DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY:-
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A Digital Marketing Strategy is a plan or course of action towards achieving set marketing goals. Goals are determined by what your business objectives are and in order of priority. Once these goals are set, digital marketing campaigns will be developed and executed to achieve them.
A digital marketing strategy is different from a digital marketing campaign. When talking about digital marketing strategy, we are referring to a master plan or a blueprint to achieve a long-term or macro goal. Campaigns on the other hand are the specific tactics used to achieve more micro, short-term goals within the digital marketing strategy.
Importance of Digital Marketing strategy:
focusing on a specific audience and identifying that audience’s needs, interests and pain points, will help deliver a more effective plan in achieving your marketing objectives.
A digital marketing strategy helps in many ways for example:-
- A strategy gives you direction
- It enables you to better understand your market share
- It helps you develop an effective value proposition
- You’ll better understand your customers
- Avoid time and resource-wasting duplication
- Avoid the risks that come with disintegration
How to Structure a Successful Digital Marketing Plan?
A digital marketing strategy is a step by step, actionable process that works towards achieving the digital marketing goals of your company.
Digital marketing is accomplished through digital marketing channels. These channels include social media, digital publishing and paid, earned or owned media.
A digital marketing strategy involves a very deliberate decision-making process regarding your digital marketing goals and the most appropriate channels that will help you achieve them.
How to create Digital Marketing strategy In 10 steps?
1. Create a Customer Persona
Customer personas can provide tremendous value and insight to your organization. Your customer persona needs to be relevant to your brand and whatever you're selling. Start with basic information like their name and age. Then get more specific with their job, income, location, and living situation. Find out how their interests, hobbies, lifestyle, and personal life impact their buying behavior.
Buyer personas are a term used to describe the ideal customer that can be defined by surveying and contacting the pre-defined target group. To define your own buyer persona, you can make use of online tools like MakeMyPersona and Persona Creator.
2.Set A Goal
Before you start strategizing, you must ask yourself what it is that you hope to achieve with your marketing strategy. Sounds simple, but this step requires you to come up with a very detailed and specific set of goals.
We Use Smart Criteria to do this:
SMART is a well-established tool that you can use to plan and achieve your goals. SMART offers the following criteria for setting goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
By making sure the goals you set are aligned with the five SMART criteria you have an anchor on which to base all of your focus and decision-making.
3. Strategies and creativity
The strategy gives us a global vision of the different actions we should take to establish a link to our client, which directs us towards the goals we have defined, based on the conclusions from the previous steps. To organize this, it is very useful to divide our actions according to the conversion funnel: logically, it’s not the same talking to someone who has never heard of our brand, as talking to a regular customer.
4. Focus on Blogging
Effective blogging is an essential part of an overall digital marketing strategy. It drives traffic to your website, generates new leads for your company, helps you nurture those leads, and gives you increased insight into your customer base.
If you have a regularly updated blog that the visitors find useful, it means that your website will be easily found through the search engines and can be used as a platform for your marketing campaign.
5. Evaluate your existing digital marketing presence
This step will help you understand what to focus on to achieve your current goals.
Businesses all around the world are investing more in digital marketing to gain a competitive edge over their competitors in the digital world.
Step 1: Know your Search Engine Ranking.
Step 2: Social Media Presence.
Step 3: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) compared to competetores .
Step 4: Website Metrics.
6.Understand the digital sales funnel
A Digital sales funnel is a step-by-step process that allows you to bring your potential customer one step closer to your offer and a buying decision through a series of marketing actions like automated emails, videos, articles and landing pages that will do the selling for you.
For your digital marketing funnel to succeed you will need specific emails built out that will automatically send to your audience at the different stages of the journey.
How A Sales Funnel Works: We know a sales funnel, like a real funnel, is widest at the top and the narrowest at the bottom. It’s because you keep losing prospects as they move from one stage to another.
Each funnel pushes qualified leads into the next stage and removes those that aren’t a good fit for your products or services.
- Discovery/Awareness Phase: Make potential clients aware of your existence. For example, through ads on social media or ranking well in search engines.
- Interest Phase: Raise interest about your brand. Who are you and what sets you apart from your competition? Some common digital tools for this stage are features about your brand in digital publications and videos.
- Decision Phase: Solidify your relationships. Sponsored posts on social media that address concerns the client could have or encourages them to ask questions is a great tool for this stage.
- Action Phase: Do business with the client. A tool for this stage is implementing calls-to-action for the client to make a purchase. For example, incentivizing a purchase by offering discounts in ads or emails for the client.
7. Make it Easy for Customers to Reach Your
Online business is all about connecting with potential customers, so traffic on your website should be high to ensure positive outcomes. Your digital marketing strategy therefore should ensure that your leads and visitors are not exerting unnecessary effort to connect with you. Engaging with your customers is invaluable for your business.
8. Use right Technology
When it comes to technology, the online world offers an endless amount of possibilities that are undergoing constant growth. So, how do we choose the best tools to implement our digital marketing plan? There is no “correct answer”, but if we have a clear idea of our budget, the expected return on our investment and the places where our audience interacts, we will have a good head-start when it comes to decision time. Don’t hesitate in asking for guidance from an expert who can explain in depth the pros and cons of each option.
9. Confirm Your Differentiators
If your company is not different from your competitors, you should not expect high profits. Make sure you change (or reinforce) your difference from the others by talking to your customers and asking them why they selected your company. Every company has a unique selling proposition, an attribute that sets you apart from the competition. Do the research and work to find out what that is. Then, fix your existing differentiators if needed. Incorporate this message into your content marketing campaigns.
10.The KPI (analysing our results):-
To define the success of our online efforts, we should have several KPI or “Key Performance Indicators” under control. These are metrics that are directly related to the results of our business, which can be easily obtained through the numerous tools offered by digital statistics. An example of a KPI could be the acquisition cost of a new client of our e-commerce.
You now have your online marketing ready to go, but the job is not yet done. It is vital to establish periodical control tests of your KPI and to analyse the results according to them, in order to be sure that your marketing efforts are successful, and to continuously improve your plan day by day. Good luck!
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