People that are interested in making their business grow and have an online presence must create a digital marketing strategy. Having a marketing strategy for your website helps your company grow as it will drive more traffic to your site or page and makes your business earn leads, which will later turn to conversions.
The question is, “What is it” and “How do you go about creating one?”
This post is going to jump right into what it is and how to go about creating it yourself. It will tell you how you, too, can have a successful action plan through digital marketing.
What Exactly Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategy is describing continuous actions that can use online marketing channels to complete the goals they have set for themselves. These may include earned, owned, and paid media. Having an action plan lets you build and even launch an online marketing strategy of your own with success.
There are no two marketing strategies on the internet. A business should have its own unique strategy, one that is going to fit their needs and consists of any different approaches.
Setting your business up with multiple goals, all being different from one another it lets you develop a plan that is best for your business. It is always good to have all three short, medium, and long-term goals as it encourages us to work towards achieving those goals.
What Makes Digital Marketing Strategies and Digital Marketing Campaigns Different?
Once you have learned what digital marketing strategies are, you may begin thinking that it is the same as digital marketing campaigns. However, the two are not the same thing at all. You need to use digital campaigns if you want to achieve your digital strategy goals.
Also, should you be interested in using Internet campaigns in a successful manner, then you must create a digital strategy to work with. It is the online strategy you decide to go with that is going to help with building successful as well as strategic campaigns on the web, and if it is a really good strategy, it is going to help with getting valuable leads and make a revenue for the business.
Only 4-steps To Creating Digital Marketing Strategies
Since you now know what the digital marketing strategy is, start developing one for your business.
Continue reading if you want to know how to develop an action plan using digital marketing using these 4-steps:
Determine Buyer Persona
It is significant to know who your target is going to be if you want your online launch to be successful for your digital marketing strategy. If you do not know of the kinds of people that are interested in your products and/or services, then you cannot have a successful launch for your online marketing strategy.
If you want to find out who your target audience is, then the best way to go about that is by creating a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is simply the personas of those who show interest in your business.
Nearly all businesses will have several different types of people who are interested in the services and products they handle. By creating personas of those people is going to help you to better understand them.
You will be able to strengthen your marketing strategy if, at first, you create a detailed persona of a robust buyer. When you know the type of person that makes an ideal customer, you will have the ability to target them with things that appeal to them.
What Is the Best Way to Create the Persona?
Use current customer data for basing the buyer’s personas from. To do this, you will need to research your business audience and do an interview to learn things about them. This lets you collect real data from them individually, which will make certain the same mistake will not happen again (making the wrong assumptions).
It is crucial that you document demographic information such as:
- Job
- Income
- Location
- Age
You also need to get some personal information, like:
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Goals
- Challenges
The above information should give you enough to begin your personas for the business. It is these personas that are going to shape the strategy to use as well as to determine the channels best to use for you to reach the people.
Set Your Goals
When you decide to create a digital marketing action plan, it will be important that you have goals. Remember, a strategy cannot be created unless you know the goals you want to reach. When you set goals to go with your campaign, you are going to know what it is you must accomplish in your online marketing.
Stay focused on the short term, medium-term, and long-term goals.
Both your business goals and your goals need to be aligned. It does not matter if you are trying to earn a specific number of conversions or to obtain leads; you are going to need to create strategic goals for achieving the overall ones.
The following must be established while setting your goals:
- The things you want to achieve
- A date you want to reach it by
- In what manner you are going to measure your achievement
You will also need to create S.M.A.R.T goals to use with your digital marketing strategy.
S.M.A.R.T stands for:
Specific – The goals you set are the things you want to achieve for the business. Instead of setting goals like “new customers,” you want to say something more like “earn a certain number of leads.”
Measurable – You want to measure the goals you set to see if you accomplished the goal.
Attainable – Do not set unrealistic goals. Set competitive goals, not ones you know would never happen.
Relevant – Make sure your goals relate to the things you are trying to accomplish for the business and the campaign. They need to align with the things you want to accomplish.
Timely – You will need to set up a time frame for accomplishing your goals. Regardless if it is to take days, weeks, months, or years, it is crucial to have a time frame.
