Create a Simple Digital Marketing Plan

What it actually covers

Create a Simple Digital Marketing Plan is a six-lesson, 16-minute course built around a single document: a four-part marketing plan consisting of a strategy, channel-by-channel action plans, a topic list, and a content calendar. Tamara Budz, who identifies herself as a marketing and ecommerce professional with 15 years of experience across small startups and large retailers, walks through each section in sequence, and the course structure mirrors the plan itself almost exactly, lesson for lesson.

The strategy lesson is the most useful piece of reasoning in the course. Budz insists on splitting a "goal" (the single measurable outcome you want, such as increasing website traffic versus increasing conversion rate) from a "plan" (how you intend to get there), and she is specific that these two things require different content approaches even when they'd both nominally increase sales. Capping goals at two or three, rather than trying to chase everything at once, is sound and clearly stated advice.

The channel lesson is where the course earns its keep. Budz draws a hard line between channels you own outright, your website and email list, and channels you're borrowing, like social platforms that can change their rules or disappear overnight. She then asks for a working list of 5 to 10 tasks per channel: fixing broken links and tracking on the website first, testing send times on the newsletter, matching platform choice to content type on social (Instagram and Pinterest for visual brands is her example), and only running paid promotion on channels where an audience already exists organically. The blogger outreach segment, which recommends drafting a standard partnership pitch and a standard rejection email in advance, is a small but practical touch.

The topic and calendar lessons close the loop. The course recommends a running list of at least 20 content topics, treated as a living document you prune and expand over time, and then mapping those topics onto a calendar that can be a spreadsheet or literally a notebook. The one genuinely tactical idea here is the flex post: a pre-built but unscheduled piece of content kept in reserve so a post that flops or a disruptive news cycle doesn't derail the week's plan.

Where it falls short

The course never opens a tool. There's no spreadsheet on screen, no example calendar populated with real dates and channels, no sample topic list, and no walkthrough of the tracking setup it tells you to implement "right now." Every deliverable is described in the abstract rather than demonstrated, so a viewer leaves knowing the shape of a marketing plan but without a template or worked example to start from.

At 16 minutes, the course also can't go deep on any one channel. Paid advertising, SEO, analytics interpretation, and platform-specific tactics are each mentioned in a sentence or two and left there. This is fine as a framework primer but means the course delivers an outline, not a finished skill.

For a total beginner sketching a plan for the first time, the structure alone is worth the short time investment. For anyone who already has a functioning content calendar or has run paid campaigns before, there's little new information here.

What you will learn

• ·How to set one to three focused marketing goals and pair each with a strategy statement
• ·Why a website and email list are the only channels fully within your control, unlike social platforms
• ·How to build a channel-by-channel action plan with 5 to 10 concrete tasks per channel
• ·How to generate a running list of at least 20 content topics for weekly themes
• ·How to structure an editorial content calendar with a flexible bonus post for slow weeks
• ·Why the plan should be revisited every few months rather than treated as fixed