Today, if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy then you’re gunning to fail. It is a critical asset in your business model. It gives your brand credibility, outreach potential, and visibility. In this article, we at Domainnetworks consulted experts on digital marketing and summed up some of their best tips on how to create a simple, effective, and incredibly agile digital marketing strategy.
H2: What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan or method that helps you achieve your marketing goals. It includes the different ways you can use digital tactics to reach your target audience. These strategies help you identify what will work best for your business and how to allocate resources to get the best results.
Digital marketing strategies are not just about social media, email, and search engine optimization; they also include offline marketing tactics like branding and public relations. Today, the use of digital marketing to promote products, services, or brands is a must. The strategy differs from traditional marketing, which has been around for a long time — after all, it was the first form of advertising and it still works today — because of the channels and mediums it uses. The former is only focused on newspapers, magazines, television, and radio broadcasts to reach consumers.
H2: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
Marketing has mutated in the last couple of years — and it’s still changing. What it will morph into is anyone’s guess. One of the biggest benefits and advantages is that today, thanks to digital marketing, what was once a secular industry – manned by Mad Men – today is incredibly inclusive. Anyone can access marketing strategies, and adapt them to their needs, as well as budget.
It’s no longer just incredibly pricey billboards and TV ads, but accessible paid content – for example, Facebook ads – as well as organic content. Today, thanks to the likes of Google, and other channels, it’s all about how you use data to reach your customer faster and more efficiently. The importance of paid or free digital marketing is that it allows businesses to grow, reach their target audience, and get more bang for their bucks — with maximum efficiency and at a quarter of the price.
A streamlined, precise digital marketing strategy – with protocols in place – minimizes waste, and targets your investment, allowing you to squeeze every red cent from it.
Here’s a quick easy guide on how to create a solid digital marketing strategy.
H3: Get your feet dirty
First off, you’ll need to explore the landscape and analyze the environment in which your products find themselves. A great digital marketing strategy starts by you doing the rounds and getting your feet dirty. You need to have a clear idea of what you’re doing, and where you’ll be interacting — in what pool.
- Take into account your history — evaluate your overall performance up until that point. Particularly your last 6 months.
- Take a long hard look at your competition. Dive into what they do. Where they have invested. What you can mirror. What you can improve. Where they aren’t investing.
- Know your consumer. It seems odd but we at Domainnetworks are constantly having to highlight this key metric to our clients. Most have no idea of their audience. Who they are targeting, what their interests are, their demographics, their behaviors, and how they spend their time online. Today, thanks to Google and Facebook, various tools can help you out and give you that much-needed insight.
H3: Map It Out
GSOT — Goals, Strategies, Objective, and Tactics. It’s important to understand what your overall plan is. By mapping out your strategy, you can get an idea of how to achieve it, and where your blindspot – and risk, as well as threats – might come from.
- Goals are what you want to achieve. Think of things like growth or more sales or more brand recognition.
- Strategy is the different approaches you’ll use to achieve your goals.
- Objectives are the measurable numbers that are linked to that goal. For example, if you want to grow your brand recognition and consumer base by 20%, what does that translate to in folks.
- Tactics are the different tools you’ll need to employ to achieve these goals.
H3: Target Audience
Think of your consumers, your target audience, not just as a number but as an individual. Imagine them. What makes them tick? What drives them? Do they feel excluded? Are they part of a community? What do they identify with? How do they dress? What are their desires? What is their sexual orientation?
The more exacting, the more holistic, the better.
H3: Create your content strategy
Once you have all those 3 items checked off your list – objectives, mapped out plan, and target audience – you can start to create your digital marketing content strategy. This should help you get an idea of what type of content you will need.
Here are some inspirational ideas on how to come up with content.
- See what your competition is doing.
- Check out search results relating to your topic and content.
- Search Instagram to see what’s trending. Search hashtags. Instagram is a great source of content trends.
- Explore Pinterest.
- Understand the difference between a cornerstone article, an evergreen article, and a trending article.
H3: Have a schedule
It’s important to have a content creation and publishing schedule. Today, the audience wants regularity. So, you need to post often and regularly. For example, a video every Friday. A blog piece every Monday. And so forth.
H3: Pick your channels
Once you have a content strategy you need to find those channels that resonate with your audience. Social media, YouTube, etc. Think about how each channel contributes to meeting your goals and objectives.
H3: Set indicators and benchmarks
It’s important to have key performance indicators or KPIs for short. These will help you measure your success. See where you can improve and understand what you are doing wrong. Understand which channels work, which don’t, as well as what content sells and what doesn’t With indicators in check, you can analyze and adjust. The most important thing about digital marketing is that you can pivot. That you can learn from your mistakes and you can create new strategies.
