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Every successful online business understands the symbiotic relationship between advertising, demand, and supply. Your business won’t succeed if your customers don’t know you exist or exhibit no desire for your goods or services.
How you make them aware of your business and entice them to buy from you is by implementing a strong digital marketing strategy designed to accomplish your business goals. You can reach customers across digital platforms by implementing various online marketing tactics to increase brand awareness and drive sales.
Whether you’re an established business looking to expand your digital reach or a new venture needing to get ahead of the game, this marketing guide has plenty of helpful tips.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a high-level plan of action for achieving business goals through the most suitable online marketing channels.
It utilizes several marketing tactics to improve customer relationships and, ultimately, revenue.
A Strong Digital Marketing Strategy Has SMART Goals
Marketing strategies are customized to meet each organization’s needs according to a SMART goal framework. This mnemonic acronym imbues strategy with a sense of direction, clarity, and motivation.
- Specific: Simple, sensible, significant.
- Measurable: Meaningful, motivating.
- Achievable: Agreed, attainable.
- Relevant: Reasonable, realistic, resourced, results-based.
- Time-bound: Time-based, time-limited, timely, time-sensitive.
Setting SMART goals is valuable because it helps businesses adequately direct enough time and resources toward the right tactics. More than that, it ensures objectives are clearly defined and attainable within a reasonable timeframe. Working through each step can reveal where priorities require realignment.
How Do You Create SMART Marketing Goals?
To create SMART business goals, you must be specific, realistic, and detailed. For example, a SMART revenue goal might be “Improve sales by 20% in the next six months.” This sets a specific objective to be achieved within a specific timeframe. In this example, we’ll assume a 20% increase is reasonable and achievable for this hypothetical business.
Digital marketing comes with awesome analytical power, which is why a detailed goal plan is so important. It gives your team a benchmark to measure their progress and self-correct if a strategy moves away from achieving its KPIs. Naturally, there isn’t a set formula, as each business has unique SMART goals.
Benefits of a Well-Executed Marketing Strategy
Studies suggest only 25% of users ever go to the second page of search engine results. Thus, a whopping 75% stick to the first page, which generally only indexes eight websites at a time. When you do the math, it’s impossible to stand out online without a strong digital marketing strategy that:
- Improves brand recognition
- Increases leads
- Boosts sales
- Markets to new target audiences both locally and abroad
- Enhances your online presence
- Grows your market share
An incisive digital marketing strategy keeps customers invested in your services, company, and brand. In many ways, it’s the lifeline to business longevity. Furthermore, the analytical component of digital marketing empowers companies to make productive decisions that propel business growth.
Is a Digital Marketing Campaign Any Different?
To expand the war analogy, we might consider a marketing strategy as a high-level framework connected to an organization’s imperatives. It’s like the overall battle plan, whereas marketing campaigns are the smaller, tactical operations that help achieve specific deliverables within the overall battle plan.
Thus, the marketing strategy is the overarching framework and decisions that result in a marketing campaign. For instance, one of a company’s marketing strategy goals may be to increase brand awareness. To do so, it could roll out a content marketing campaign across different social media channels.
Components of a Marketing Strategy:
- Audience segmentation study
- Clear value proposition with unique selling points
- Marketing approaches
- Customer experience priorities, journey maps, and digital touchpoints
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Different marketing channels and marketing activities with identifiable campaign points
Components of a Marketing Campaign:
- A finite timeframe
- Specific marketing channels to be used within a budget to achieve objectives with particular analytics and ROI
- Key messaging is informed by keyword research and accompanied by strong visuals and mechanics to meet campaign objectives.
- Specific reference to the marketing approach used, such as social media, email, etc.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan
An online marketing strategy allows organizations to stress-test marketing assumptions and determine the right strategies that are key to success. It connects businesses with their ideal target market when they are on search engines, social media, email, and other digital channels. To lower wasteful expenditure and attain higher flexibility for marketing efforts, businesses need to develop an agile digital marketing strategy.
Set Clear Goals
Setting SMART goals ensures your digital marketing strategy is straightforward to update and monitor. When organizations determine goals, they gravitate towards qualitative objectives that deal with questions like: “Do we want to improve brand visibility? Or: “How can we increase brand loyalty?” These are necessary inquiries that, while achievable, are astonishingly difficult to measure.
