Introduction
Anyone running a business knows the importance of having systems in place. Systems are designed to connect all of an organization’s intricate parts and interrelated steps to work together for its growth and success. Additionally, not only does creating effective business procedures unify the problem-solving and decision-making of the organization, but it also improves top-line performance and ensures you meet customers' expectations.
The same principles apply to digital marketing – you can’t just wing it and hope for the best. You need a digital marketing SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to achieve consistent results and grow top-line revenue.
This article includes the following free templates:
- Marketing communication plan SOP template
- Outbound email marketing SOP template
- Building your brand on Youtube SOP template
- Twitter profile optimization SOP template
- Google keyword planner SOP template
But before we get started: what is an SOP?
Why is it important for your digital marketing activities? And most importantly, how do you create marketing SOPs? This blog post aims to answer these questions and help you get started on building your very own marketing SOP templates for your digital team.
What is a standard operating procedure (SOP)?
Standard Operating Procedure is a set of step-by-step instructions that outline how to perform specific tasks or carry out routine operations. SOPs are created to ensure consistent quality output, achieve efficiency and maintain uniformity of performance — while also reducing miscommunication and failure to comply with industry standards.
Having an SOP in place ensures that everyone on your digital marketing team can carry out tasks consistently, safely and efficiently. Some of the major characteristics of well-written SOPs include:
- Visually appealing (including aesthetics).
- Written in clear and concise language.
- Easy to navigate through.
- Has uniform formatting.
- Easy to understand.
- Written to address the specific task at hand.
- Rich in multimedia files and other visual elements.
- Trackable and fully responsive.
- Regularly updated as needed.
What are the benefits of creating digital marketing SOPs?
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the importance of developing agency SOP templates is to consider the consequences of not doing so. For starters, not creating a marketing SOP for your digital team aids the lack of systematization of your processes — keeping all of your team members and other stakeholders at various pages at all times, and creating the inability to move forward in a singular, cohesive manner. Basically, it's bedlam!
🎓 Related resource: Challenges & Solutions: SOPs for Agencies
Additionally, there are no guarantees that best practices will be followed at all times, that your team members will work in alignment; or most importantly, that the organization will always operate effectively. SOPS can help you…
- Ensure adherence to digital marketing best practices. It serves as a "North Star" guiding your entire team and improves the chances of achieving better digital marketing outcomes, while also minimizing the chances of encountering problems along the way.
- Ensure consistency and efficiency. Your digital marketing team will always know the right steps to take and make both decisions and processes more automatic for your team at all times.
- Ensure that processes proceed without interruption and are completed within the prescribed time frame.
- Act as a guideline for your team who observe job results to improve overall performance.
- Serve as an internal wiki of how, when, and what steps are taken in an existing digital marketing process.
- Make employee onboarding easier and improve how you train your digital team regarding best practices in certain situations.
- Reduce misunderstandings since your digital team can easily access it when needed to complete a task.
🎓 Recommended resource: How to build social media SOPs in seconds: A step-by-step guide
Why is having an SOP important for digital marketing?
What do digital marketing standard operating procedures provide for your business? For starters, they save time. You no longer have to waste a great deal of time or effort in creating something that already exists, for example, when you create new content. All you have to do is refer to your SOP and follow the steps prescribed. It helps your team stay organized and on track — two elements vital to the success of any digital marketing campaign.
Secondly, SOPs can improve your overall marketing campaigns' efficiency and profitability. Streamlining your digital marketing process gives you more time and resources to focus on other important areas of your business. This boost in employee productivity will result in increased ROI for your digital marketing campaigns.
Finally, you need SOPs to improve the quality of your content. Having a set process to follow, ensures that all of your content is high-quality, free of errors, well-researched and properly formatted. Plus, your readers won't miss your attention to detail. 😉 This will surely impress your readers and help you build trust with them.
Examples of digital marketing SOP templates
In this section, I'll be sharing various SOP templates for different digital marketing activities.
Marketing communication plan standard operating procedure template
About this SOP
A marketing communications plan template is a pre-designed communication plan. It describes how you will communicate a message, the right message, to the right people (stakeholders), at the right time and in the right channel.
Why is this important?
It’s a plan that sets the information, communications goals, audience (stakeholders), strategies, activities, and timeframes.
