A digital marketing strategy is a scheme designed to assist your company in achieving specific objectives through discreetly identified marketing channels like earned, paid, and owned media. It’ll be absurd to run a digital marketing campaign without any strategy in place. A great marketing plan is essential for improving your organization’s efficiency.
With no strategic plan in place, you’re more likely to take wrong turns leading to disappointments and longer routes to achieve your goals. But relying on a digital marketing agency can help you outline how to attain your marketing objectives, whether a start-up, medium, or big enterprise.
Table of contents
1. Establish Your Goals
It would be best to determine whether your marketing objective involves increasing sales, leads, or awareness. In a scenario where you want to expand your email subscribers list, your key performance indicator should focus on growing sign-ups. If you desire to improve your customer list, your marketing objective should create viable leads that can trigger success and that’s what our digital marketing agency is good at.
When crafting a digital marketing strategy, you must have a clearly defined goal on what you hope to attain. A rigid plan should begin with an analysis and evaluation to guide you on where your starting point should be.
Analyze your previous performance
The analysis is meant to give you a clear indication of where to start and provide a detailed understanding of customers’ expectations. It’s also essential to establish what worked out and what didn’t to help you design a better marketing strategy.
Evaluate your competitors
Evaluate the presence of your competitors on social media channels to see what they’re doing and strategize on how to outshine them. You can evaluate via your google analytic account or free tools such as SpyFu to determine their strategies.
2. Formulate Your Strategy
It would be best to build a solid strategy based on facts detailing your objectives and how you want to attain them. The GSOT framework, which stands for goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics, can assist you in executing your plan.
Goals
The goals entail what you intend to accomplish on a high level. For instance, it could increase sales or generate sign-ups for an occasion. You should make sure that your objective is specific, relevant, measurable, attainable, and timely.
Establish Your Strategy
It’ll be the specific approach you’ll apply to attain your goals. You should comprehensively define your strategy by asking yourself these essential questions: If you want to increase your sales, will you target existing users or focus on new users? Do you want to drive conversations or build awareness? You should have a clear strategy.
You can use the ANCRA framework plan, which stands for: Attract, Nurture, Convert, Retain or Advocate, to help you develop the best digital marketing strategy.
3. Set Objectives
They are quantifiable numbers that relate to your main goal. Your objective can either create traffic, build brand awareness or generate leads.
Choose better tactics
The objectives and the strategy should guide you in choosing the best tactics. For instance, if your target is to generate leads, you should generate quality traffic and increase conversion rates. Aligning a clearly defined strategy will help you direct your efforts on essential aspects that will lead to business growth.
Understand your audience
As a digital marketer, you have a chance to execute your digital campaigns with a clear-cut target. You should rise above geographical targeting and be as specific as possible. Generate a buyer persona for your audience to help you know who they are before attempting to reach out to them.
To understand your audience, you should;
Create a narrative
Make some assumptions about where your audience shop, what they read, and the likely marketing channels to find them on.
Be specific
You should find out the preferences of your customers and how best you can meet their expectationsPinpoint Your Marketing Channels.
- After you’ve established the content that resonates with your potential clients:
- Select the marketing channels that have the potential to bring the best results.
- Contemplate all the digital media, tactics, and tools you will use to execute your plans.
- Prioritize based on the strategy you’ve created.
- Determine how every channel you have selected will contribute to your goals and objectives.
It’s important to carefully select the strategies you will focus on and drive your energy to flourish in the areas chosen. As a marketer, you can explore other places in the case where your online presence has grown.
Examples of digital marketing types you may need to choose as part of your strategy include:
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- PPC (pay per click and SEM (search engine marketing)
- Video marketing
It would help if you chose fewer marketing channels to focus on to help you build a solid online presence.
4. Set Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators
In most cases, you find that when the business starts executing, you often struggle to find an answer to the vital question of whether the company is getting the expected results. Every activity you invest in must have a clear KPI to help you measure your success. You should also set benchmarks. The benchmark is what you would like to achieve.
With a reliable digital marketing agency, you’ll be in a better position to measure your performance and adjust to new strategies.
5. Build A Content Plan
It would be best to design a content plan based on your goals and strategies to help you determine the main topics to execute in your plan. Here you will create a specific marketing strategy for every channel that causes your traffic.
To get the content inspiration, you need to find out the most asked questions about your products in the search engines or search for hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to know what is trending. Google search suggestion also gives you an insight into what people are looking for related to your category. Try also to explore Pinterest for viral, visual, and shared content.
The content you create will help you achieve your digital marketing goals for all your channels. It will comprise a series of actions influenced by specific goals.
Your strategy will also have a timeline so you can determine the deadline for each action. Some of the activities will include;
Social media posting
You will use the information you have acquired from your research to determine what content to post and on what channel.
Develop a keyword strategy
It’ll help you identify relevant keywords to improve SEO. On keyword strategy, you can engage a digital marketing agency to research keywords with the strongest audience search in your niche.
Create a content calendar
You’ll need to keep your audience engaged all the time with new content on a regular basis. In your marketing campaign timeline, each month should have a digital marketing goal and appropriate content to help you achieve it.
Marketing automation tools
These tools will improve your efficiency and save time once you lay down your content strategy. There are plenty of useful marketing automation tools out there, such as Google Analytics, MailChimp, Userfox, Marketo, etc. find one that best aligns with your marketing objectives and find how to implement it.
6. Analyze and Execute
It’s the most crucial step in developing a viable digital marketing strategy. The ability to adjust and pivot is vital in making digital marketing powerful. While analyzing and focusing on tactics, you’re more likely to get new ideas daily. Critical questions in this step include; What is the interaction between your customers and what you shared with them? Are you heading towards your goals?
The feedback to these questions will determine whether you are on the right course and where you will need to improve. With the help of analytics software, you will understand your progress at different funnel stages.
Following up on leads, conversions, and traffic data will help you refine your content strategy. It will also sharpen your skills for creating a better marketing strategy in the future.
7. Involve digital marketing experts
Sometimes, you may learn that despite having implemented all the strategies, your campaigns aren’t still giving the desired results. you don’t stop at that; you could keep trying with a different approach hoping to achieve your goals.
Alternatively, you can hire a professional digital marketing agency to handle the entire marketing campaign for you. it’s much easier and can save you money in the long run, especially if you’re not much acclimatized with digital marketing.