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The Ultimate Digital Marketing Checklist + PDF Template (Fully Updated for 2018)

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The Ultimate Digital Marketing Checklist + PDF Template (Fully Updated for 2018) The article was originally published in December 2016 and was updated in April 2018 to include the newest features and developments in digital marketing.

With so many tools in the digital marketing arena, it becomes more challenging to keep your marketing strategy organized.

Take a look at how the amount of marketing technologies has developed since 2011.

Marketing Technology landscape

Image source

Seriously, how can marketers keep up with all the latest technologies?

It gets worse:

Some platforms tend to change their specs every year which creates a lot of confusion.

Here’s a clue:

You need to have the latest digital marketing checklist at hand.

By the common effort of our marketing team, we compiled the most up-to-date digital marketing checklist for you.

The cherry on the cake:

In the end, you will find a free PDF template of the checklist.

Here’s a breakdown of what the checklist contains. You can jump into a part that interests you the most.

1. Content marketing
2. Websites
3. SEO
4. Social media 
5. Social media ads
6. Search engine ads
7. Analytics
8. Lead nurturing
9. Productivity
10. Marketing events
11. Public relations
12. Video marketing
13. Graphics
14. Marketing reading

Relevant reading:

Download the guide: Marketing Automation in a Nutshell

1. Content marketing checklist

Think about it:

Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.

There’s no doubt that content marketing should constitute an important part of every marketing team.

Here are the tools that help our team take our content marketing to a whole new level.

Content editorial calendar

It’s important to plan your content ahead to avoid stress over upcoming deadlines.

That’s why having an ultimate content calendar is crucial for every marketer.

There’s a variety of options to choose from when it comes to an editorial calendar.

  • CoSchedule is a marketers’ go-to tool for planning content.
  • If you want to download a ready-made template, the color-coded spreadsheet by Vertical Measures is a good option. It offers both a month-to-month and an entire year overview.

Content Marketing calendar template

Content calendar by Vertical Measures

Blog posts headings

Your content might look like a million dollars, but without a catchy headline, it won’t generate any clicks.

Our content creators usually look for inspiration in these sources:

Spell check

Whether you create long articles or make occasional social media publications, having a spell check tool in your arsenal is a must.

We use Grammarly for proofreading our content.

Pro tip:

Download Grammarly Chrome extension and your social media posts and other online publications will be mistake-free.

Media monitoring

There are many ways media monitoring can facilitate your content marketing:

  • Finding the right type of content when seeking for an inspiration for a new piece of content.
  • Tracking the performance of published content in the media and social channels.
  • Engaging with the audience

For example, as email marketing geeks, we actively listen to the industry-related conversations using LianaMonitor.

Media monitoring with Liana Monitor

Also, by tracking the mentions of our latest article, we never miss a chance to get engaged with the audience even though some of the users didn’t tag our account.

Social media mention Liana Technologies

2. Website checklist

Here’s what we recommend for marketers to help them maintain websites without any IT headache.

CMS

There’s no longer need to call for help of your IT department when you want to handle a redesign project.

Utilizing a Content Management System (CMS) tool is the best solution, as it contains all features required for managing a high-quality website:

  • Mobile optimization
  • Maximizing SEO
  • Content management
  • Building tailored landing pages
  • Tracking visitors’ behaviour

Landing pages

You can hardly find a business that does not use landing pages as a lead generation machine today.

We tend to experiment with different landing pages formats for different campaigns.

Email marketing platform Liana Mailer Landing page

For our solutions, we mostly use a long format of the landing pages

Marketing automation platform LianaCEM landing page

For whitepapers, we tend to use a short format 

Heatmaps

Common questions that most webmasters face:

What pages do most visitors hover?
What areas of my landing pages get most of the clicks?

Heatmaps give you solid data on how users interact with your site and thus provide answers to the above questions.

Our marketing team finds Hotjar to be effective.

Heatmaps tool Hotjar

A/B testing

With an abundance of web design features you can stumble upon a question:

Which landing page format or headline copy drive most conversions for my campaigns?