For example, you may have a communication plan template for your products’ launch. The template will clarify the product, the purpose of a product launch (service or initiative), the official messages you want to deliver, the intended audience(s), and the communication channel.
What is covered?
This SOP should include:
- Goals/Objectives
- SWOT
- Channels/Tactics
- Roles
- Evaluation (KPIs)
- Timelines
Outbound email marketing standard operating procedures template
About this SOP
In this SOP, we focus on reaching out to potential customers to gauge interest in your product or service.
Use this outbound email marketing SOP template to build your own.
Why is this important?
Understanding how to effectively use outbound email marketing will allow you to establish a connection with potential customers, gauge interest in {insert product or service} and build brand awareness.
What is covered?
This SOP should include.
- What outbound email marketing is and why it is important.
- The tasks necessary for campaign kickoff and how to measure your goals.
- How to create a brief of your strategy and its importance.
- What prospecting is and some of the methods you can use for lead generation
- How to define your target audience, find leads and clean the list.
- How to create outbound email marketing templates.
- Email automation: What tools do we use, how to create a drip campaign and how to import leads to the system, and how to send a test email before hitting the "send" button.
- How to track and measure results.
When to run it:
Run this for every outbound email marketing campaign you manage.
Who should run it?
It should be performed by whomever or the team responsible for outbound email marketing campaigns.
How to build your brand on YouTube standard operating procedure template
About this SOP:
This free Brand-building on Youtube SOP will teach you how to build your brand on YouTube, by teaching you SEO tactics that'll help you drive traffic to your channel and videos.
What is covered?
- Keyword research
- Using Google Search
- Looking at competitors
- Using YouTube Search
- Optimal keyword placement in your content
- How to use tags effectively
- How to write effective YouTube descriptions
- How to design eye-catching and irresistible YouTube thumbnails
- How to create playlists
- Quality content generation principles
- Finding partnerships with other channels
- Sharing your content through social media
- Monitoring and evaluating your metrics
Twitter profile optimization SOP template
About this SOP:
Twitter is a powerful platform that can help you connect with your audience, build relationships, and promote your brand.
However, with so many profiles out there, it can be challenging to stand out and get noticed.
This Twitter Profile template provides a step-by-step guide for optimizing your Twitter profile.
By following these best practices, you can increase the chances of your profile appearing in search results and make a great impression on your followers. Whether you're new to Twitter or looking to improve your existing profile, this template will help you make the most of this platform and build your brand on Twitter.
Why is this important?
This increases the chances of {insert company/client name} profile appearing in search results, to get more followers.
Furthermore, when people do visit {insert company/client name} profile, they're more likely to stick around and check out {insert company/client name} tweets, since it looks more professional and polished.
What is covered?
You will learn about:
- Hashtag usage
- How to include emojis
- Recommended image sizes and how to create them
- When to include your location
- How to use pinned Tweets
- The benefits of direct messages
When to run it:
Create a workflow from this template for every Twitter profile you want to optimize.
Who should run it?
It should be performed by whoever is responsible for the team's social media marketing. This person could also be a virtual assistant (VA).
Software required:
A Twitter account.
Using Google keyword planner for free SOP template
About this SOP:
This Google Keyword Planner SOP template focuses on the use of the Google Keyword Planner to help you discover the best-targeted words for your content.
Why is this important?
This SOP is important because it serves as a preliminary SEO strategy that can be used to structure your content and increase the possibility of significant conversions.
What is covered:
You learn about
- What Google Keyword Planner is.
- Why use Google Keyword Planner for SEO?
- How to use Google Keyword Planner for SEO.
- How to discover new keywords.
- How to get search volume and forecasts.
When to run it:
Run this when planning keywords for content.
Who should run it?
It should be performed by whoever is responsible for SEO and/or content strategy.
Software required:
Google Keyword Planner
Using Ahrefs.com for Keyword Research SOP Template
About this SOP:
This SOP teaches you how to use Ahrefs.com for keyword research. Getting traffic from keyword research is great, but as you go through this process, you want to ensure that the keywords you’re targeting are serving your potential customers.
This is why it's important to map keywords to the problems they face. Additionally, it gives you the opportunity to showcase how your products and services will make their life easier and guide them toward your end goal.
