Digital Marketing Strategy Template

Below is a step-by-step guide to completing the template for your charity. We’ve also provided an example from a small arts charity called Trajectory Theatre, so you can see what your completed template should look like.

How to use the Digital Marketing Strategy Template

Time: 1-2 hours (depending on size and complexity of the organisation).

Resources: Print-outs or digital copies of the template; biros and coloured pens; post-it notes; Persona templates (could be completed in advance).

Team: We suggest working with at least one other member of your team to populate the template. If that is not possible completing them yourself is perfectly fine.

Template headings explained

Responsible: The person who will be carrying out the majority of the digital marketing activity and coordinating other staff and volunteers to contribute content for digital channels.

Accountable: A senior staff member or trustee who will ‘sponsor’ digital marketing activity and support the responsible person, receiving reports on progress to ensure things stay on track.

Persona: Your audiences should be at the heart of your digital marketing. Use the Persona Template to develop an understanding of your different audience groups.

Messaging: A busy charity will have many messages to communicate. List a maximum of your five most important messages in order of priority. Think about what you want people to think, feel, say and do about your organisation. You may choose to link certain message with a certain audience.

Channels: You can think about three different types of channels:

• Owned — channels you control completely where you can provide the most value (e.g. website).
• Earned — channels you can occupy a position on and engage people (e.g. social media).
• Paid — channels you could pay to appear on and use to recruit people (e.g. Google Ads).

Review what’s already working and what could be improved. If one of your audience groups has a preference for a channel you don’t currently use, you could think about starting a presence there. You can restrict content on a particular channel to one audience group or engage multiple audiences through the same channel.

Landing Page: The landing page section helps you plan one landing page, but you can use this format to plan others. Plan the website destination for your priority message or campaign. Send people here from social media, email and any digital advertising. As you will have multiple landing pages for different campaigns and events over the year, you can use this format again to plan important new pages on your website.

• Location — Where the page lives online. On your website, social media, or a partner’s site.
• Title — Name of the page.
• Call to Action — What you want people to do as a result of interacting with this content. Try to stick to one action for your audience to take.
• Hero Content / Hub Content / Help Content —  Consider content that will have an impact and content that will answer your audience’s questions.
• Image / Video Assets — Plan what images or graphics you will use on the page and whether you can make a video to help communicate your message.

How will you measure?: Digital marketing channels will give you plenty of data on how your content is performing. Start with the basic measurement tools, e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and the stats from your email marketing system (e.g. Mailchimp).

What are your goals?: Your measurement tools will help you see whether you’re on track to meet your digital marketing goals. Our Digital Objective Builder will help you set targets.

What will you test?: Digital is great for testing and learning about your audiences and what types of content and communication work for them.

Budget: If you find in-kind support through one of your corporate partners, register for the Google Ad Grants programme, or set aside a small budget to test out Facebook Advertising, you can record it here.

Risks and Mitigations: There are risks associated with any plan, or new way of working. What things do you need to bear in mind when delivering on your strategy? What actions could help to mitigate the risks?

Next steps

Recommended further reading:

Lloyd’s UK Business and Charity Digital Index

More information about content strategy

Youtube’s Hero, Hub, Help model

Find out about Google Ad Grants — free budget for advertising on Google search results pages for registered charities.

You can also check out our Digital Leadership Stories  five-part film series, which offers you an inside look into small charities that are leading the way in digital. Each film explores a key area of digital communications and  provides unique advice and learning from  digital leaders working across the sector.