The Key Parts Of Digital Strategy
Digital marketing strategy should not be limited to only online tactics, but should also include offline strategies for a more complete plan.
We can just call it a digital marketing strategy. There are both digital and offline marketing elements to consider, like the website, SEO, emails, social media, online ads, customer service, traditional advertising, and telephone communications.
Digital Marketing Strategy Starter Kit
After you have decided what your business goals are, you need to analyze your current situation to see where you are starting from. This will help you develop a digital marketing strategy that is realistic and achievable. In order to benefit from a map, you need to first establish your location.
You need to know your objective. What is it you’re trying to accomplish? What’s the digital marketing strategy supposed to do? A strategy can be a long-term plan for a company or a small part of a plan for a new product.
After you identify your location, assess the resources you have access to. Take inventory of available personnel, budget, time, and expertise. Rarely does a marketing manager have everything they want.
There are usually areas where they wish they had more resources. A gap analysis is a good place to start in order to figure out where additional support is needed to carry out a digital marketing strategy.
Determine what future state you want to achieve. The future state has to be more specific than the objective.
We need to come up with a plan of how we want to achieve our goal in order to create a successful strategy.
This is just like the bunch of ingredients we have in the cupboard. What can we make? What meal can we put together?
More experienced marketers and marketing teams are better. It seems that the more chefs or cooks you talk to, the more they are able to draw on their shared experience with these ingredients.
You should figure out what you are able to do and it is completely alright to say that you need to go and get some things that are missing.
Put In The Work To Figure Out The Start Of Your Digital Strategy
Depending on your organization’s size, department, or the size of the undertaking, it can be difficult to determine where you stand. The easiest place to be is when starting a new business with nothing. The hardest part is that you have nothing.
This means that there is usually some form of marketing strategy in place that can be adjusted or improved.
The most difficult scenario is when the marketing manager or CMO starts working in a new company.
If an employee is transferred to another division or is new to the company, they have to try to catch up with what is already happening. You still need to keep track of the resources you have available. It’s just harder in that case.
If you understand how the organization and culture work, it will be easy to figure out what resources you have to work with.
Once You Have The Lay Of The Land, What’s Next
This is the fun part. You need to come up with a solution that doesn’t exist yet, so you can be inspired. You have the option of looking at what others have done or consulting with your team.
We often say that it is important to carry out your own research.
If you want to achieve a marketing or business objective that involves marketing, it is advisable to get input from those who will be affected, such as customers or potential customers.
Other departments that might be involved in the process include the sales team, customer success team, customer service team, product marketing, or operations.
A marketer who tries to implement a strategy without research or consultation is likely to be inexperienced, lucky, or foolish, because the marketing objective is designed to alter behavior.
What are the most effective triggers? If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to understand both who that person is and how to change their behavior.
If you want to persuade or motivate someone, it is best to go directly to them and ask for their opinion. One of the simplest things to do is to often take a lacking step.
Salespeople talk to prospective customers all the time, and marketers have to do the same. It’s beneficial to take the time to get to know your audience when you’re trying to reach a new group of people.
Although the salespeople’s word can be trusted, it is beneficial for the marketer to sit in on sales calls to get to know the people. This is because many successful organizations follow this practice.
Third-party research is helpful, too. More data is available now than in the past, so it would be foolish not to use it.
Enter The Feedback Loop
Marketing is producing a lot of leads, butSales is not closing them. Sales says all these leads are crap. Sales states that they would like to receive more leads of high quality from Marketing. Marketing is claiming that they are responsible for a large number of leads, and Sales is not meeting their expectations. Sound familiar?
You need to avoid the old conflict between these departments. Sales and marketing departments should work together because they have the same goals. There needs to be communication between Marketing and Sales in order to improve understanding and collaboration.
You might get an early warning from social media and other outlets, but someone’s got to be listening
A good sales department would research the competition in order to be successful. Sales must participate in the digital marketing strategy and they are a crucial part of the feedback process.
If the marketing message is not being received well, the sales or customer service team will be the first to know.
If you want to be aware of upcoming changes that your company is going to make, you should follow them on social media and other platforms. Someone needs to be monitoring these channels and relaying the information back to the marketing department so they can make the necessary changes.
Building Digital Marketing Strategy
You now understand the basics of digital marketing strategies. Let’s discuss how you can make your own digital marketing strategy with the best chance for success. We have broken it down into five simple steps.
1. Make Sure Your Digital Foundations Are In Place
You can’t ride a bike without tires that are properly inflated. You can’t just launch a bunch of digital marketing campaigns and expect them to work if you don’t have your digital foundations set up first.
