To create a digital strategy, you need to know your target audience, define your goals, assess your competition, and decide on your marketing channels. Plus, you need to outline your content marketing strategy, create reporting tools to measure results, and assign tasks to your team. Each step should be aligned with your business goals. Do you struggle to get noticed online? Online marketing can be overwhelming, and if you don’t have a strategy, you can feel discouraged. A well-thought-out digital strategy can help.
A clear digital strategy can help you turn the pain of a low online presence into the pleasure of high engagement rates and conversion rates.
This article will show you 7 steps to creating a digital strategy for your company.
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital strategy is an integrated plan that describes how a company will reach its marketing goals using online channels such as search, social media, and email marketing.
This strategy is a guide that will help you achieve your business goals. This strategy includes the following components:
- Identification of the Audience
- Goal setting
- Competitive Analysis
- Channel selection
- Create your content
- Performance tracking
How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing is no longer an option in today’s internet-driven society. It has become a necessity. It is being used by businesses of all sizes and across many industries to reach their target audiences, promote their products, and drive growth and profit.
Digital marketing is not simply posting content on the internet and hoping it sticks. It is about developing a fully considered plan, including an audience, goals, competition, and considerations for each digital platform. This plan should align with your business goals, while considering the data available to keep the plan updated. Even though this can be difficult, it is a process worth pursuing for any organization wanting to be successful in digital.
You must have a digital strategy, whether your business is part of the industry or the industry that provides home services. This will help to guarantee your customers can find you and select your business.
It’s a bit overwhelming to begin the process of digital marketing strategies, and it will be more manageable if you take a structured approach. This article will walk you through the steps and give you hints and tips to help you build a strong, effective digital marketing strategy. Let’s dive into the digital marketing strategy creation process!
Continue reading to find out how to create an effective digital marketing strategy using seven simple steps.
1: Identify Your Audience Identify Your Audience
The first step to planning your digital marketing campaign is to know and identify your target audience. If you’ve narrowed down what service or product you offer, you now need to identify the demographics of people who would be most interested. This includes not just demographic information, such as age and gender, but also interests and habits.
For example, if you’re a local bakery, you might be targeting busy parents with careers in your community who value convenience when making food choices. They are looking for meal choices that are easy, quick, and delicious. If you’re a tech startup with a fitness tracking app, your target market might be tech-savvy millennials who follow fitness influencers and prefer to work out outside of the gym.
Knowing who your customers are and what they do is key to successful marketing. To get to know your target audience better, it can be helpful to create buyer personas. This will allow you to market to a specific target audience.
2. Define Your Goals and Objectives
Next, you need to specify your objectives for digital marketing. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals is vital. Your goals should be consistent with the overall objectives of your business.
For example, a clothing e-commerce store may want to increase the traffic to its website by 50 percent in the next six months through SEO and content promotion. A local restaurant may want to increase online reservations by 20 percent in the next three months through social media advertising.
Every business has its objectives. Defining these objectives upfront ensures your digital marketing campaign has a specific focus and you will be able to measure its success.
3. Assess Your Rivals
You can find a competitive advantage by discovering an opportunity through competition. Will investigate competitors’ position, pricing, marketing approach, and customer experience.
If you’re a SaaS (software as a service) company that sells project management software, your competitors may focus on paid search advertising heavily, have a lot of content-marketing initiatives, and they may have client support 24/7. This knowledge will help you identify areas of opportunity for you to exploit.
4. Selecting Your Digital Marketing Channels
Many digital marketing channels are available, and your audience and business objectives will determine which channels are appropriate for your digital marketing campaign. Considering search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, and more.
For example, a B2B company might use LinkedIn as a social media platform, SEO for organic traffic growth, and email marketing to nurture leads. In comparison, a B2C brand is likely to dedicate more ad spend to Instagram ads and Facebook ads, and use PPC ads for instant visibility and email marketing for customer retention.
Regardless of your business model, there are advantages to each channel, and you will approach each channel somewhat differently. Understanding each channel and what you can gain from it will allow you to create a multichannel digital marketing campaign that maximizes your efforts.
5. Outline Your Content Strategy
Your digital marketing strategy is worthless without content. Content drives traffic, provides brand awareness, offers education to customers, nurtures leads, and turns prospects into buyers. Your content strategy will provide you with the details of which types of content to produce, which topics to cover, how you’re going to publish, and what platforms you’re using.
For instance, a health and fitness blog could create a mixture of articles that provide information about nutrition and physical activity, how-to articles, and personal success stories. These articles could be published on the website, published to social media, or included in an email newsletter. Content should provide value to your audience. Content should alleviate their pain points, answer their questions, and help them achieve their goals.
In contrast, a B2B tech company may produce detailed case studies, white papers, webinars, and blog posts on industry trends and best practices. They may share their content and nurture business leads on LinkedIn.
6. Set Up Your Reporting Tools
You’ll want to monitor the performance of your digital marketing strategy once it is implemented. Reporting tools are a great way to do this. These tools allow you to analyze your audience’s behavior, measure your campaign success, and optimize your strategy.
Google Analytics Reporting tools are a great way to do this. Reporting tools allow you to evaluate your audience’s behavior, assess your campaign performance, and optimize your overall approach.
Some tools can be as complex as Google Analytics to assess the effectiveness of your website or other campaign efforts. Google Analytics can provide you with answers to how well your website is performing, where the traffic is coming from, and which content is popular. Various email marketing platforms provide metrics to see how many recipients opened an email, conversion rates, and how many people clicked on a link in the email. You can find insights offered through social media platforms to see audience demographics and engagement rates for a post.
It doesn’t matter which tool you select, but you must focus on metrics that align with your goals. They could be website traffic, lead generation rates, customer acquisition costs, etc.
7. Assign a Shared Responsibility for Marketing to the Team
Digital marketing is a relatively complicated process and therefore requires a variety of skills: content creation, SEO (search engine optimization), data analytics, social networking management, etc. It is also important that you delegate. Delegate based on each team member’s strengths and experience.
If you are a small-business owner who wears many hats, think about your inability to engage in too much collective digital marketing – specifically, think about outsourcing your digital marketing to a digital marketing agency.
As long as everyone uses a solid marketing strategy for digital marketing, communication and collaboration are key to success. Schedule a regular time to check in and provide updates to each other about broader goals and measures of success, and to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Need a Hand Developing a Digital Marketing Strategy?
In a crowded, confusing digital market, it can seem impossible to stand out from the crowd. But it doesn’t have to be.
As a full-service digital agency, GenTech Marketing specializes in developing comprehensive, customized digital marketing strategies that reach your audience and achieve outcomes that matter. We’re experts in search-engine optimization, social-media marketing, and pay-per-click advertising.
The outcome is being able to achieve your business goals more quickly and effectively than before, and build solid connections with your audience. We have done it in the past. We can do it for you.
Call GenTech Marketing today to see how we can help you develop a strong marketing strategy for your business.
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It might seem impossible to come up with a digital strategy, but the most important parts are knowing who your audience is, knowing what goals you want to reach, knowing your business, and deciding on the best weapons to use to engage them and achieve your goals.
With quality planning, constant tracking, and regular optimizations, you can build a digital strategy that will grow and accelerate your business for success!
If you would like to talk through it, reach out to GenTech Marketing, and we can consider how our team could develop a digital strategy that would take your business to the apex!
