Hello there. Now, before you even get there to this question, yes, I am still alive. You may have noticed that there haven't been any new episodes for the month of December, and that's a very, there's a very simple reason for that. Um, I was very busy with deadlines and finals and I decided to take a break from the podcast to kind of reinvigorate my creativity and just my love for getting on here and talking to everybody every week. Now, here's the other kicker to this.
If I had only continued to follow my own advice, the advice I am literally giving you today, I wouldn't have had to take such an extended break. So what are we talking about today? Well, we're gonna talk about how to save you time in your marketing and how to not take breaks and your consistency because you're overwhelmed. You ready to dive in? Let's get started. You're listening to the Captain Coder podcast. Each week I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your
online business. I'm your host, Marisa Van Skr, a k a Captain Coder. Now, I want you to imagine, just for a second, don't close your eyes cuz you might be driving. Have you ever tried to drive someplace new in the LA like let's say the last 15 years and not used Google Maps? I mean, there was a day 15 years ago where we had to print out Google Maps. It wasn't on our phone, but can you remember the last time that you went a new destination and didn't use some sort of navigation to get there?
I'm gonna guess that's a negative. You know that if you actually wanna end up at your destination, you have to have some sort of guide to get you there. Even if it's an area of town, like in your own town, your friend is probably gonna tell you, Hey, it's on the corner by that Arby's and Sonic. There's going to be some kind of guidepost, some kind of reference point for you to find where you're going. That's the same way it is for your business.
You have never been to this destination in your business before. You're trying to grow. You're trying to get further along with what you're building. If you wanna grow and scale at a steady rate, steady rate, not just winging it, not knowing what's going on each month, you cannot wing it. You need a map, a guide to get you there. Look, it's really simple. If you wanna build up your business, you have to focus on your customers more.
If you take nothing else away from today's episode, I want you to remember that it is all about your customer. You have to work to build loyalty with your current customer base, which then encourages them, your customer, to become an advocate for your brand and send people your way. But mostly, and I cannot stress this enough, you can only get so far without a plan. Now, creating a digital marketing plan only takes maybe two to three
hours of your time. It can get a little faster every time you do it, of course, and yet it can save you hours and even days of time throughout the year, you'll be able to have everything set up for you for what you wanna accomplish in 2023. And you'll find quarterly, monthly, and even weekly planning is far easier because you have your guide for the year. Plus, you'll stop asking yourself what you need to post on social every day because you're gonna have a binder of ideas ready to go.
Now, if you're ready to save time and work smarter and not harder in 2023, it's time to dig in. Okay? So let's talk about actually creating a digital marketing plant. And I'm not only gonna walk you through exactly what you need to know and how to make this as simple as possible, but I've got a handy dandy guide for you. No, there's not a singing blue puppy. Why do I have blues crews in my head? I have no idea. You don't need to grab a notebook. I just want you to go to capped coder.com/ 26.
And there you in the post for today's podcast, all the podcast notes are there, everything here to walk you through? You can actually go download my workbook where you can print it out or because it's a fillable pdf, because I know that you may not have a printer at home, you can create your digital marketing strategy right there, even better as a fillable pdf. This becomes a live document so you can change as you go throughout the year.
So all you have to do to download that, hit pause, go to capt coder.com/ 26, go to scroll to the bottom of the post and download your workbook. Okay, so I'm gonna pretend that you've downloaded your workbook, you're ready to go and you've gotta open with you. Now the first step, um, look, this sounds really boring , but it is imperative that you start here.
You have to know what your goals are for the year, and it's great that we're talking about this in January because everybody's thinking about resolutions and goal setting. So let's take advantage of that mindset. So I want you to ask yourself first things first before you, you do anything else, because this one answer informs the rest of this plan. What is the main goal you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve in 2023? What are you trying to get out of the, out of what you're doing
with your marketing? Now, once you've decided that main goal, then we're gonna break it down on how we're actually going to get there. Basically, you're gonna set long and short term goals throughout the whole year that will help you achieve this main goal that you're trying to accomplish. So let's take a step for a second and just talk about it. If your goal is to grow your online sales just 15% by the end of 2023, then you'll want to create sub goals that might help with that.