An A/B testing tool (sometimes called split testing) is, therefore, another important weapon for marketers.

Our team has used VWO to test how different landing pages formats can impact conversion rate.

3. SEO checklist

The study conducted by Chitika confirmed that the top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33 percent of the traffic, compared to 18 percent for the second position.

And the traffic drops significantly from there.

SEO research by Chitika

There is no doubt that investing in SEO is a huge thing in 2018.

Taken the number of technical features related to SEO, a lot of companies outsource this part.

However, there is still a bunch of non-technical SEO work marketers can employ to rank their websites higher on search engines.

A common practice is to divide your SEO project into on-page and off-page SEO tactics.

On-page SEO

These sources can help you conduct an on-page SEO strategy:

  • Moz Open Site Explorer is a good place to start for an overview of your current SEO situation. With this software, you can also check the position of competitors on Google.
  • Finding the keywords that your ideal prospects use to search for your company is vital. SemRush is a great software for keyword research.
  • A goldmine for effective keyword research by Backlinko

Off-page SEO

This part boils down to the effective content promotion and link building.

Consider using these resources:

4. Social media checklist

Whether you run a small business or a big enterprise with a dedicated social media team, having this list of sources is crucial.

Social media images sizes cheat sheet

Fact:

While previously you could only post only square images and videos on Instagram, the platform now allows uploading images in various dimensions.

That’s why it’s crucial to have the latest social media dimensions in your toolbox.

This 2018 Social Media Image Sizes Guide depicts detailed image guidelines for every social channel.

Social media image sizes 2018

Social media calendar

Do you produce a lot of content? Does your team participate in many events across the globe?

Then you should make sure you share everything on social media and don't miss a beat.

Keeping a social media calendar will allow planning all your publications in advance.

These tools and resources will be a huge time saver for you:

  • CoSchedule's detailed guide on how to create a social media content calendar accompanied with a free excel template for 2018.
  • You can also try out Buffer or Hootsuite — software for social media scheduling.

Social media card validator

Not sure how your update will look like on social media?

We feel you.

That’s why our marketing team uses Twitter Card Validator and Facebook Sharing Debugger.

Twitter Card validator

Emoji

Don’t even try to deny it:

Emoji is a big thing in 2018.

Emojis even get their own conference and constitute an important part of Apple’s presentations.

Emoji in digital marketing

Image source

To have emojis at hand every time you need them, the handiest way is to install an emoji Chrome extension.

Pro tip:

Mac users can use the keyboard shortcut Command - Control - Spacebar to access emoji.

5. Social media ads checklist

According to Stream Creative, 25% of people who see a social ad, will then respond by visiting the store or website.

Investing in social media ads is crucial regardless of your industry.

Here’s a toolkit you need for successful social media ads campaigns.

Guidelines

The biggest challenge we faced while working on social media ads was this:

All social networks have different requirements in terms of image size, the number of words in the copy and other important specs.

Bookmark the following guides to be prepared for your next campaign:

URL builder

What’s the biggest struggle for social media marketers?

Exactly, measuring the ROI of social media.

Research by SimplyMeasured confirmed it.

Social media marketing challenges, research by SimplyMeasured published on the Econsultancy website

Here’s the trick.

By Using UTM parameters and marketing automation we measured the ROI of different social channels.

The tools for UTM parameter generation:

6. Search engine ads checklist

While marketers realize the importance of search engine advertising, quite often setting and running the ads sends chills down a marketers’ spine.

However, there’s no need to be scared of the process if you have the right tools at hand.

7. Analytics checklist

There are 20,000+ Marketing Analyst Jobs on LinkedIn — why?

Because analyzing your marketing performance is crucial as the amount of big data is growing tremendously.

Here are marketing analytics tools by Google that our team recommends.

Additional resources:

8. Lead nurturing

Acquiring a new customer is from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. 

Therefore, to keep the right customers closer, marketers need to be armed with the most effective tools.

