can use the predefined KPIs you set up for your own measurements to evaulate your competitors current performance

  • Look at where your competitors are performing well in each analysis to find opportunities for yourself. For example, if they are gaining a strong following on social media, what sort of activities, posts and promotions are they engaging in?

  • Be sure to check out customer reactions and opinions on social media and review websites. Their voice is an extremely important one for identifying areas where your competitors are struggling to meet demand and expectations, shining a spotlight where you can improve their experience.

Once you have conducted your competitor research you should have an understanding of your current placement and performance within the immediate scope of your industry. Be sure to add any findings into your S.W.O.T analysis.

 

Competitor Research Resources

 
Step 7 - Assess the current Industry Landscape

Explore Marketing and Promotional Opportunities

Now that we have a wealth of information about ourselves, our target audience and our competitors it's time to evauluate the industry as a whole. We need to see what opportunities are available to us and what tools are at our disposal before we start planning our promotional strategies. To do this we should research the current climate of the industry, consumer needs and requirements and general challenges facing the market.

What's important in your industry landscape?

  • Check out social media, look for online forums and review sites. Where ever your customers are searching or browsing for your services or products, you need to be active. Where ever your customers are, there is an opportunity!

  • Where do you place in terms of the cost of your products and services and how well does your quality and customer service stack up?

  • There are different ways to reach your customers. Through your website, Social media, paid advertising, content marketing and email marketing to name a few. It's important to assess which your customer base tend to respond to within your industry.

Once you have evaluated the landscape it's time to take all of the information we have established to date and make a start into putting an actionable plan in place for the different branches of your campaign.

 

 

Industry Research Resources

 
Step 8 - Create a SWOT Analysis

Create a SWOT Analysis

Now that we know how we're going to measure the performance and effectiveness of our marketing efforts, let's take a baseline reading of our current position.

It's important to have a grasp of how we are currently performing to guage improvement over time. Use the spreadsheet or table you have created to complete a baseline column.

GoalKPIBaselineJanuaryFebruary
Increase Website Traffic1000 Visitors per month598 VisitsTBCTBC

Once you have recorded all of the data for your current position, you will have a clear idea of where to focus your efforts for improvements and where you are currently performing well. This will allow you to assess any current marketing methods to evaluate where change is needed and what can be learned from successful metrics.

Here we may now consider doing a S.W.O.T analysis.

A SWOT analysis helps you understand internal and external factors that can make or break your success toward your marketing goals. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

You can look at your current performance and discuss with your team where you are performing well, where you need improvement, where those opportunities for improvement are and threats or challenges to moving forward.

You can begin the S.W.O.T analysis at this point and revisit once you have completed your competitor and industry research to add to and expand on your current view on the situation.

 

Measuring KPI Resources

Step 9 - Create a Digital Advertising Plan

Now we have assessed the Industry Landscape, we understand our customers and competitors, we can start to formulate our strategies for how we are going to promote our company, brand and services. One of our primary goals will be to drive traffic to our website.

There are 4 key types of traffic that we need to understand;

  • People who access your site directly using the website address.

  • People who find your website via search engines such as Google & Bing using.

  • People who find your website through 3rd party platforms such as social media, other peoples blogs, review sites and forums.

  • People who see your advert on search engines, social media or 3rd party websites and click through to your website.

We will be placing a huge focus on driving direct, organic and referral traffic to your website through SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media. We will look at this in the next stages.

However, it may be that you will be considering some paid advertising to generate leads and sales. There are a great number of opportunities online that prove successful when it comes to paid advertising, such as Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, YouTube and other social media platforms. It's important to understand the types of advertising available to you and which will best suit your campaign.

A few key points to consider include;

  • There endless opportunity for paid promotions online, but we need to look at the most effective tools available.

  • It's important to reach your customer base, so using our previous target audience research, we now can make some informed decisions about where to invest in any paid promotions.

  • This is where content meets advertising. If we know that a large portion of our customer base are actively using YouTube, then we need to consider creating video versions of our content to promote our message and brand.

  • Budget is a huge consideration and we need to think about our return on investment (ROI).

Whilst we want as little expenditure as possible, it's important not to dismiss the benefits of paid advertising for generating leads and sales. The resources in this section will take you through what you need to know if you are considering paid promotions as part of your campaign.

Advertising Plan Resources

Step 10 - Decide your SEO Strategy

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most critical parts of your campaign to consider.

SEO is how we manage our website structure and content (both on and off-site) to rank higher in search engines such as Google & Bing for key terms and phrases that best represent our company, services, products and information. The ultimate goal is that our website pages are ranking high in results as people search for what we have to offer.

Before we can begin our strategy for SEO, we need to understand the key factors involved that we MUST pay close attention to. This information will be important through the stages of planning your content and website so, whilst much of this will come into play when your website is created / evaluated, let's just get a brief understanding now.

6 key factors for SEO;

  • This includes setting up diagnostic and reporting tools such as Google Analytics.

  • Understanding what your customers are searching for in relation to your products and services. This will be the core focus of this section.

  • Ensure that your website is well-structured, clean-coded, accessible to search engines, mobile friendly and optimised to load quickly.

  • Writing informative, descriptive and interesting content that engages the user and is easy to read. This process is relevant to everything on your website, from your home page copy, blog articles, product and service descriptions. Your content is key to reaching your customers for a wider selection of key terms and phrases related to your offering.

  • Crafting each page on your website to include information that search engines will read to index, rank and deliver your content.

  • Getting relevant, high quality links from other websites that indicate to search engines a connection between your content and the source website. These types of links can indicate that your content is useful, beneficial, and authoritative.

The key factor we need to consider at this stage is Keyword Research. To plan our strategy, we need to understand what people are searching for. These resources will focus on conducting the keyword research that will provide you with this information, so you can actively plan your content and website structure with these key terms and phrases in mind.

SEO Strategy Resources

Step 11 - Formulate your Content Marketing Strategy

We bring you Web Rocket. A step by step walk through of your digital marketing process, designed to help you prepare for your new website development project.

From preparing your business and branding, to building your website and planning your content and social media strategy, we take you through step by step with a process check list in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage.

Content Marketing Resources

Step 12 - Decide your Social Media Strategy

We bring you Web Rocket. A step by step walk through of your digital marketing process, designed to help you prepare for your new website development project.

From preparing your business and branding, to building your website and planning your content and social media strategy, we take you through step by step with a process check list in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage.

Social Media Resources

Step 13 - Create a Website Plan / Evaluate Current Website

We bring you Web Rocket. A step by step walk through of your digital marketing process, designed to help you prepare for your new website development project.

From preparing your business and branding, to building your website and planning your content and social media strategy, we take you through step by step with a process check list in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage.

Website Planning Resources

 
 

Web Rocket

Your FREE Digital Marketing Guide

Your very own FREE Digital Marketing Checklist

Are you a new start-up, looking to prepare for your digital marketing journey? Or an existing business ready to review and improve your current online presence?

We bring you Web Rocket. An interactive, step by step resource, guiding you through your digital marketing process. This FREE online resource is a collaborative project brought to you by industry professionals, sharing expertise in their relevant fields.

Web Rocket covers every aspect of your Digital Marketing, from preparing your business and branding, to building your website, implementing SEO, and planning your content and social media strategy. We also look at Search Engine Marketing, website analytics, email marketing and much more.

We take you through the process with your personal check list, reading lists, guides and downloadable resources in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage. Web Rocket ensures you cover everything you need to know when getting ready to launch a new business or review your existing presence.

 

Web Rocket will be launching June 2023 - if you would like to pre-register for the course, please enter your details below and we will email you when your free account is ready to access.

 

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