What you'll learn:
This SOP will teach you how to use Ahrefs.com to:
- Generate keyword ideas.
- Analyze search results for the keywords.
- Find competitors' keywords.
- Assess your ranking difficulty.
- Assess your competitors' domain ratings.
- Reverse engineer the keywords your competitors rank well for.
Software required:
An Ahrefs account.
7 steps to building your own digital marketing SOP
Not sure how to build your digital marketing SOP templates? You're in luck. Here are guaranteed ways to help you get started.
1. Define your digital marketing goals and objectives.
The first step to building your marketing SOP is to define your goals and objectives.
- What are you looking to achieve with your content?
- What kind of content should you create?
- What distribution channels do you want to focus on?
- Do you want to generate leads, increase brand awareness or drive traffic to your website?
Once you’ve identified your goals and answered these questions, developing a plan of action is the next step. For example, if your goal is to generate brand awareness, streamline your objectives with a particular focus on more content creation and distribution (including third-party platforms).
2. Conduct research
Research is essential for customer segmentation and identifying their needs and wants. It helps you understand your target audience and ascertain the type of content they love.
The first step is to conduct keyword research and see what it produces. Thankfully, there are tons of keyword research tools to use. Don't forget to also check out your competitors' content to see what makes their readers tick.
3. Create an editorial calendar
Once you’ve gathered all of the necessary information, begin to plan your content. An editorial calendar is a great way to get started. Not only does it help you to strategically plan and optimize your content to drive conversions, but it also keeps track of what needs to be published, by who and when.
Scribe top tip: Don't forget to add the following to your editorial calendar when creating your SOP:
- Create topic clusters.
- Target content for each stage of the funnel.
- Organize authors (internal and external) and topics.
- Track keywords and call-to-actions (CTAs).
- Track content events.
- Determine and plan which channels your content will be published on.
- Identify which topics work and don’t work. Don't forget the "diamonds in the rough" as well.
4. Use a well-planned digital marketing process
Keep your audience in mind and create content and distribute them according to their customer journey. Don't forget to polish your work before publishing. The knowledge base creation process should always involve a team so that you can get objective opinions and edits.
Regarding content promotion, while it's almost certain that you and your digital marketing team have certain distribution channels in mind, use A/B testing as your plan B. Experiment with different tactics to see what works best for you.
5. Analyze & track results
Published your content? Check. ✅ Your work isn't completed after the content is published. The next step is to analyze the results.
- How many people viewed it?
- How many people clicked through to your website?
- What's the bounce rate?
- What was the average time spent on the page?
Analyzing your campaign's performance helps you to know what worked and what didn't — and determine whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off.
6. Rinse & repeat
Continually create new content regularly. The more content you have, the better your chances of driving traffic and generating leads. However, don’t sacrifice quality for quantity – always make sure that your content is well-written and informative.
Assess the ranking pages to see what content is working best and get more ideas for similar topics. Also, keep an eye on your website’s analytics to see how users are interacting with your site.
7. Make changes where necessary necessary
No matter how well you plan your digital marketing campaigns, chances are high that you'll need to tweak adjustingly until you're "good to go."
Be open to making changes to your digital marketing strategy where applicable, and be willing to experiment. You can only identify what works best when you try out different things and see what gives you the best results.
Final thoughts: Reduce the time it takes to create an SOP by 93 percent!
Scribe brings all your digital marketing team's knowledge, docs, and projects together in one single, central platform.
It's a modern, code-free and insanely fast way to create step-by-step guides, collaborate with your team, and share documents, anywhere!
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Use Scribe to:
- Create a central knowledge base that serves as a single source of truth for your digital team.
- Integrate the tools you love, such as Notion, Jira, Miro, Microsoft Teams, Confluence and more.
- Manage and document your SOPs in one place without the chaos of context switching or silos.
- Redact sensitive information and share information with stakeholders on a need-to-know basis.
- Collaborate in real-time or asynchronously and spend less time in meetings.
- Easily add edits and customization to suit your brand's needs.
- Share your SOP with your team in one click via various formats (URL link, PDF document, copy into a document with HTML or Markdown, etc.).
Ready to create your next digital marketing SOP template? Use Scribe for free!