Email marketing tool

Email marketing has the highest ROI among all marketing channels.

But wait — there’s more.

The effectiveness of email in terms of ROI has been remarkable already for many years.

In 2015:

Email marketing ROI 2015

Image source

In 2016:

Email marketing ROI 2016

Image source

And in 2017 as well:

Email marketing ROI 2017

Image source

Choosing a suitable email marketing software can be tough. With the upcoming GDPR regulation, you should keep in mind the reliability of your email marketing tool.

Read our tips on how to choose an email marketing software you’ll love.

Pro tip:

Use this Email marketing ROI Calculator to track the ROI of your email marketing with precision and accuracy.

Marketing automation

According to our marketing automation survey, the biggest benefit of the automation is improved targeting of emails.

Marketing automation challenges

With targeted emails, you can nurture the leads to take steps towards customership as well as retain current clients. Examples of targeted messages include:

  • A welcome message with a special promotion
  • Birthday greetings
  • Automated emails offering customer support

Therefore, complementing your email campaigns with a marketing automation tool is a must in 2018.

CRM tool

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool allows you to manage your contacts in a systematic way. With a CRM system, customers are more easily and accurately segmented.

Thus, you can send your customers emails they are interested in at the right time, leading to more up- and cross-sales and higher customer retention and satisfaction.

One of the most widely-used CRM systems are Zoho CRM and SugarCRM.

9. Productivity hacks

Tons of email to read, constant messenger notifications and the endless stream of distractions.

Does this sound familiar?

Here are some Chrome extensions to boost your productivity when you have a lot on your plate.

Save to pocket
Found an interesting article on the Web in the middle of the workday? Just save the Web page with the one-click and continue reading the article at home. The saved pages will appear in your Pocket account, which gets synced across all your devices.

Save to pocket

OneTab
You’re likely to have a crazy number of tabs open when you’re working. OneTab organizes all your open tabs into a list. You can recall the tabs anytime you need them.

StayFocusd
Set a certain duration of time you want to spend on sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you exceed the time limit, StayFocusd will block your access to all of these sites for the rest of the day.

10. Marketing events checklist

According to Endless Events survey, the majority of marketers (80%) believe live events are critical to their company’s success.

Event marketing research

Preparation for the events involve a lot of stakeholders and can be quite time-consuming. Therefore, you need to plan your event marketing thoroughly.

Consider the following resources to plan your events effectively and in a timely manner.

Calendar of marketing events

A well-planned event calendar contains all relevant info in one place. Thus, it can be effectively utilized by many teams, such as designers, social media people or email marketing department.

We don’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the event calendar.

An oldie but a goldie Google Calendar serves us well.

Event marketing calendar Liana Technologies

List of digital marketing conferences

Not sure which marketing events to attend in 2018?

Event management tool

Hosting your own events or webinars?

Using an event management software is a sure-fire way to help you organize the entire process.

From sending invitations to gathering payments, an event management tool takes care of many important steps.

We at Liana Technologies use Eventilla for every event we host.

Digital Marketing event by Liana Technologies

11. PR checklist

Press releases haven't become obsolete.

According to our latest PR survey, journalists actively utilize press releases in their daily job.

PR survey by Liana Technologies

Thus, with the right tools at your fingertips, press releases can give your brand a big exposure online.

PR distribution tool

Our marketing team uses LianaPress to send press releases about company’s achievements and other important announcements.

Press release by Liana Press

But we are always one step ahead when it comes to PR distribution:

By complementing our PR efforts with a media monitoring tool, LianaMonitor, we can immediately see when a press release has been published by a certain media.

For instance, we could easily spot when our latest press release was published by Business Intelligence Middle East.

Presentation tool

Dealing with presentations or helping your sales team to deliver a great one is an inevitable part of PR.

