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Is a separate digital marketing plan required?

If there is a specific resource for digital marketing activities such as a digital marketing or 

e-commerce manager, then he or she will be responsible for the digital marketing plan. 

However, where there is no identified responsibility for digital marketing, which is still the 

case in many small and medium organisations, there is likely to be no digital marketing plan. 

This often occurs when marketing managers have limited resources or other priorities and a 

lack of recognition that a separate digital marketing plan is valuable.

These problems are typical and commonplace when there is no clear 

planning or control for digital marketing:

1 

 Customer demand for online services will be underestimated if this 

has not been researched and it is  under-  resourced and no or unrealis-

tic objectives are set to achieve online marketing share.

2   

Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share if insufficient 

resources are devoted to digital marketing and no clear strategies  

are defined.

  3 

Duplication of resources will occur, for example different parts of the marketing organi-

sation purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar 

online marketing tasks.

  4 

Insufficient resource will be devoted to planning and executing digital marketing and 

there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist digital marketing skills which will make it 

difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

  5 

Insufficient customer data are collected online as part of  relationship-  building and these 

data are not integrated well with existing systems.

  6 

Efficiencies available through online marketing will be missed, for example lower 

communications costs and enhanced conversion rates in customer acquisition and reten-

tion campaigns.

  7 

Opportunities for applying online marketing tools such as search marketing or email 

marketing will be missed or the execution may be inefficient if the wrong resources are 

used or marketers don’t have the right tools.