Digital Marketing refers to achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies and media, that include company website, Mobile apps, Social media company pages, Search Engines, Advertising, etc., Through this blog, we'll define what digital marketing strategy is, how to create, and how to implement it.
What’s Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a set of techniques that use online marketing channels to achieve a set of goals. These channels can include owned, paid, and earned media. A digital marketing action plan lets you build and launch your online
marketing strategy with success.
A digital marketing strategy differs from a digital marketing campaign. When mentioning digital marketing strategy, we are referring to a master plan or a blueprint to achieve a long-term or macro goal. Campaigns on the other hand are the specific tactics used to achieve more micro, short-term goals within the digital marketing strategy
What’s the importance of Digital Marketing Strategy?
Owning a Digital Marketing Strategy is as essential as having a plan of action to achieve any goal. It fully improves the workflow execution, allowing great effectiveness while overlooking various areas to review data analytics and acting upon them appropriately.
It creates a way for constant enhancement in the different digital marketing strategies extending from search marketing (SEO/SEM), conversion rate optimization (website user experience), email marketing & social media marketing to build towards your business goal, gaining new customers and building huge relationships with existing ones.
Your business also requires a challenging and viable content marketing strategy to reach and convert more clients through grasping the power of online content, while integrating the different digital marketing channels with traditional media.
As businesses carry on with adopting digital change in their core operations and in new channels of reaching customers, having a superior digital marketing strategy is essential for this success.
Key Elements of Digital Marketing Strategy:
Some key elements of a digital marketing strategy include:
- Identifying the brand: employ brand guidelines to identify your brand. Review the Unique Selling Points (USPs) of your business.
- Enlarging customer personas: Recognize demographic information like age, gender, location, as well as the inspirations that push people to select the products and services. Use Google Analytics to help in generating buyer’s persona and separate them according to the keywords in organic traffic.
- Defining S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals.) marketing objectives and KPIs: E.g. Achieve a 30% increase in leads generated from contact form within the upcoming 7 months.
- Recognizing target markets: Use market research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Facebook Audience Insights to conduct market research and identify potential target markets
- Executing competitive analysis: Use web and social analytics tools like similarweb, Semrush, and Social Bakers to analyze your competitors and create a SWOT analysis.
- Managing and assigning resources properly to achieve objectives: Resources include manpower (in-house team or outsource, external marketing agencies) and budget.
- Revising and optimizing campaign performance: Use digital marketing analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track, measure, and report your digital marketing campaigns’ performance
How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategy includes putting marketing objectives dependent on the analysis of market information and target audiences, choosing digital marketing channels and platforms, regulating channel-specific delivery methods, and identifying macro marketing KPIs to think about the performance of the digital marketing strategy.
On the opposite hand, an example of a digital marketing campaign revolves around generating brand awareness (micro objective) by launching a viral marketing campaign (tactic) on a particular social media channel like Facebook. Short term (micro) KPIs are accustomed to keep track of the progress and success of the digital marketing campaign.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy:
1- Build your Buyer Persona:
For any marketing strategy — digital or not — you have to determine who you're marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are developed upon precise buyer personas, and your first step is to build them.
Buyer personas represent your perfect customer(s) and can be built by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business's target segment.
It's significant to notice that this information should be based upon real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can lead your marketing strategy to proceed in the wrong path.
To get a clear image of your buyer persona, your research pool should involve a combination of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.
But what kind of information should you collect for your buyer persona(s) to build your digital marketing strategy?
It depends on your businesses — it's likely to vary depending on whether you're B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a high-cost or low-cost product.
Here are some starting points that you can tailor to your particular business:
1- Quantitative and Demographic Details:
- Location: Use web analytics tools to define where your website traffic is coming from.
- Age Group: According to your business, it's best to collect this data by defining trends in your existing prospect and contact database.
- Income: It's perfect to collect information like personal income through persona research interviews, as people might be hesitant to share these details via online forms.
- Job Title: You can get from job titles a well-constructed idea of your existing customer base and is most relevant to B2B companies.
2- Qualitative Information
- Goals: Based on what challenge your product or service resolves, you might already have a fair idea of the goals of your buyer persona. Connect yo
ur expectations by talking to real clients and internal sales and customer service representatives.