Now, those sub goals could be things like growing an affiliate program, creating sales around important dates for your business, making your website user experience easier, because just gonna tell you right now, that helps improve your online sales friend and maybe you wanna grow your email list by 25%. All of these sub goals here are really just what I do I actually need to do to hit my target by the end of 2023.
And I promise I am not. If you can hear me moving away from the mic, uh, that is just me watching the dog guard the fence outside squirrel. Oh my gosh. Okay, , back to it. All right, so now that we know what we wanna do, we need to know how we're gonna track that success. This I'm gonna teach you a thing that I teach students every year, um, that is my most commonly confused thing every year. These are called key performance indicators or
KPIs. And honestly, what ends up happening is that people either over or simp overcomplicate or simplify KPIs. It's really just a fancy way of creating a goal with a number attached that you can track. Okay, so here is the formula to create a kpi, a key performance indicator that is just foolproof. So your formula is insert goal. Well, so for example, increase traffic by insert figure. So like maybe 20% in insert number of months.
So in three months, in 12 months, uh, by the end of March, 2023, you're basically just setting a goal. You're giving it a growth rate or some kind of of percentage rate, and you're adding time to it. You need to make sure that you're giving yourself one enough time to actually accomplish this, but you need a deadline. That deadline helps you check in to see how you're actually performing and how well you're doing.
Now you wanna break those KPIs down further into like step by steps of how you actually might get there. So if you wanna increase your web traffic, maybe you launch a blog this year and you start sharing that and promoting that on social media and other avenues. If you want to, um, grow your email list, maybe you create a couple new lead captures and you
up that way. The great thing with this part of the plan is not only can you use the workbook that I have for you@capcoder.com slash 26, but you can also just sketch this out on a whiteboard, a calendar, the panda planner, the full focus planner, or anything that you need to think through the flow and what you would need to do to hit these KPIs. Whew. Okay, so let's get into, um, I think this is more fun, um, defining your goals and laying out the path for how you're gonna get there.
That part is gonna probably take the most time. Now, I don't want you to get caught up in having these solidified yet. These are still fluid because I want you to think about where you wanna go, how you might get there, and you wanna make sure that you're taking a look at the last year or so of your marketing to really understand if those are the right steps for you. So you wanna think about a
timeframe. So I usually say just over the last 12 months when I'm doing this, you could take the last three months, the last six months, just depending on how long your business has been around, you could do the last five years, eh, well, I always stick with 12 months max . But choose a timeframe and ask yourself two questions. What's been working and what hasn't? It's really simple right now. Look, if you created any kind of plan last year, pull out that plan and look at your Google analytics.
Did you get the traffic you wanted for your social media? Go through your feed and simply analyze what's been getting engagement and what's not. Is there a common pattern? Do your real suck because you hate doing the trends. Oh, that's just mine. The time that you're posting the types of images you're using, keep track of everything you feel worked and
didn't work. And if you don't know or you simply don't think anything worked at all, uh, then you get to the whole freedom to do whatever your heart, heart desires. Okay, well, not really. Look, if you don't have a past year to analyze, or if you've been winging it and you're not really sure you had any kind of, um, structure to what you've been doing, then this secret can help you. I want you to look at your competition.
If you don't know if anything you did worked or you simply don't have that long history of posts and articles and even website traffic to look at, analyze what your competitors are doing, go to their social media pages, they're blog posts, they're on podcasts. Try to search for them on Google. What looks like it's working for them, what is getting engagement and what seems to be falling flat.
Now, if you can access a competitor's free Facebook group, chich, or even get on their email lists, you can see exactly what they're doing and what's resonating, at least with you. Facebook groups, of course, you can see public, um, comments and things like that email list. Just see what you like, but take a look at what your competition is doing and that can help you inform what you want to try for this next year. Even if you have the data, you might be asking, well, do I need to do this?
