Building your strategy from the ground up could be overwhelming. What if your strategy doesn’t work? What if it fails to drive conversions? These are but some of the questions that typically hound marketers who are tasked to create a digital marketing strategy from scratch. These points may be valid, but instead of worrying about problems that do not even exist yet, what you need to do is to get over your initial anxieties and think of this as an opportunity to grow and scale your business.
Steps in Creating a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
The most important factor when you create a digital marketing strategy is to be able to draw a clear picture of what your strategy aims to achieve and how you can get there. Here are the steps you need to take to help you do just that:
Decide on your SMART goals.
Every plan needs a goal — that much is a given. It’s easy to come up with a lot; however, when it comes to starting your online marketing strategy, you need to make sure that these goals are SMART goals. SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These goals are crucial because it gives purpose and direction to your strategy. They also prove to be useful in helping you keep track of your strategy’s performance so you can improve and refine later on, when necessary.
Do your research.
Do you really need to do a thorough research before devising your strategy? The short answer is yes. A sharp and sound digital marketing plan is one that is based on research and analysis. The current trends in your industry, your competitors, and your target market are just some of the things you need to review and analyze scrupulously.
INDUSTRY TRENDS
Industry trends constantly change as they are heavily influenced by a myriad of factors. Keep in mind that you have no control over these factors. This is why you need to stay in the loop and find out what the trends are so that you may incorporate these into your strategy. Be extra careful when reviewing and analyzing these trends, though, because only a few of them will suit your business.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
According to an article from KickOffLabs, you need to keep a close eye on your competition. Look at how your competitors are doing their marketing. This would help you avoid costly marketing mistakes in the long run. More than anything, it would also help you anticipate their response to shifts in market demands. If you neglect reviewing and analyzing your competitors’ marketing efforts, you could easily fall into the trap of duplicating their strategy, including the parts that neither brought in substantial traffic nor conversions.
CUSTOMER RESEARCH
Finally, do invest a lot of time and effort into thoroughly studying your target market. Create a buyer persona to represent your ideal customers. By knowing who they are, what their problems and pain points are, and how you can reach them digitally, it will be easier for you to attract and engage your target market and move them along in the buyer’s journey.
Identify your value proposition.
How well do you know your value proposition? To create a digital marketing strategy, you need to have a clear view of your value proposition and how you can communicate this properly to your target market. Be clear on what makes your business unique and why your customers will want to choose you over your competitors. Then, find effective ways to get the message across through your company’s website and your other marketing collaterals.
Set a budget.
How much are you willing to spend on your marketing activities? The Digital Marketing Institute reiterates the importance of sticking to your marketing budget. In this next step, you need to create a working budget for your digital marketing expenses. Be clear on the financial parameters so you will not go over your funds. Keeping a close eye on the outflow of your money will push you to make better use of it. As we know, more strategic allocations lead to a substantial increase in traffic and conversions.
BUILD AN OPTIMIZED WEBSITE.
A website is your company’s digital storefront. In most cases, it is your customers’ first point of interaction with your brand. To impress your prospects and to interest them in finding out what your company has to offer, the bare minimum is that you need to build an optimized website that aligns with your brand’s image and adheres to its branding guidelines.
Furthermore, it needs to be useful and relevant to your target audience.
A highly effective website has highly functional navigation bars, readable texts, and call-to-actions that are strategically placed. It should be at par with the modern standards in enhanced web experience. The website should adapt a modern look and feel while still making it easy for website visitors to explore the pages. The codes should be thoroughly checked for errors to ensure navigation efficiency as this would further help in driving conversions. It should also be search-friendly and mobile responsive so as to cater to your on-the-go audience.
CREATE DIGITAL CONTENT.
Brands typically include content marketing when they create a digital marketing strategy because they acknowledge its crucial role in tapping a targeted audience. As a rule of thumb, you cannot simply publish random content in your website. You need to develop ones that are well-written, relevant, and informative. These are invaluable in attracting and engaging with your target market, in influencing conversions, and in strengthening brand loyalty. To that end, you need to plan, develop, and publish digital content regularly in order to experience the benefits of content marketing.
Here’s a tip: Create a content calendar to keep your writing on schedule. Make sure you know and understand your buyer persona before developing your content. Otherwise, you will not be able to connect well with your audience.
DEFINE YOUR DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS.
In the previous item, we established that content marketing is an integral part of your digital marketing strategy. Once you have created your digital content, the next thing to do is to distribute these across different channels. Social media and email are two of the most common distribution channels used by many brands today.
To find out which distribution channel is the best one to use for your company, explore each option and see how these align with your audience. Choose the channels that are most frequented by your audience to ensure that you would be able to reach them easily. Once you have set up your channels, get ready to publish, then evaluate how your content performed across your chosen distribution channels. Make the necessary changes based on the results.
Improve your online visibility.
A successful digital marketing strategy is one that has a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy in place. SEO is the process involved in making your website visible to your audience. The goal of SEO is to make sure that your website is among the first ones to catch your customer’s attention when they are in search of a product or service related to your business. By making it to the top of the search results pages, you will have the opportunity to promote your products and services to your prospects ahead of your competitors.
Of course, it is important to note that there are many things to consider before taking a leap into SEO. The first and the most important item to tick off your list is your keywords. SEO makes use of keywords to make brands visible to their porpstecs online. In order to drive traffic, you need to come up with the most relevant set of keywords for your brand. You can identify these keywords by conducting a comprehensive keyword research.
Once you have the right set of keywords, you can proceed with optimizing your website content for search, and pursuing your onpage and offpage SEO tactics to improve searchability. Note that the specific onpage and offpage tactics to use would depend on the strategy that you deem would work best for your brand.
SET METRICS.
In order to gauge the effectiveness of your strategy, you need to know your numbers. Disruptive Advertising recommends troubleshooting your marketing efforts through Key Performance Indicators or metrics that accurately show the performance of your campaigns. Some of the more important KPIs you need to keep in check are web traffic sources, CTRs, online conversion rates, returning visitors, bounce rate, cost per lead, and lead conversion rates.
With these KPIs in-the-know, you will have a clearer direction with your campaigns. Furthermore, you will also be able to identify the non converting items you need to change as well as the highly effective ones that are driving conversions and maximising your marketing ROI.
Remember to keep your KPIs realistic so you wouldn’t end up getting frustrated every time you see the results.
Devising a digital marketing strategy could be scary because, admittedly, new things may sometimes instill a certain amount of fear and anxiety in most of us. Don’t wallow in these negativities and instead, focus on the task at hand. Most of all, keep in mind that the process you follow when you create a digital marketing strategy is crucial to the overall success of your campaigns.
At Gohan Concepts, we believe in the balance of simplified branding and modern marketing in pushing your business to its full potential. For more information about our company, click here to visit our website.