There are many components required to build a great digital marketing strategy. In this article, you will learn what you must do to ensure your strategy excels.
Businesses use marketing to expand their visibility to their target demographic, increase engagement, and retain customer loyalty — meaning that companies must develop and implement the best possible marketing strategy in today’s competitive market. However, it’s tricky to create the ideal game plan. After all, no two companies are exactly alike, and not all demographic groups respond to the same marketing tactics. So, what’s a digital marketer to do?
Let’s dig into the hows and whys of digital marketing strategies, how to create a digital strategy, and elements like marketing campaign planning and techniques.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is assessing specific business goals and then developing a plan to establish an Internet presence via online channels like social media, organic search, paid ads, and other web-based mediums like a business’s website. The aim is to use available digital resources and strategies to increase customer numbers and involvement.
Digital marketing strategies come in many forms. For instance:
Content Marketing
In this case, the content consists of infographics, videos, blog posts, and more.
Email Marketing
This form of digital marketing involves creating e-mail campaigns and sending them to new and current customers. Email campaigns are also one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Also called PPC, this strategy involves bidding on keywords that you want your business’s advertising to show up for. Then, your ad pops up when a user’s search uses the keyword.
Search Engine Optimization
Also known as SEO, this involves improving your website’s rank in search engine results. For example, do you know that only 25 percent of web searches go to the second page of the search results?
Social Media Marketing
We’ve already established that marketers should focus their efforts on where so many people are — that’s social media. It could be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, or whatever comes next.
Video Marketing
Everyone likes videos, and video marketing imparts valuable information about your business and its products in an engaging, pleasing way.
Voice SEO
Voice SEO is a newer form of digital marketing that optimizes new and existing website content in voice searches (e.g., Alexa, Siri, Echo).
Why Does Your Business Require a Digital Marketing Strategy?
By this time, we’re sure no one needs to be convinced that the key to a business’s success in today’s market is to go digital. Marketing campaigns are most effective when they focus on where the greatest concentration of people are, and today, everyone’s online.
That may be just a slight exaggeration, but the online audience has been undisputedly growing over the past decade. Furthermore, it’s showing no signs of slowing down! So, if you want to reach many people, you go digital.
But there’s a difference between acknowledging the importance of focusing marketing efforts online and recognizing the need to take a structured, organized approach.
Your business needs a digital marketing strategy because:
- First, it optimizes your marketing efforts. Digital marketing strategies keep your marketers and their efforts organized. Marketing strategies offer structure, eliminate blind guesswork, reduce wasteful redundancies, and increase accountability.
- It gives marketers actual data. This advantage closely relates to optimization. After your marketing department has turned the strategies into action, you will get a healthy amount of data regarding the effectiveness of your plan. Once you have this feedback, your organization can decide which strategies should be implemented in the future.
- It increases Return on Investment (ROI). An organized marketing strategy reduces waste and mistakes and improves turnaround time and intelligent resource usage.
- It gives you a new perspective regarding your customers. Effective digital marketing strategies focus on the customers, incentivizing you to find new ways to engage them and think outside the box. Digital marketing strategies make marketers look at every stage of the buyer’s journey and inspire digital marketers to add more value to the business-customer relationship.
- It motivates your marketing department to learn more. Knowledge is power, and digital marketing strategies strengthen your digital marketing efforts by encouraging you to think through every aspect of your enterprise. It would help to research your target demographic, the competition, and trends so that your strategy is fresh and relevant.
How Do You Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Although is no single universal process for creating a digital marketing strategy, the following steps cover all the bases:
Define the brand
If your business has brand guidelines, use them to define the brand and how it’s to be presented in online campaigns. Consider factors such as proposed value, the brand’s voice, and unique selling points.
Create a buyer persona
Consider the demographic you’re aiming for. Build a profile of your potential customers, including what would motivate them to use your services or products.
SMART goals
Employ Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART) goals to create your marketing strategy. Outline your business’s long- and short-term goals.
Select your digital marketing strategies
Review the abovementioned digital marketing types and determine the most effective. Factor in experiences from previous campaigns. Go with the methods that give the most bang for the buck; don’t just jump on the latest popular bandwagon.
Set up a digital marketing budget
Research digital marketing costs and create a realistic, workable budget for the entire campaign.
Brainstorm the strategies
Here’s where you start planning actual, measurable steps. Set up budgets for each aspect of the marketing campaign and create timelines, deadlines, and outlines.
Launch your digital marketing campaigns
Put your marketing campaign plan into action and launch it across your chosen channels. Make sure each channel has suitable tracking mechanisms in place.
Track the results
Use Google-based tools like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to measure and monitor the campaign’s performance.
What Are the Six Stages of a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Now that we’ve covered creating a digital marketing strategy let’s break down the process into common component stages. There is some overlap with our previous section, and you can consider this information as a continuation and refinement of the ideas presented earlier.
Stage 1: Plan
This stage includes the SMART goals, buyer persona, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis, customer research, etc.
Stage 2: Implementation
Create the content.
Stage 3: Execution
Put the social media marketing strategies into action.
Stage 4: Analysis
Review the data, collect information regarding markets, users, and business opportunities, and evaluate performances.
Stage 5: Reporting
Organize the analysis results into easy-to-read reports and send them to interested parties.
Stage 6: Measuring
Call this a summary. Measure the campaign’s results using marketing ROI (Return on Investment) and use them as a guide to creating actionable items for future improvement.
How to Increase the Impact of Your Digital Marketing Strategy
It would be enough to construct a sound digital marketing strategy, implement it, gather results, and learn from the experience for the next time. But no, it’s not enough. It’s a tough, demanding environment out there, and you follow these five steps to increase your strategy’s overall impact.
- Leverage Automation. Automation is the wave of the future, making our jobs easier and cutting down on time spent on redundant tasks. Use automation to automate customer service operations, manage e-mail lists, and do other grunt work.
- Create Content That Means Something to Your Audience. Personalize your marketing content to your audience. The content should be relevant, valuable, and interesting for the group you’re trying to reach. If your digital marketing campaign is directed at several groups, you must ensure each group has a customized, dedicated message that resonates with them.
- \Use Predictive Analytics. After you collect your data, leverage it through datasets and algorithms to predict and analyze customer behavior. Predictive analytics is ideal for boosting and measuring ROI, as it helps you identify the most effective leads for your customers.
- Keep Evaluating and Reevaluating Your Marketing Strategy. Trends come and go. Social, political, and economic factors are in constant flux. Markets evolve, so your strategy must evolve with it. That’s why you must frequently evaluate your plan.
- Boost Customer Lifetime Value. It’s easier to keep established customers than to get new ones, so leverage those good relationships with your customers to help power your business growth and help promote your marketing campaign. Identify your high-value customers, engage your clients across all platforms, and build a lookalike audience. Lookalike audiences are social network members who share characteristics with another group of members.
Do You Want to Become a Digital Marketing Professional?
The key to a successful career is having the right skills. You can enroll in the UMass Amherst Digital Marketing Bootcamp to upskill or embark on a new career.
This bootcamp teaches you how to create innovative digital marketing campaigns to attract customers and boost engagement. You will learn vital digital marketing skills from top university instructors and challenging projects, including skills in search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, web analytics, email Marketing, mobile marketing, and conversion optimization.
Indeed.com recently reported that digital marketing professionals could earn a yearly average of $60,211, potentially going as high as $100,000.
