Your business’s presence online is important, and if you want to build it up (Which you should), you need to have a digital marketing strategy. Also known as a web marketing strategy, it will give you the ability to grow as a company, driving needed traffic to your web pages. This will earn not only leads but conversions too.
You are probably wondering, “What is a digital marketing strategy?”. Well, we are going to talk about what a digital marketing strategy is, some of the basics, and how you can create one. So, keep reading to find out how you can bring in more traffic with a digital marketing strategy.
Defining Digital Marketing Strategy
To answer the above question right off the bat, a digital marketing strategy is a series of actions that you take online using marketing channels to reach certain goals. These channels include: Earned, Paid, and Owned Media. These plans will help you launch and build up your only marketing strategy with greater success.
All that being said, there aren’t any two marketing strategies that are identical. In fact, your business’s marketing strategy online will be relevant to your industry, fitting your needs, and takes a lot of different approaches. For a robust plan for online marketing, you need to set goals under the following types:
- Long-term Goals
- Medium-term Goals
- Short-term Goals
You are able to develop your plan to better suit the needs of your business with these three types of goals. Your medium-term and short-term goals will help drive you to your long-term goals.
Are Digital Marketing Campaigns The Same As Digital Marketing Strategies?
The simple answer to this and the only real answer is no. They are not the same at all. Digital marketing campaigns are the actions taken to achieve the goals you set when developing your digital marketing strategy. In order to have a successful campaign, you need to build a digital marketing strategy.
An online strategy helps to build up the success of the web campaigns, and if the strategy is top-notch, you will get an increase in revenue and leads.
4 Steps To Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy
Now that we have defined digital marketing strategies let’s get into how you can build one. Below we cover the important basics of building a digital marketing strategy while helping you learn how to create one. These are 4 steps you need to take to create a digital marketing strategy.
Buyer Personas
The most important thing to know when you are developing a digital marketing strategy is who you want to target. If you don’t know your demographic, how will you create the right strategy?
A reliable way to establish your target audience is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona represents individuals that would be interested in your services/products.
Most companies have people interested in their business for different reasons. Making buyer personas will better help you target all these people in customized ways. It gives you a greater understanding of those who would be interested in your business.
Every strong digital marketing strategy begins with a detailed buyer persona. As long as you have an idea of your perfect customer, you can use personas to figure out the best way to target them. But, that leads to the question, “How do you create a persona?”
You need to take your customer data and base the personas off of that. Make sure you interview and research the audience and learn as much as you can about them. Make sure you only use real data to create your personas, that way, you are guaranteeing that you don’t make the wrong move in approaching them. Demographic information you should document is:
- Career
- Income
- Age
- Location
There is more personal information you could learn that will help you, too, such as:
- Challenges
- Hobbies
- Goals
- Interests
With this information, you are able to craft the right buyer personas. They will help you form the right strategy, making it easy to identify the right channels to use in order to reach the right audience.
Set Goals
When you are developing an internet marketing action plan, you need to realize how important it is to have goals. You have to have something you want to achieve with your strategy before you can actually make it. You can look at goals as mile markers to success or as something to shoot for to better understand and develop the strategy.
Like we mentioned before, there are three types of goals; Long, Medium, and Short term. They should each align with the goals of your business. Whether you just want to increase conversions by a certain percentage or bring in more traffic, your goals should be realistic and help you achieve the ultimate goals of success.
Things to establish when setting goals:
- How You Measure Achievement
- How You Reach Your Goals
- And Most Importantly, What You Wish To Achieve
Just Remember: You want your goals to be S.M.A.R.T.
What is S.M.A.R.T?
- Specific- You need to be as specific as possible with your goals; if they are too vague, you won’t have anything to reach for.
- Measurable- When setting goals, make sure you measure them to see if you can accomplish that goal. Like measuring the number of customers, you gain to meet the goal of earning a specified number of customers.
- Attainable- The goals need to be realistic. You can’t say your short-term goal is to earn 1000 new conversions; instead, set a short-term goal to earn 50 more by the end of the week.
- Relevant- Your goals need to be relevant to your campaign and business. If you aren’t running an e-mail campaign, your goals wouldn’t be to gather e-mail subscribers.
- Timely- It is important to have a time frame for these goals. Doing so will give you a better understanding of how your campaign is working and where you can improve. Time dictates all goals, so make sure the time frame you set is realistic for the goals you set.
Following S.M.A.R.T, you can create better targets for your marketing strategy. You will see successful results when your goals are set to these standards. Moreso, goals set by these reasonable standards will help establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the campaign.
KPIs are basic figures that help you to measure your campaign’s success. You will get to look at metrics, such as; Bounce Rate and Pageviews. This will showcase your success, or lack thereof, if your campaign efforts aren’t planned well enough.
Goals will help you make a digital marketing plan that will work.
Online Marketing Strategy Auditing
In order to improve the strategy process, you have to audit your digital marketing plan. You do this to better understand how the campaign is functioning, showing you areas in need of improvement. When you audit, you need to look at three specific types of media:
- Paid
- Owned
- Earned
Paid Media
The name says it all; it is media that you pay for in order to advertise your brand. With paid media, you are mainly looking at paid advertisements, such as PPC or Social Media Ads. The way paid media works is you are paying for your ad to be seen by the audience you found to be relevant from your personas.
If you are using paid media in your strategy, make sure you analyze the tactics first. Learn how they work to drive valuable leads for your company. It is an ideal way to see if your efforts are paying off.
Owned Media
Owned media is media that your has your name attached to it. If you create it, it is owned media. Such media includes:
- Website
- Blogs
- Social Media Profiles
- Images That You Make
You need to monitor your owned media to ensure that it is getting the response you want. You want people to be interacting with your social profiles, reading your blogs, and spending as much time on your website as possible. Analyzing your media is crucial to driving results. If improvements need to be made, you will be able to identify them to increase your audience’s interaction with your site.
Earned Media
The only control over earned media is the impression you make on the public. Earned media is any media that is produced by your audience as a result of your advertising and promotion efforts.
Examples of earned media:
- Reviews
- Articles
You can’t pay for earned media. Anytime you receive praise about your company, it is earned media. So make sure you audit your earned media in order to determine the number of articles, awards, and reviews about your business that are out there. The feedback received will help you determine what is working and where you could improve.
Create a Budget
A budget is something that needs to be established before you can launch your campaign. You need to know what you can spend and all the resources that you have at your disposal. Don’t stretch yourself beyond your means of planning an digital marketing strategy.
Each campaign requires its own budget. Dividing your budget across your multiple campaigns will let you know what to invest in each of them. This will balance your resources for the maximum success of each campaign.
It is easy to over-invest if you try to do an overall budget for your campaigns. You don’t want to do that because your campaigns might need to be altered for success, and if you over-invest, you will most likely run out of resources and won’t be able to reach your goals.
Your resources need to be established too. The most essential resource is people. You have to figure out how many people you are going to be working with on your marketing campaigns.
The next resource is tools.
Marketing tools, such as Google Analytics, help you organize and manage your campaign. Make sure you can fit them into your budget.
Last note, establishing your resources and budget will allow you to gain clarity on what you have at your disposal before your strategy becomes a campaign.