In case you’re wondering what presentation tool to use, check out these:

  • Marketing professionals love the cloud-based Prezi as it’s great for collaboration and does not require designer skills
  • A lot of marketers refer to Haiku Deck as being an easy-to-use tool
  • Our Marketing and Sales teams use Apple’s Keynote

Liana Technologies Presentation

Surveys

Marketers use online surveys in any number of ways:

  • Conducting market research
  • Getting customer feedback
  • Finding out customers’ preferences

Ultimately, the survey results can be effectively used to boost your PR.

Aside from Google Forms, there are other online survey tools in the market:

12. Video marketing checklist

In 2018, investing in video marketing is earth-shattering.

Look:

Video marketing study by Wyzol

(Survey by Wyzol)

Make sure to have the following tools to get the most out of video marketing.

Camera

Having a good camera in your toolkit is important for shooting customer cases or other brand videos.

There are a ton of good ones out there:

  • Sony a7R
  • iPhone X
  • Samsung Galaxy S9

Our team has Canon 5D Mark III for shooting company’s videos or customer success stories.

Video editing tools

The most common misconception floating around video editing:

It’s difficult to edit a video without sufficient skills.

However, with these tools you can effortlessly create short video clips:

  • The barrier to enter iMovie is usually low
  • VivaVideo is a good tool for creating short clips right on your mobile device. The app is available for both iOS and Android
  • Video editor Splice has a user-friendly UI and a great music collection
  • Motion Array contains Motion Graphics templates, Premiere Pro templates, stock music, and much more

Give them a try and see for yourself!

Stock videos

A collection of stock videos can add a little spice to your videos:

13. Graphics checklist

Dealing with graphics is something that every marketer eventually faces in their everyday job.

Make sure you have the relevant graphical tools at your disposal.

Image editing tools

The following tools can help you with basic design tasks, such as whipping up a social media post or a header image for your new blog post.

Stock images

14. Marketing reading checklist

What do all successful marketers have in common?

They constantly expand their scope by reading industry-relevant blogs.

Our team recommends the following blogs:

Tip:

Use Feedly to keep all of your favorite blogs organized in one place.

Feedly

Remember to share the checklist with your team at your next marketing meeting!

Download PDF: Digital Marketing Checklist (Fully Updated for 2018)

Digital Marketing Checklist 2018 PDF download

 /media/henkilokuvat/articles-authors/elena_bezborodova_300x420.jpg

Elena is a Marketing Coordinator at Liana Technologies. When you don't see her passionately writing a new blog post for Liana, you can find her baking delicious cheesecakes or jogging. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

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Kommentit (7)

06.06.2018

(Untitled)

Hey Elena, thanks for the Snappa mention! Great list of resources!

- Nick Le

07.06.2018

(Untitled)

Hi there! You are more than welcome :)

- Elena Bezborodova

11.07.2018

(Untitled)

Wow - that is quite the epic blog post! Congratulations on a great piece, and thanks for putting it out there!

- Corey Hinde (The Good Oil - Marketing Dept NZ)

06.08.2018

(Untitled)

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed this article! :)

- Elena Bezborodova

20.09.2018

(Untitled)

thx for the info, it's helpful

- Felix Poon

18.02.2019

(Untitled)

Thanks for the feedback :)

- Elena Bezborodova

29.10.2018

(Untitled)

Very intersting article

- Ayad Khudhur

18.02.2019

(Untitled)

Thank you!

- Elena Bezborodova

14.11.2018

(Untitled)

Very good post. A lot of very useful information. Thanks

- Lisa M. Foster

18.02.2019

(Untitled)

We are glad you find it useful! Thank you.

- Elena Bezborodova

16.02.2019

(Untitled)

You make it sound so easy!! All the other posts I’ve read on this topic might as well be in elvish. Thank you for the non-techie version of SEO optimization!

- Traffici5

02.09.2019

(Untitled)

You are welcome :)

- Elena Bezborodova

01.09.2019

(Untitled)

Thank you so much for this checklist! So helpful for me as I prepare for my role as Marketing Specialist.

- Jae

02.09.2019

(Untitled)

Good to hear! Good luck with your new role :)

- Elena Bezborodova

 

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