Digital Marketing Plan: Strategies for Next Plc (Business Report)

This report provides a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for Next Plc, a multinational clothing retailer. It begins with a situation analysis using SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The report then links the digital business with digital marketing strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, website redesign, and application development. It formulates marketing objectives to increase sales, brand affiliation, and website traffic. An implementation plan is designed using the STP marketing model. The report includes a detailed budget for digital marketing activities and outlines methods for evaluating the plan's effectiveness, such as monitoring website traffic, brand affiliation, customer feedback, and revenue growth, along with a reference list.

DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Situation Analysis............................................................................................................................1
Link Digital Business with Digital Marketing Strategy..................................................................1
Formulate Objectives.......................................................................................................................2
Design implementation Plan to meet the Objectives.......................................................................2
Budgeting.........................................................................................................................................3
Evaluate the Plan.............................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

Situation Analysis
Next Plc is a British multinational clothing, home products and footwear retailers with more than
700 stores in more than 7 countries out of which 500 are in United Kingdom, 200 across Europe,
Asia and Middle East (Mononen and et.al., 2019). Next is one of the largest clothing retailers
present in UK that have overtaken Marks and Spencer in 2012 as well as in 2014. In order to
evaluate situation analysis SWOT analysis of the company can be done.
Strengths
 They provide excellent customer service in
terms of being active on social media.
 Has their own website for online shopping
for their customers.
 Next has a strong free cash flow that helps
them in providing resources in hand of
company in order to expand into new
projects.
Weaknesses
 They rely on third part for delivery service
because of which many times customers
face late delivery.
 They are not keeping up with the
competition in terms of customer
knowledge and technology.
 They are not very good in forecasting
product demand as a result they end up
keeping high inventory than required.
Opportunities
 They can improve their delivery service by
looking for more credible and reliable third
part delivery sources.
 They can start partnership online start-ups
like Net-a-Porter.
Threats
 Customer’s loyalty is quite low due to high
competition.
 Many retailers are using cutting edge
technology in a much better manner as
compared to Next Plc to reach they
customers.
Link Digital Business with Digital Marketing Strategy
Next sells clothing, home products and footwear both digitally and through physical stores.
They are focusing on expanding their online business in order to reach larger group of targeted
audience. For this they can use various kinds of digital marketing strategies which will help them
to not only reach larger targeted audience but will also help them in increasing their overall sales
and revenue as well as online presence.
 Search engine optimization can help Next to get quality traffic from organic and free search
results from various search engines like Bing, Google etc.
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 Social media marketing will help them to reach larger targeted audience (De Pelsmacker,
Van Tilburg and Holthof, 2018). Next can use various social media platforms or websites for
promotion of their company as well as its product’s. it is one of the most useful digital
marketing strategies that can be used by Next as today most of the people uses social media.
This will also help them to remain in touch with their customer’s and understand their
demands in a better manner.
 Pay per click is another type of digital marketing where Next can pay their customer’s every
time they click on their ad. It is a simple process to increase number of visits to company’s
site.
 Email marketing is another type of digital marketing where Next will be sending emails to
their customer’s in order to build relationship with them.
 Next can redesign their website and make it look more attractive and easier to use for their
customers. This will help them to attract new customers.
 Lastly, they can build and launch their own application so that it becomes much easier for
their customers to each them.
Formulate Objectives
There are three main marketing objectives of this marketing plan:
 To increase market sales as well as shares of NEXT in next three years by using innovative
digital marketing strategies.
 To increase online presence and physical stores brand affiliation within six months.
 Increase 10% traffic on website in order to increase international online sales within one
year.
Design implementation Plan to meet the Objectives
STP is a marketing model that can be used by organizations to analyse their product, price
and targeted audience (Magalhães and et.al., 2019). Next focuses on demographic segmentation
with includes both male and female genders. Other than this they also focus on middle class
customers between age of 20 to 50 years of age group. But company need to focus on consumers
of age group 15 and above so that they can increase their targeted customer groups. Next targets
customers who are trend setters and innovators rather than fashion followers. The main
consumers of next are believers who are aware of their quality and strives who focus on
purchasing their products. Next is positioned as an organization that has moderately high fashion
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trend with affordable price. This STP will help Next to meet their digital marketing plan. In order
to reach their targeted customers Next can focus more their social media marketing and most of
the youngsters uses social media marketing. They can also use PPC strategy and most of the
middle class customers like such kind of marketing done by organizations.
Budgeting
Budget will help the organization to evaluate their overall spending, any mile stone that they
need to achieve or what amount of their earning they need to spend in order to implement their
digital marketing plan (Juska, J.M., 2017). In order to evaluate overall digital marketing budget
of Next first of all the digital marketing strategies that are used by them will be evaluated. Next
will be using pay per click advertising (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), email
marketing, social media marketing and redesigning of website.
Digital marketing service Overall expenditure cost
Per click advertising (PPC) $500 per month
Search engine optimization (SEO) 5 percent of monthly advertisement spend
Email marketing $300 per month
Social media marketing $250 per month
Redesigning of website $2500
Application development $3000
Evaluate the Plan
This marketing plan can be evaluated by assessing number of downloads of Next application
and number of visits on their online website by consumers in a specific period of time.
Consumer’s brand affiliation can be checked by checking number of consumers that are aware of
organization’s new technologies. It can also be checked by checking how many customers
actually use these technologies for shopping. Other than this customer’s rating or feedbacks
provided by them can also help in checking or evaluating the effectiveness of the digital
marketing strategy. Lastly company can also check increase in their revenue or profit margin i.e.
if there is increase in company’s revenue and profit then it can be said that this digital marketing
strategy was useful and effective.
REFERENCES
Books and Journals
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De Pelsmacker, P., Van Tilburg, S. and Holthof, C., 2018. Digital marketing strategies, online
reviews and hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management. 72.
pp.47-55.
Juska, J.M., 2017. Integrated marketing communication: advertising and promotion in a digital
world. Routledge.
Magalhães, M., and et.al., 2019. Canvas marketing plan: How to structure a marketing plan with
interactive value?. In Handbook of Research on Emerging Technologies for Effective
Project Management (pp. 158-168). IGI Global.
Mononen, A., and et.al., 2019. Digital marketing plan for small and medium sized companies.
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