You need to have strong hosting for your website.
But it’s not enough to just have a website. That website needs to be fast. Search engine optimization (SEO) relies heavily on speed as a ranking factor, so a slow loading website will rank lower than one that loads quickly. In addition, users are likely to abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
Your site also has to be secure. Security is incredibly important in the age of cybercrime. The three most important things you can do to protect your website from being hacked are to use HTTPS, have a robust firewall, and use a secure hosting service. For our Kinsta customers, we offer even more advanced security measures.
Your site should be designed for easy use. This will make it easier to turn customers into conversions, and provide them with a more streamlined path to conversion.
Ensure your social media profiles are up-to-date with accurate information.
2. Define Goals
What are your goals for your digital marketing strategy? What does success look like for you? Some companies are just looking for brand exposure. They just want to get their name known to as many people as possible and make people aware of their existence.
For others, it’s all about sales and conversions. The company wants to both attract new customers and keep existing ones returning. When outlining goals, it is helpful to be specific.
What are your goals for your business’s growth during this strategic period? Do you hope to increase profits by 40% by the end of the second quarter? Would you consider a 30% increase in your strategy a success or a failure?
You need to come up with your best and worst possible outcomes for this situation. The threshold where the strategy would be viewed as a failure is not achieving the desired outcome. Any success achieved would be measured against that.
This is also the time when you would decide which tools will help you be successful. Are they affordable? How much money are you willing to spend on email marketing software in order to make it successful?
Be sure your goals are specific and measurable so you can identify whether you have been successful. This means that you need to understand how much money you are making from your ads, how much it costs you to acquire a customer, and more.
3. Understand Buyer Personas
Creating a digital marketing strategy requires knowing who you’re marketing to.
It is important that you understand the needs and motivations of your key buyers in order to better cater to them. Get to know their likes and dislikes in order to provide them with a more personalized experience. You can make your appeal to your audience more effective by taking their needs into account.
You should have detailed and accurate profiles of your target buyers that include demographic information about different subsections of your audience. This can include information about their age, occupation, gender, geographic location, interests, income, and so on.
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Your marketing strategy can be tailored to target different buyer personas within your target audience.
individuals that fit into persona A might prefer using social media as a means of communication, while those that identify with persona B would rather receive emails, and persona C benefits from looking up questions on Quora. In order to be successful, it is important to know this information.
Where do your personas hang out online? Focus your marketing efforts on these platforms.
4. Evaluate All Existing Digital Assets
Now is the time to look at the different types of content we identified earlier. To be successful, you need to know what resources you have and how you can use them to achieve your goals.
All media that you own, paid for, or have earned through your own efforts should be audited for maximum success. After you have compiled a list of all your company assets, you can then decide which marketing campaigns will benefit most from using them.
This is an excellent time to identify gaps in your asset catalog. If you think that you could improve your content strategy by acquiring something that you currently don’t have, it’s time to either create or purchase that content.
Don’t just look at how much content you have. Dig into the quality of it as well. If you want to improve your ranking on Google, one thing you can do is refresh your old content. This will make it more relevant and increase your chances of appearing in search results.
If you have two or more pieces of content on your site that are exactly the same, get rid of one of them. Google does not like duplicate content and can give you a penalty for it.
5. Map Out Your Plan
All the necessary components are now available, so it is time to plan your content marketing strategy.
You should have a content creation plan that will help you to identify and fill any gaps in your knowledge. This means that you will have a large amount of content that is designed for your target audience. This will be beneficial for you in the future.
You should have a basic understanding of the types of campaigns you’ll need to run for each buyer persona to help you reach your goals.
Draw up a plan for each of your marketing campaigns, specifying the details such as the social media platform to be used, the duration of the campaign, the type of content, and the financial investment.
After you have completed this, create a document that contains the entire strategy, with a timeline that explains how every campaign you have made will help you achieve your goal.
Side Notes
Do something quickly. People say learn fast; people say fail fast. There’s lots of expressions out there for marketing.
Time is not your friend but it’s constant. If you want to see results from your digital marketing campaign quickly, you need to deploy your strategy fast. Having data to base your decisions on will help you improve your campaign and see better results overall.
If you want to save time, it’s better to launch a less-developed marketing plan than a more complete one. You will arrive at your destination regardless.
Instead of using time to perfect your educated guess, you can learn as you go and get more reliable feedback from an implemented strategy. Dive head first and you will find your way.
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