Digital Marketing

 

How to Develop a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in 4  Steps

Why Should You Have a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Having a well-defined digital marketing strategy provides you with some immediate perks. Right off the bat, it provides you with a certain degree of protection. Proper planning ensures that brands are spending resources wisely.

Wasting time and money on marketing campaigns is a common brand fear, but lacking critical information about your marketing intentions and decision-making process can be an absolute nightmare.

When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you’re able to test and confirm specific marketing data points. Let’s say your latest campaign is about appealing to a particular customer behavior.

Establishing a clear digital marketing strategy lets you stress-test your marketing assumptions, which becomes especially useful when you’re targeting certain audiences.

At the same time, you’re building a foundation for continued marketing growth with your digital marketing strategy. Imagine a scenario where a brand’s first marketing push underperforms. Without an established strategy, it can be impossible to know exactly what went wrong

4 Steps to Develop Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’ve never developed a digital marketing strategy, the process can feel a bit intimidating. When building your marketing strategy, there are dozens of potential metrics and techniques you could choose to focus on.

For now, let’s prioritize two key elements: clarity and experimentation. To maximize clarity, we’re going to spend time defining our target audience and establishing clear goals. When it comes to experimentation, we’re going to focus on growth and the implementation of specific marketing tactics.

Over time, your digital marketing strategy will become more complex as it continues developing. The more data you collect, the more complex your strategy will need to be. That’s why establishing a strong foundation early on in the process is so crucial

1. Research and Understand Your Audience

Before we dive into the deep end of digital marketing strategy, we need to spend some time unpacking the concept of target audiences.

Target audiences are defined by specific data points, like:

• gender
• age
• education
• purchasing power
• location

By targeting certain demographics, your ad budget is being spent as efficiently as possible.

Of course, this leads us into the most challenging aspect of audience targeting: properly defining your audience.

You’ll want to start by analyzing your market. Determine whether you’re operating in a well-established market or developing one. Is your industry mainstream? Who are your major competitors?

Once you’ve clearly defined your market, think about the type of customer you’re looking for. A good rule of thumb is to start with a general idea of your ideal customer, and use data points to further narrow your audience down.

2. Set Digital Marketing Strategy Goals and KPIs

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when discussing digital marketing strategy, the concept of goal-setting is typically glossed over. This is a shame because a well-defined set of goals can empower your brand with some pretty useful perks.

Remember those two key elements we mentioned earlier, clarity and experimentation? Well, setting goals properly ensures that your digital marketing strategy is both easy to monitor and update.

OK, setting goals is important. The real question is how on earth should you be setting marketing goals?

When the average person thinks about setting goals, they tend to focus on qualitative goals. An example of a qualitative goal would be wanting to improve your brand image, or increase your brand’s position within your industry.

You can start to see the problem with these kinds of goals. Since qualitative goals are abstract, they’re notoriously difficult to measure.

3. Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve taken care of the basics, it’s time to actually build and implement a digital marketing strategy.

The biggest challenge here is determining which digital marketing channel to focus on. If this step stresses you out, you’re not alone. One of the reasons this decision can feel so intimidating is the fear of investing in a channel that won’t work.

4. Continue Improving

Growth, particularly long-term growth, is something that brands all over the world struggle with. It’s one thing to collect all those data points. Turning them into next quarter’s marketing campaign can quickly become a frustrating experience.

Here are just a handful of the issues that brands struggle with at the end of a marketing campaign.

• The brand doesn’t know which problems need fixing.
• The brand doesn’t fully understand their audience.
• The brand can’t see the value in their data.
• The brand has too much data and can’t make sense of it all.

Digital Marketing Strategy for E-Commerce Business Owner

Social media marketing is about more than just paid ads and memes. For example, when your e-commerce brand interacts with customers on social media, the entire world can see how you handle both customer compliments and customer complaints

Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Business Owners

Creating content that’s truly impactful is rarely easy. Even massive brands like Coke and Pepsi don’t always get it right. That’s why I’m always fascinated by the way Dollar Shave Club exploded onto the scene

Digital Marketing Strategy for Marketers

Creating stale, uninspired content is a fear that every marketer has had to deal with. Once you’ve exhausted the usual list of content ideas for your industry, it can be difficult to identify content ideas that are both new and exciting

How can I start digital marketing?

Start with the basic building blocks of digital marketing. Understand your audience and establish clear marketing goals. Start testing and keep experimenting until you find what works!

Is digital marketing easy?

Definitely not, but it’s far from impossible to figure out! Commit yourself to the learning process and eventually, you’ll have a digital marketing strategy that can support long-term growth.

Is coding required for digital marketing?

Absolutely not! Many of the techniques you’ll need to master can be essentially self-taught, with enough patience and the right direction.

What is a KPI?

KPIs or key performance indicators, are metrics brands that track to determine how effective their marketing is. Examples include: conversion rate, bounce rate, ROI, etc.

Digital Marketing Strategy Guide: Conclusion

At first glance, the sheer depth of digital marketing strategy can be intimidating.