If I have, you know, say, a past year's worth of information, uh, yes, please always, always, always keep an eye on your competition. You don't have to emulate what they're doing. The answer to that question, maybe I don't like what they're doing and nothing of what they're doing is getting traction. So then you know what to not do, but never take your eye off of what your competition is doing, at least in a sum semblance of the word.
Okay? So you're probably starting to get just a little excited. Now you've got some fun plans that you're putting in place, you've taken a look at your competition, you're getting ideas of what you wanna try and you've probably looked at what you've done in the past that you forgot about, and you're like, oh, that was a genius idea. Tell me that's not just me. Who does that literally all the time. Okay, now that those creative juices are flowing, it's time to tweak your buyer persona. Now,
what is a buyer persona? Honestly, it is just a marketing technique that we use in the industry. It's like marketing 1 0 1. It's something that I teach my students every semester and all it really is, it's a simple profile of who you are talking to, who your ideal customer is, and I wanna teach you a really simple trick to make this easier.
Don't think of this as some kind of weird amalgamation of like six different customers who like is between the age of 35 to 50, that that's just a terrible way to approach the buyer persona process. Instead, I want you to think of one person name her Jessica or Lindsay or Beth, or I don't know why I'm coming up with kind of terrible female names right now, but give your buyer persona one name and think of them like a person. This is your ideal client. You're talking to this one person.
When you talk to one person, you'll find it is far easier to not only create the content that that one person will like, but to also be creating content that people that fit that persona, and even just on the edges, not I exactly, they will communicate and fit in with that far better. Okay? Whew. Knowing who your audience is is like the number one way to figure out how to talk to them. Now, three important things when you're trying to put together your buyer persona.
It's not simple demographics, it's not what age are they, what their job is, any of that. It is what are their goals? What do they want to achieve and what problem are they trying to solve? When you are creating any marketing content, you need to know what your ideal customer wants and what problem they're trying to solve when they come to you.
Most of us are motivated by very simple factors, increasing our revenue or saving time, but you wanna drill down to a more core answer than that, and you wanna make sure that you remember that they care about themselves. They'll come to you and your business for help because they themself need that help. It's not because they love you per se. Um, I have a lot of people that love me that don't utilize in our business because I don't solve problems they have.
So think about the problems that your ideal customer has and create content around that. One thing too that you wanna keep in mind is you have to talk the way your customer does. So I just started talking about a buyer persona, which can be an incredibly, um, technical thing. It can feel overwhelming,
and I understand that. I know that, that's why I spent time explaining to you what a buyer persona is, and you're gonna have a little bit more information in the walkthrough guide that you go download. The reason that we avoid that technical jargon and instead speak how our customers speak, is because we want them to understand that A, we know them, we understand their problem, we get it, we understand them at their core, but also you want them to recognize that you can solve that problem.
If I sit here and I just talk about increasing traffic and, um, you know, creating a, a marketing plan so that you can hit all your KPIs, no one's gonna really care because, and I, and I can bet you money right now that you glazed over a little bit during the KPI discussion. It's just fancy goals guys. But because I'm using technical jargon I have, I want to explain it and bring it back to my customer, right? Same thing. Try to use your customer's language as best as you can.
That way they know what you're talking about, they understand it, you are on their level, they're not in your business every single day. So think about them in that way. You also have in this guide a handy dandy jargon, the sous. This is just so you know when to change up your technical jargon and what your customer's language translates to. It's really easy for me when I get stuck and I wanna talk about things like KPIs. I'm like, okay, how would
my customers talk about them? Oh, they would talk about those as goals, very simple things and steps and milestones, things they'll understand, not necessarily KPIs, okay? So you know your customer's problems, you know what you're trying to do to solve those. So I want you to think through a few other questions and take note of those answers. Those questions are where do they spend their time online? Where is Jessica spending most of her time? Is it Instagram? Is it Facebook? Is it TikTok?
Is it reading blog posts? Is it listening to podcasts? Where is she spending her time online or he, if you have a, a male buyer persona, now how do they like to learn? That usually informs your longer content pieces. Are they a reader? Do they like watching videos? Do they like listening to audio clips only? And what drives them to make a purchase?