- Challenges: Talk to clients, sales and customer service representatives, and other customer-facing employees to gain an idea of the common challenges your target audience faces.
Interests: Question your target audience about interests and what they like to do. For example, if you're a beauty brand, it's important to know if large segments of your audience are also interested in your products and beauty content.
Priorities: Speak to customers and target audience to identify what's most important to them in relation to your business.
By collecting all of these pieces of information, you'll be able to generate your buyer personas that are accurate and highly-valuable for your business.
3- Define Your Goals and the Digital Marketing tools you'll use:
Your marketing goals must be tied back to the basic goals of your business.
For instance, if your business's goal is to increase online revenue by 30%, your marketing team's goal may be to generate 60% more leads via the website than the previous year to achieve that success.
You’ll need to establish S.M.A.R.T goals for your digital marketing strategy.
S.M.A.R.T stands for:
- Specific: Your goals are detailed to what you want to complement. You don’t want to set unclear goals like, “get new clients,” Instead, “earn X amount of leads.”
- Measurable: When you identify your goals, you need to measure whether you’ve achieved that goal. When you create a goal such as, “earn X amount of customers,” you can measure how many customers you gain to see if you’ve achieved that goal.
- Attainable: Many organizations make the marketing mistake of setting goals that aren’t realistic. You wouldn’t set a goal to earn 300 leads if that isn’t workable for your business. Rather set challenging goals but not impossible to achieve
- Relevant: Your goals should be relevant to what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign and your business. For example you can't set "X number of email subscribers" as a goal, if you're not running an email campaign . Your goals must align with what you want to achieve.
- Timely: When you set goals, it’s essential that you build a timeframe for completing them. You must have a deadline for reaching your goals. Whether it’s weeks, months, or years, make sure your goals have a timeframe.
S.M.A.R.T goals will assist you in building better targets for your digital marketing action plan. You will notice more successful results with your campaign when you set goals that you can measure and knock out.
Your S.M.A.R.T goals will also help you build key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaign.
KPIs are figures that guide you to identify and establish how to measure the success of your campaign. You want to view the metrics, such as bounce rate or page views, that will show whether you’re succeeding with your campaign.
4- Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.
While reviewing your existing digital marketing channels and assets to spot what to incorporate in your digital marketing strategy, it is important to contemplate the large picture — this may prevent you from feeling overwhelmed or confused.
Collect what you have got, and classify each asset in an exceedingly spreadsheet, so you've got a particular picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.
Owned, Earned, Paid Media Framework
To do this functionally, use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to classify the digital "vehicles", assets, or channels you're already using and determine what's a decent suitable for your strategy.
- Owned Media
This refers to the digital assets your brand or company has — whether that's your website, social media profiles, or blog content. Owned channels are the channels that your business has a full control over.
This can also include some off-site content you own that won't be hosted on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).
- Earned Media
Earned media is the exposure you earn through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether that's content you've published on other websites (e.g. guest posts), PR work you have been doing, or the customer experience you've delivered. Earned media is the recognition you receive as a result of these efforts.
You can earn media by getting press mentio
ns and positive reviews still as by people sharing your content via their networks (e.g. social media channels).
- Paid Media
Paid media means any vehicle or channel you pay money on to know the eye of your buyer personas.
This involves Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (e.g. sponsored posts on other websites), or the other medium through which you pay in exchange for increased visibility.
5- Build your content plan.
Your Content Plan should serve your goals and what y
our business wants to achieve.
This should include:
- Title
- Format
- Goal
- Promotional channels
- Why you're creating the content
- Priority level of the content
This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if you're planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you're producing it yourself.
Establish Your Budget:
When building a digital marketing strategy, it’s important to state how much you can pay and what resources you have for your campaign.
First, you’ll set a budget for your marketing efforts. It performs effectively if you create a budget for each campaign. This division guarantees that each method has a separate budget, and you know how much you can spend on each one.
In case you only have one budget for all your marketing efforts, you may end up over-investing into one digital marketing tactic.
Beside your budget, you’ll also need to build your resources. People are one of your most important resources. You must identify the number of people you have to work on your online marketing campaigns. Another important resource is tools.
If you own any marketing tools, like Google Analytics, that assist you in running or analyzing your campaign, you’ll need to take those into account towards your budget and means.
Establish your budget and resources, so you recognize what you have before launching your digital marketing strategy.