Abstract concepts aren’t useful unless incorporated into a SMART goal framework with quantitative marketing targets. Concrete digital marketing goals with a corresponding and realistic digital marketing timeline might look something like this:
- Lead increase of X% in the next quarter
- Increase conversion rate optimization by X% on the site within a year
- Boost customer engagement by x% in the next six months
All marketing strategy goals should provide insightful information about progress toward them. Becoming an industry-leading business requires a set of quantitative measures of things like sales, innovation, market share, and profitability in comparison to competitors. Therefore, clear goals combine quantitative and qualitative measures, underscored by a range of quantitative key performance indicators.
Analyze Your Current Successes
A thorough digital marketing analysis assesses a brand’s position on all digital channels using Google Analytics and the like. Each business will approach a marketing analysis slightly differently, depending on how advanced its digital marketing strategy is.
Elements Worth Assessing May Include:
- Competitive landscape: Examining how competitors attract, convert, and retain potential customers.
- Target audience behavior: Determining the what, where, when, how, and why customers behave in a particular way.
- Marketing performance: Assessing how well a brand performs on different marketing channels like social media, email marketing, and online searches. Coupled with this are average order value, click-through rates, bounce rates, and other standard industry metrics.
- Brand and consumer predictions: Using data to anticipate the customers’ next move and pivot services and products if necessary.
Analyzing your business’s current success and shortfalls helps refocus efforts and save time and money. Because the internet is a crowded space, you need to optimize and maximize ROI as effectively and swiftly as possible. An analysis will reveal which marketing tactics are performing well and can be enhanced and which ones need improvement or to be scrapped altogether.
Determine Your Buyer’s Persona
Buyer personas deepen target demographics by helping organizations understand who their customer is and how to talk to them. They establish customer attitudes and behaviours critical to product and digital marketing development.
Creating buyer personas puts faces on abstract data and allows the engineering of better digital marketing strategies.
Inbound marketing software company HubSpot provides this definition: “Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to meet the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization (from marketing to sales to service).”
Determining these fictional representations entails market research and analysis. Most importantly, you need to figure out who would be interested in what your business has to offer. Gathering existing customer data, conducting interviews, and competitor analysis will help collate the information needed to create personas.
Most organizations have more than one, as target audiences can be segmented into smaller groups.
A buyer persona profile includes basic demographic information, interests, hobbies, aspirations, and pain points they experience that your product or service can solve. The more detail your buyer personas contain, the more solutions you can provide. Buyer personas are the embodiment of your ‘ideal’ customers. They act as a customer bibliography, always referenced to develop relevant strategies and engaging campaigns that increase conversions and sales.
Establish a Proper Sales Funnel
A digital marketing sales funnel is a term used to describe the journey customers go through on the way to purchase. There are three stages: top, middle, and bottom. Establishing a proper sales funnel informs successful strategy because it helps understand what potential customers are thinking and doing at each stage of the purchasing journey.
Equipped with this knowledge, marketers can create the most relevant messaging that nudges lead further down the funnel.
There Are Four Degrees of Awareness in a Marketing Funnel:
- Awareness: When a lead first hears about a product or service.
- Interest: A lead evaluates a brand’s offering.
- Conversion: When a lead is ready to buy and will look for the best deal.
- Action: When a lead (hopefully) purchases your product/service.
A proper sales funnel brings visibility to every stage of connection with customers, but for this to exist, you have to generate leads and engage them. While there are multiple marketing funnels (content marketing, Google Ad marketing, and omnichannel marketing), their purpose is to bring users into the funnel and persuade them to the next stage. This process might follow these steps:
- Build a Landing Page: A prospect clicks on an ad, which takes them to a page that reveals what an organization is about and highlights the company’s products and services.
- Create Lead Magnets: Gated content designed to engage, inform, and provide value in exchange for a prospect’s contact details. Examples are case studies, eBooks, templates, industry reports, and whitepapers.
- Implement Email Marketing: Once contact details have been obtained, move customers further down the funnel with targeted email sequences that convince them to move further down the funnel.
- Use High-Quality Content: This should add value at every stage. Avoid ‘sales-y’ language and place prospects’ interests above everything else.
Establishing a proper sales funnel informs successful strategies because it creates specific touchpoints at every customer journey stage. This not only guides leads through the buying process but also nurtures them, making the customer experience more enjoyable.