What is the one thing that gets them to finally sign up for that call where they know as a sales call or sign up for and just buy something from you right off the bat? Okay, . Now if you wanna go, we're going for 20 minutes. You have our permission to hit pause, go grab a monster, monster or a second cup of coffee. I'll wait. Okay, I won't wait, wait very long. Um, I'll let you pause it. It's not like the intermission and sound of music on Disney plus that they still play the full intermission
for it. It's like this is streaming. We could have just removed this all together. We don't have to put in a second VHS tape. Anyway, we have done a lot of work to start deciding on what we wanna accomplish, how we're gonna hit those goals, what's worked and what's not, and who we're going to talk to. Now we need to decide where and how we're going to talk to the people we want to talk to so we can hit those goals. Y'all okay? I can't pull that
off. Um, I should edit that out, but I'm not gonna, so I want you to go back to your buyer persona notes. Where are they spending time online? I want you to choose a couple of platforms that you know that your ideal customer is hanging out on and which ones you can also spend time on. Now where you're posting online needs to line up with where your audience is, um, but also with what you can handle. Don't pick TikTok if you don't wanna create a bunch of videos,
for instance. Now, some of the platforms that you have to choose from, just so we can think this all through are email, social media, so Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn at the time of this recording, all of those exist. TikTok and uh, Twitter are on some kind of weird precipice, which is interesting. You also have digital a search ads Google, which is basically your website and Google my business. Then you have blogs, YouTube podcasts.
All of these things are things that you can focus on. Now, you have to choose how much money you want to spend. If at all you, your marketing budget could be zero. Now, if you've got where you want to post and create content, do you wanna put any money behind that? That is a question that you have to think about. And don't forget that you're tying equals money. So you need to think that
part through as well. Now, for a very basic marketing budget, you just have to, you have to decide what you're willing to spend per click, per lead, and per actual sale. So you also wanna decide how much time and money you're willing to spend each week on a platform and then allocate that budget to each channel and split it up. So time and money, and of course you could spend $0 of ad revenue, but you still wanna calculate the time.
So maybe you're willing to spend two hours a week per platform or one hour per week per platform. What is your hourly rate? That is your time. That is your number that basically you're investing each week to get that done. Or if you hired somebody to help you with that, whatever you're paying them is the number that you've invested in to get that done. Now remember, these are just goals. They don't have to be 100% accurate, especially with budgeting.
If you have never done this before, it'll take a lot of guesswork on your part. Just choose a number that you're comfortable with profitable once you've made a sale and track it each week and month to ensure that you're staying on track, you can always adjust this plan throughout the year and because the workbook that you can get@keptcoder.com slash 26 is a fillable pdf. It's really simple to go in and change and re-save it. Okay?
We're gonna get to something that's a little bit more fun, you know, where and how much now we get to decide the content we're going to create. So I want you to think about the different channels that you wanna put information on that you wanna use in your marketing. Are those channels social media? Does your customer learn best by reading? So what's your main outlet going to be? And I mean a big cornerstone piece of content. I don't necessarily mean creating six reels a week.
I mean something that's a bigger chunk that you can break up and build multiple posts from. For me, that's blogs. I create a main blog article each week, and then I actually record that blog as a podcast episode, and then I break it up into multiple social media and other marketing content around those blog topics. One blog article I can repurpose and reuse in like 15 different ways
over the course of several weeks. It also helps me to focus in my weekly, monthly, and quarterly plans without taking a ton of time. Now, the other great point about choosing one main con, one main outlet is being able to break it up so you can save time when you're creating it, but you can also save time in creating your social media and other content for weeks on end. Now you're starting to see how you can save days of time when you're planning
ahead. I'm here for you, boo. I can't, I can't pull that one off either. Listen, I'm still finding myself at 35 years old, so if we could all just, uh, be patient with me, that'd be great, . Now, make sure when you're creating content, you're also focusing on helping your ideal audience with their struggles and problems. I know that my ideal customer struggles with time. They want to have more control over their time.
They want to save time doing the tasks they don't like doing, which is often revolves around their marketing, but Thus, I'm creating a long podcast episode today about how to best save time. The best way to save time with your marketing is to have an annual plan. See what I did there? You want to provide, when you're providing solutions to these problems, just enough of the win of a win that they wanna trust, that they begin to trust you and want to work with you later.
