Marketing is a core element of a business. Business is evolving faster with modern technology. To keep up the pace with this evolution, marketing has also gone digital. Digital marketing has become more powerful & effective than traditional marketing in this modern era. If you want to create a better online presence for your business, you need a solid digital marketing strategy.
So what is a digital marketing strategy and why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is an actionable plan that works towards focusing and achieving the digital marketing goals of your company. The digital marketing goal is accomplished using various digital marketing channels such as digital publishing, social media, organic, online advertisement, referrals, etc.
A digital marketing strategy will give you a complete guideline towards your marketing and business goal. It will help you optimize your work plan and avoid duplication. With a limited resource, you can tie up your team and stay focused. A single written copy will make an enormous difference to your online performance.
Creating a strategy does not need to be complicated. That’s why we have created an effective guideline to help you build a solid digital marketing strategy in simple 8 steps.
8 simple steps to building a solid digital marketing strategy
Let’s discuss the steps for building a digital marketing strategy for making your business successful.
1. Set up your goal:
To build an actionable strategy, you must ask yourself what kind of goals you want to achieve. Although it sounds too simple to set it up. But you must be visionary and this step needs you to come up with a very detailed and specific set of goals. Define your ultimate business goal and your marketing strategy should fit into your mega plan.
Your digital marketing plan should be SMART. SMART is an excellent tool for measuring any goal or strategy. To be SMART, a goal should have five characteristics:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
So your digital marketing mission should have those characteristics. Increasing sales of your eCommerce store is not a SMART goal. Generating a 5% sales increment per month with paid search within four months is a SMART goal.
2. Evaluate your accomplishment:
You need to measure your accomplishment even if you are just starting a new venture. This will help you understand your progress and what should be focused on the digital marketing goal. If you have an existing business, try to find out your previous mistakes and make sure you are not doing the same one. Make a list of your target marketing channels where you want to move forward. Some mostly used marketing channels are:
- Website
- Email marketing
- Content marketing/SEO
- Social media
- PPC(Pay per click) advertising
Keep in mind that all available channels are not equally suitable for all types of digital marketing campaigns. You can rank all channels from most effective to least effective and focus on them according to the ranking.
3. Understand digital sales funnel:
A digital sales funnel is a comprehensive process where a stranger comes to buy your products or services and becomes your long term loyal customer. There are some steps in the digital marketing sales funnel and by following these steps with proper marketing channels and tools; you can achieve your digital marketing goal.
The buyer’s journey can be divided into 5 stages:
- Awareness: Make your target customers aware of your existence.
- Interest: Create customer interest in your business. Let them know how your business can benefit them.
- Engage: Solidify your relationships. Sponsored posts on social media that address concerns the client could have or encourages them to ask questions are a great tool for this stage.
- Action: Do business with the customers. Inspire your potential customers to buy your products or services. Call-to-action is a great tool for your business website to encourage the client to make a purchase. Offering discounts is another good way to make them purchase from you.
- Advocacy: Customer service is now very much essential for building a successful business. Your customer may need your suggestions before or after purchasing. You must help your customer solve any kind of issue regarding your business.
Funnels are extremely important for turning your anonymous traffic into customers on automation. You need to understand each stage and implement all of them as a process.
4. Build Your Buyer Persona:
You need to know who your target customer is. Buyer personas will help you know your potential customers better. The better you understand your customer behavior, the better you can serve. You can tailor your products & content easily according to your customer needs. Put yourself in the place of a buyer. Now think about what kind of features & facilities make you convinced to purchase the products or services. Now you can make some assumptions about what would appeal to a customer.
- Create a narrative: Learn about your customer interest. From where they shop? Which social media do they use? What kind of marketing channel can be used to reach your audience?
- Be Specific: What kind of product the person is interested in? What are their preferences? How can you meet their expectations?
- What are the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services?
These are the very important questions you need to answer. You can use Google Analytics to learn about the demography of your target audience.
5. Locate your customers:
This is another important step that is used for determining your marketing channels. For example, you are selling web hosting Your prospective customer may:
- Search web hosting service on Google and find your website on the top pages.
- Read a blog where you are featured.
- Find you on a sponsored advertisement on social media such as Facebook.
- Opt-in your email campaign featuring an option to buy your web hosting service at a discounted price.
- If you have enough information about customer location, it will be easy to run your digital marketing campaign.
6. Set your digital marketing budget:
Before starting your digital marketing campaign, you need to set your digital marketing budget. When you determine your budget, you can distribute it into your marketing channels based on your focus. If you are trying to get organic traffic, you need to invest in content marketing and SEO.
7. Make your content marketing plan:
You need to create a specific content plan for each marketing channel. Determine your content to attract your audience. You should have a comprehensive strategy that is made up of a series of steps to deliver a complete message to your potential customers. You need to maintain a specific schedule so that all actions taken by you can be measured properly.
Content Strategy Checklist:
- Keyword Strategy: determine the keywords you want to cover up in your content.
- Set up the content calendar: You need to create your schedule for publishing your content. Your content calendar should be specific. The calendar should include the topic, meta keyword, publishing date, author, tags, etc.
- Breakdown your schedule into the year, month, week, and daily basis.
- Specify social media content: You need to determine what kind of content you want to publish on which social media channels. And also think about the frequency of publishing content.
- Marketing automation tools: There are various automation tools out there that can save your time and effort. Once your content strategy is ready, you can use these tools.
8. Track your results:
Monitor customer feedback and measure the digital marketing performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. You can use different tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and so on to measure your performance.
Building a digital marketing strategy that includes all eight of these steps will allow you to understand the whole process and the impact of digital marketing on your business. Keep in mind that this is a step-by-step process and don’t skip any step. You can locate your customers without building buyer personas. You can’t think about content types until you’ve crafted your marketing channels. If you are focusing on marketing your business digitally, you need some experts for execution.
Saief is the founder and CEO of VernalWeb, a fast growing web hosting company. Saief is a digital marketing enthusiast. He’s on a valiant quest to discover effective marketing strategies then share those secrets with VernalWeb users.
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