A solid digital marketing strategy is required for the optimization and growth of your business.
When it comes to getting a good ROI, an effective digital marketing strategy is essential to take advantage of the growing opportunities on the internet.
This is a beginner approach to an effective digital marketing strategy.
How to Start a Digital Market Strategy: A Step-by-Step Plan
According to a ‘Managing Digital Marketing’ study by Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity.
As a result, these companies miss out on a huge opportunity to be found online, grow their customer base, and boost brand loyalty.
#1. What Do You Desire?
An effective digital marketing strategy begins with being able to answer the question above.
This should be the overriding objective or goal you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve.
Let’s look at 5 possible goals to consider in your digital marketing strategy
1. BRAND AWARENESS?
Do you want more people to be familiar with your brand?
2. LEAD GENERATION?
Do you want to identify, attract your target customers, and as much as practicable transform them into buying customers?
3. ACQUIRE NEW CUSTOMERS? Acquiring new customers is a sure way to grow revenue for your business.
4. INCREASE REVENUE? Perhaps you want to increase your business revenue by launching a new product.
5. INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE? You may want to increase traffic to your website to boost your search engine ranking, sell more products, or bring community members.
Identifying your goals is crucial to planning a successful digital marketing strategy.
#2. SET MEASUREMENTS FOR YOUR GOALS
It’s essential to have specific figures with time limits to measure your goals.
For example, you may want to generate a 60% increase over last year’s sales. Or generate 500 qualified sales leads from your google ads campaign over the next 6 months.
#3. Identify your audience
Every successful digital marketing strategy has a powerful foundation built on effective target audience identification.
If you don’t have a clear picture of who your target audience is, then it will be difficult for you to deliver content and services that will be relevant to them.
Most businesses make the costly mistake of undermining this very important aspect of their digital marketing strategy.
Who is your target audience?
Your target audience is the most likely group of people who will be interested in buying what you have to sell.
So, how do you identify your target audience?
By creating a persona of your target audience.
This means you have to create a profile or a picture that will be based on the characteristics of a real customer.
These characteristics will include age, education, sex, location, interests, marital status, and much more.
By doing this, you’ll be able to establish who your customers are.
With the result that your brand will be able to deliver meaningful, useful, and valuable services to your customers.
See this detailed guide on how to create your target audience persona for an effective digital marketing strategy.
#4. Identify your brand promise.
This is what your brand stands for. It’s your unique or uncommon offering to your customers. And it’s what sets you apart from
your competitors. Putting it simply, it’s the experience your customers get every time they interact with your brand.
I recommend you come up with a brand promise if you haven’t already.
Coca-Cola promised to“To inspire moments of optimism and uplift.”
Virgin: “To be genuine, fun, contemporary, and different in everything we do at a reasonable price.”
BMW: The ultimate driving machine.
These companies have made great promises to their customers.
The question is, “do they deliver on their promises?”
They certainly do!
Your brand promise lives in the minds of your customers, and it creates a connection between your business and your customers.
Therefore, failure to live up to the promise could be extremely devastating for your brand.
Think carefully before making a promise to your customers.
And when you do, ensure that you do everything practicable to fulfill your promise. By doing this, you’ll be able to build trust and loyalty with your brand.
5. Identify your competitors
Identify your competitors and gather information about them. Research their weaknesses and strengths.
What you can learn depends on the level of detail you go into, but just by looking at your competitors, it’s possible to track new trends and corporate positioning.
Studying your competitors gives you a competitive edge over them.
Who are your competitor?
According to HubSpot, you can think of your competition in 3 ways:
Direct competitors: Those brands who are in the same niche as you.
Indirect competitors: They offer slightly different products but compete for the same customers as you.
Comparators: These may have a similar appearance and feel to your brand or maybe other brands that your target customers use frequently.
How to learn about your competition
There are many ways to research your competitors.
– Ask for a trial of their service
-Request a quote to know if your pricing is competitive.
– Sign up to join their email to receive regular updates on their business.
– Attend their webinars.
You should also do research on their customers to find out who they are, what they buy from your competitors, and why they buy.
With the result that you will be able to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.
6. Identify the right digital marketing channel for your business
You have to be strategic in choosing digital marketing channels for your business.
The reason is that this can make or break your business.
Digital marketing channels are wide and can be overwhelming.
The options of digital marketing channels are social media, Seo, your own website, paid ads, displayed advertising, email marketing, native advertising, etc.
Whichever option you choose to go with, consider the marketing channel that will most effectively target your customers.
Otherwise, you might end up wasting your resources.
You don’t want to make the mistake of putting your time, energy, and money on the wrong marketing platform where your customers are not.
7. Consider your budget
Define your budget. How much do you plan to spend? Are you going to depend on organic growth, social media ads or google ads to grow your business?
Your budget can be a constraint to your digital marketing strategy. Therefore, allocate your budget wisely.
8. Make the plan
Now that the groundwork is out of the way, it’s time to put all your information together to plan your marketing strategy.
Effective digital marketing requires testing and replanning your strategy until your goals are achieved.
Conclusion
Every entrepreneur or marketer looking for the ultimate digital marketing solution must have:
Clear-cut goals
Understand his target audience
Research his competitors.
Have a strong brand promise.
Have the required budget.
And map out an effective digital marketing strategy for his digital marketing success.