I am hoping of course, that if you go and you download today's digital marketing workbook and you even get halfway through, not even just the whole thing, but halfway through and you start to get good ideas and it helps you create content for the next few weeks that you're gonna wanna come back to me to have me help you with your website or helping you write those blog posts or writing those emails and actually executing the plan because you trust me that I know what I'm doing, right?
Let's just all be transparent here. I'm trying to help you solve a problem and build trust with you. There's probably a lot of marketing professionals that would not tell me, it would tell me not to be so transparent, but let's be real. Of course, that's what I'm doing. And of course, any piece of content you create, the ultimate goal is to build trust with your ideal customer and get them to want to work with you.
Most importantly, though, your content should attract your ideal customers attention and either fascinate them or educate them or entertain them. You have to hook them in to give your content the time of day, be yourself, be authentic to who you are, present yourself as you know the person that you actually are, the human being that you actually are, and they'll follow along.
It'll just maybe take some time, but focus on hooking them in and giving them a solution and a win that they can work towards in their own business. . Now, for our grand finale of today's podcast episode, I promise that if you get out the workbook and you listen to this again, you will, honestly, it'll be like having a consulting session with me. This workbook is literally the workbook that I use with my own clients when we're setting their
annual plan. No joke. Uh, it is tweaked a little bit because I have more notes in there for you so you can do it yourself, but this is literally the workbook that I use. So as you probably understand, the last step when creating a digital marketing plan is to actually write it all down.
Hopefully you've been doing that as you've been listening and as you've been working through, you're actually like writing down your ideas in that handy identity fillable pdf, but, and there's not really a wrong way to lay out a digital marketing plan as long as you can understand it and you will follow it. Now, the workbook will make it a whole lot easier for you, of course,
and you'll have that all down. But I want you to think some things through, as you're writing out your marketing plan, you do wanna set milestones with timeframes attached. Those are basically those KPIs we talked about. You do wanna highlight your key campaign or goals, the things that you're gonna do to get to that main goal. You do wanna document what is going on which channel. And when I use a simple calendar spreadsheet, actually I'm creating a new one that I quite enjoy.
I never thought I would like spreadsheets, but apparently if it's marketing content, I'm very excited about it. And you wanna decide how you're gonna measure success and failure. You need to be able to check in and see how things are going. Now, however you record your marketing plan, I want you to keep it handy because again, you're gonna be checking this throughout the year, and you don't wanna be afraid to tweak
and adjust your plan. It is a living document, and the world honestly can change on a dime, and your ideal customer's needs might not be what you expect when you set out the plan at the beginning of the year. Now, I'm a little old school. I did my marketing planning a couple weeks ago, and uh, then I printed it out and I put it in a binder. So it's really easy for me to pull off the shelf and reference when I'm working on my content and I don't have to go find the Google Doc.
It's also a fillable PDF in my Google Drive, like why I have it in three. Don't ask. This is just how my brain works, but you can hold onto this however you like to hold onto this and keep it handy for you. Now, whatever your plans are throughout this year, there's nothing wrong with adjusting those when you get more information and honestly, real truth. Can we, can we take a second here to just talk this through?
If you've never really approached your marketing with a plan before, it can take a year for your organic strategies to really start having an effect. It's all about consistency, guys. Um, also do what I say, not what I do. , you know, miss, I took a, took a break from my own podcast for the last month. Don't take it too hard on yourself when your plans don't work immediately, and you can always use ads to speed up the process and test out some messaging a
little faster. Just make sure you've taken the time to write it all down. Now again, make this easy. Go grab my very free, but probably will charge for this at another time. 2023 Digital Marketing Plan workbook@capcoder.com slash 26. And if you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram at Captain Coder, send me a dm, just tell me I'm have a question about the workbook and let's talk. Thank you all for tuning into our show this week to catch more Captain Coder, you can subscribe to this podcast
on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on Instagram at Captain Coder or visit us online@captcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.