Steps To Create An Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
WHAT IS A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that describes how to use one or more online marketing channels to reach your target audience. It has a list of steps and specific digital marketing goals.
Having a digital strategy is important because it will help you orchestrate the different online marketing strategies so that they all work towards achieving your business goals.
The person responsible to design and execute a digital strategy is the digital marketing manager of a company.
Together with his team, they will make sure that every marketing activity is part of your digital marketing plan.
Source: reliablesoft.net
1. DEFINE YOUR BRAND
The first step to driving success with your digital marketing plan is defining your brand. It’s important to know the ins and outs of your brand so you can sell it to your audience.
Define what is unique about your business. What do you bring to the table that your competitors don’t? It’s important to understand what makes your business unique so you can market that to your audience.
These are facts about your business that are both unique to your company, but also convince someone to choose your team. USPs strengthen someone’s image of your brand and makes them feel more confident about choosing you over the competition.
Aside from your USPs (Unique Selling Points), you’ll want to define your brand’s mission and values. Define why you do what you do. What motivates your business to start up every day and provide for customers?
Many people define a business based on their values and mission. For example, Tom’s , a shoe company, is strongly characterized by its goal to provide people in Africa with shoes. Each time someone makes a purchase, Tom’s donates a pair to someone in Africa.
This is a strong USP for Tom’s. It motivates people to purchase from them because they know that there is a huge benefit to buying the company’s footwear. Tom’s generosity and mission to do good attracts people to the brand.
If you want to have success with your digital marketing business plan, start by defining your business’s brand and figuring out what makes your company unique.
Source: webfx.com
2. DETERMINE WHAT YOU WANT TO ACCOMPLISH
What do you want your digital marketing campaigns to accomplish? Do you want to build name brand recognition?
Generate leads? Get more sales, or email subscribers?
Great! Whatever it is that you want, though, you need to name it.
This is yet another way that marketing has an online dating crossover comparison . If you go on a bunch of blind dates with no idea what you’re looking for, you might settle down with the first person who you can tolerate. If you have an actual list of traits you want in a person, you’re much more likely to find your match.
Your goals matter, and you’ll need to take specific steps to accomplish each one. We’ll look at this more in-depth a little further down.
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3. UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCES
Create robust digital profiles (what they want, how they behave, how to engage with them and with whom else they interact), map the customer journey in detail and identify value exchanges all along it. These profiles often start with traditional segmentation, but you need to go steps further to recognize behaviors, interactions and content, functionality and experience needs.
With many clients, digital profiles aren’t necessarily built around precisely who the customers are, but rather which objectives the target audience is trying to solve. Goals versus roles. Doing this early on keeps you cognizant of customer needs and allows you to match your objectives to meet them.
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4. IMPLEMENT SPECIFIC GUIDELINES TO REACH YOUR GOALS
You’ve got your marketing mix selected and you know how you expect your audience to react. Once you do this, it’s time to start tying everything together and create specific tactics that will help you reach those end goals.
A few of these tactics might include:
Placing lead generation widgets or lead magnets on the sides of all blog posts, along with featuring a CTA at the end of posts to get in touch.
Sharing influencer’s content on social media in order to build a relationship and increase visibility and brand recognition.
Encouraging testimonials with email plugins that you can then place on your site, or request that users submit reviews on Google business to improve your local SEO scores Again, specificity is key here. Map out very specific steps that you’re going to take in order to accomplish your goals. Go beyond “write blog posts to attract leads,” and include those CTAs and links back to a lead magnet or a webinar until you start to get results.
Source: disruptiveadvertising.com
5. MEASURING RESULTS & KPIS
The work doesn’t stop after you’ve designed and implemented your digital marketing strategy. The next step is one of the most important: analyzing the results. Analytics has turned into a critical pillar for successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending.
We have to measure every action using KPIs to figure out if we earned the expected ROI. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and activities we have implemented in our digital marketing strategy will help us correct what doesn’t work to achieve the goals we set.
Having tools that allow us to carry out this analysis is crucial.
Salesforce , for example, allows us to completely measure all the actions that are carried out and see how the user reacts and behaves on each step of the journey. Therefore, in addition to extracting valuable information, we also use the Al that Salesforce provides to improve the user experience and offer each lead the content they are looking for at the right time.
Make sure you have an effective, real-time data visualization system. The digital world evolves rapidly, so you need to be on the lookout at all times to identify opportunities and room for improvement in an instant. Data value is very important, because without it we are blind and it’s impossible to make logical decisions. We insist on the need to use tools that compile, process, and extract value from the data:
Mulesoft is an integration software used to connect systems with each other and ensure the exchange and use of as much data as possible. Together with the Salesforce ecosystem, it can be very helpful for you.
Keep these steps in mind when creating your digital marketing plan and don’t leave anything to chance; it’s your greatest enemy if you’re looking to position yourself and boost your presence in the digital space.
Likewise, keep in mind that technology can turn into your greatest ally when creating personalized, automated, and ultimately successful marketing campaigns. As the task gets complicated, the new tools out there let you simplify your work and boost your performance.
Source: wearemarketing.com
6. MEASURE RESULTS
A digital marketing plan should always have a strategy for measuring results . Measuring results is crucial in determining whether your business was successful with your efforts. It’s important to constantly monitor your results to ensure you’re putting out the best campaign.
You can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine your campaign’s success. KPIs are statistics that help you define whether you reached the goals you set.
If you aren’t meeting your goals, it provides you with the opportunity to restructure your campaigns to drive better results. You can alter and optimize your strategies to help you reach consumers better.
Source: webfx.com
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