S.M.A.R.T goals are going to help in creating the best targets to work with your digital marketing action plans. You are going to be seeing more of the successful results from your campaign if the goals you have set can be measured, even knocked out.
Your S.M.A.R.T goals are going to help in establishing key performance indicators (KPI’s) that will be useful for your campaign.
KPI’s are figures; these figures assist in identifying as well as establishing the way to measuring the success of your campaign. Just look at metrics as though they were a bounce rate or maybe page views, which is going to showcase whether your campaign is being successful or not.
If you establish goals, you will then know how to go about creating your digital marketing strategy, one that will work.
Analyze Existing Online Marketing Strategies
To improve upon the process of your digital marketing strategies, you need to audit it.
You must understand the way your campaign functions to improve it. Look at these three different kinds of media on your website: owned, earned, and paid.
Earned Media
Free media for your business is earned media.
This type of media is from the publicity stemming from the advertising and promotions you have put into it. It consists of all materials and content about your business, which you did not create yourself.
Such media could come from reviews, articles related to your business, or rewards, etc. For instance, let us say you earn an award for being a grade-A workplace, well, that is earned media. It is not a spot you can pay for, for it is a spot you must receive.
Whenever an individual writes something good about a business, and they were not paid to do so, it is considered earned media.
To find out the number of awards, reviews, and articles you have received for your business, you will want to audit the current earned media for your business. By examining this area, you will be able to learn things that will earn even more media.
Owned Media
Owned media is media that belongs to your business. It is all media that you create yourself, and media that is attached to your name in some way. It can include social media profiles, images produce by you, blogs, and your website.
If you have owned media, you need to analyze the strategies you currently must make sure they are working for your business. Does your site have people coming and engaging with your social profiles, do they spend a lot of time on your site, and do they take time to read your blogs?
It is important that you analyze any owned media. You must make sure that it is driving traffic to your site. This lets you know where you need improvements, if any, to your owned media so you can increase the number of engagements you have to your site.
Paid Media
This accounts for all media that you pay to advertise your business. This mostly consists of paid advertisements, such as social media ads and/or pay-per-view (PPC) ads. Any time you are running social media ads or PPC ads, you must pay if you want to appear in front of other leads that may be interested in your business.
If you use paid media in your marketing strategy, you should analyze them to find out if they are driving traffic to your site. It is a good way to go about finding out if your paid media is paying off.
It is crucial for you to audit the business’s current marketing efforts so that you will know what works to drive traffic to your site. It helps you to learn the things that work and the things that need improvement. Keeping up with the efforts your putting into it helps to set up your digital marketing strategy to achieve success.
For instance, if you were working to increase conversions by 20% in only a quarter, you could look at the online marketing efforts you have made, and you may find the PPC ads to be the most effective. This means it might be helpful in reaching your goal if you invest more money into the PPC ads.
News flash, auditing is useful for locating gaps within your campaign.
You could discover areas that need new content or design elements which ay give the users an enhanced experience and/or optimization that would improve your ranking with Google search results.
If you did an in-depth audit, it would let you see the digital marketing efforts that are working the best. This is going to give you a better understanding of the way your campaign is currently working and how you can improve on your future campaigns.
Determine A Marketing Budget
It is extremely important that you know the amount you will be able to put out on your campaign, including the resources you are going to have when setting up your digital marketing strategy. You would not want to end up having an online marketing strategy you do not have enough money for.
You will first need to create your marketing efforts budget. This should consist of a separate budget for each individual campaign. By separating them in this manner, it will make sure that both methods will have a budget and that you are going to know the amount you will be able to spend on each of them.
While having just one budget to cover all your marketing efforts, you could end up investing too much in one and not enough in another.
Besides your budget, you are going to also want to establish what your resources are going to be. Keeping in mind that people will be the most important resource of all. Then, you are going to have to figure out the number of people you are going to have to work your online marketing campaigns.
Let us not forget that tools are another resource.
If you use marketing tools such as Google Analytics, which helps to run and/or analyze those campaigns, this will be something else to take into consideration that comes from your budget.
Prior to Launching your strategy, you will want to establish your resources and your budget, so you know what you must work with.