Build a Content Strategy Framework
Content marketing is how organizations reach target customers and showcase their expertise through informative content. By building a content strategy framework, businesses create a roadmap that organizes how they will publish content, on which platforms, and at what times.
Content marketing can range from written formats to videos, podcasts, webinars, social media posts, infographics, and more. This method nurtures customers by offering them valuable and engaging content that builds brand loyalty and trust.
A basic content strategy framework should include:
- Content Goals: Identify the goal of the content, whether it’s to inform, entertain, inspire, or persuade.
- Target Audience: Specify who the content is for and what pain points it addresses.
- Content Types: Decide which types of content will be produced, such as blog posts, videos, social media posts, or infographics.
- Content Calendar: Develop a schedule for when and where the content will be published.
- Distribution Plan: Determine how the content will be shared, such as through social media, email marketing, or paid advertising.
By having a content strategy framework, businesses can ensure they consistently deliver valuable and relevant content that resonates with their audience and drives engagement.
Leverage SEO to Enhance Visibility
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical component of digital marketing. It involves optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This increases visibility and drives organic traffic to your site.
Key SEO Practices Include:
- Keyword Research: Identify the keywords and phrases your target audience uses to search for your products or services.
- On-Page SEO: Optimize your website’s content, meta tags, headers, and images to include relevant keywords.
- Off-Page SEO: Build backlinks from reputable websites to improve your site’s authority.
- Technical SEO: Ensure your website is fast, mobile-friendly, and has a clean URL structure.
- Content Optimization: Create high-quality, engaging, and informative content that answers your audience’s questions and includes relevant keywords.
By leveraging SEO, businesses can improve their search engine rankings, attract more organic traffic, and increase their chances of converting visitors into customers.
Utilize Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing involves using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others to promote your brand, engage with your audience, and drive traffic to your website.
Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies Include:
- Choosing the Right Platforms: Identify which social media platforms your target audience frequents.
- Consistent Posting: Maintain a consistent posting schedule to keep your audience engaged.
- Engaging Content: Share a mix of content types, such as images, videos, and articles, to keep your audience interested.
- Interaction: Respond to comments, messages, and mentions to build relationships with your audience.
- Paid Advertising: Utilize paid social media ads to reach a larger audience and drive traffic to your website.
By effectively utilizing social media marketing, businesses can increase brand awareness, engage with their audience, and drive more traffic and sales.
Conclusion
In summary, a well-executed digital marketing strategy is crucial for any business looking to thrive in today’s competitive online landscape. By setting clear SMART goals, analyzing your current successes, determining your buyer personas, establishing a proper sales funnel, building a content strategy framework, leveraging SEO, and utilizing social media marketing, you can create a comprehensive digital marketing plan that drives growth and success.
Remember, consistency, adaptability, and a deep understanding of your audience and their needs are the keys to a successful digital marketing strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is the difference between a digital marketing strategy and a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing strategy is an overarching plan that outlines how a business will achieve its marketing goals using various online channels. It includes long-term goals, target audience identification, and overall approaches. A digital marketing campaign, on the other hand, is a specific series of actions within the strategy designed to achieve a particular objective within a set timeframe. Campaigns are the tactical implementations of the strategy.
2. How can I determine which digital marketing channels are best for my business?
To determine the best digital marketing channels for your business, consider where your target audience spends their time online and what type of content they engage with the most. Conducting market research, analyzing competitors, and experimenting with different channels can help you identify the most effective platforms for your business.
3. How often should I update my digital marketing strategy?
Your digital marketing strategy should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure it remains effective and aligned with your business goals. It’s advisable to conduct a comprehensive review at least once a year, but more frequent updates may be necessary based on performance metrics, market changes, and new opportunities.
4. What are some common mistakes to avoid in digital marketing?
Common mistakes in digital marketing include not setting clear goals, neglecting to analyze performance data, ignoring mobile optimization, failing to understand the target audience, and not investing in high-quality content. Avoiding these pitfalls can help improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
5. How can I measure the success of my digital marketing efforts?
The success of your digital marketing efforts can be measured using key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, engagement metrics, and return on investment (ROI). Using tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics can provide valuable insights into your campaign’s performance.
6. What role does content marketing play in a digital marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a crucial component of a digital marketing strategy. It involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience. High-quality content helps build brand authority, improves SEO, drives organic traffic, and nurtures leads through the sales funnel.