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Digital strategy is an important marketing tool. Whether you are an employee of an agency or an individual entrepreneur, in any case, you need to delve into the online world and run a business according to the new rules. There are over a thousand tools and tactics in digital marketing – and this is not an overstating. How to find your way in this ocean of possibilities?
The solution is to come up with a strategy and find tools that are most suited to your needs. Let’s discover what a digital marketing strategy is and how to create an effective one.
A few words about digital marketing
A digital marketing strategy is a coherent set of steps based on online marketing tools and tactics used to achieve some business goals. Like any strategy, it’s based on goals and contains 3 mandatory parts:
- determination of the current situation and problems due to which the goals are not achieved;
- the concept of problem-solving;
- a set of key actions needed to achieve the goals.
If you want to reliably and predictably increase sales and profits, increase market share, and win the competition, you definitely need to come up with a company’s digital strategy.
You and your company are ready for this if you have already tried certain online promotion tools, you have basic points of presence, traffic, but at the same time you are not satisfied with the volume of applications and sales, your objectives are not being met, and you don’t know how to dramatically change this situation.
That is, you need a certain experience and level of work with your brand and product in order to move to the next level with a well-thought-out strategy.
7 steps to making a powerful digital marketing strategy
#1. State your goal
Before you begin building a plan, consider what you aim to achieve with your marketing approach. Simply put, establish your digital marketing goals. This phase may appear straightforward, but it demands you to have a highly precise and exact set of business ideas.
Experts from all over the world take the principle of 5Ss as a basis. So what do you want to achieve?
- Sell – Grow sales
- Speak – Get closer to customers through engagement and participation
- Serve – Add value
- Save – Cut costs
- Sizzle – Extend your brand online
Depending on the purpose, you need to select different tools.
#2. Assess your presence
It is always good to understand what you have already achieved. First, you need to come up with your main marketing channels: email, website, social media, SEO, ads, and others.
Which of these generates more leads and boosts traffic for you? Rank each channel and specific medium in order of effectiveness, from most to least effective.
#3. Create customer portrait
Understand your audience before trying to successfully connect with it. Put yourself in your client’s shoes. Once you can discover the buyer persona, you can make some assumptions about what they will like.
Gather data about customer preferences, site behaviors, hobbies, etc. To create the extended profile of a potential buyer, compare collected information with real data that you can collect using the Google Analytics tool.
This data may help you create catchy ads, come up with personalized emails, and much more.
#4. Conduct a content audit
Items descriptions, blog articles, branded podcasts, Instagram posts, and even the About Us page can be defined as content.
As a rule, content does a great job in converting followers or website visitors into real clients. Furthermore, when this material is optimized for search engines, it may increase your search and organic traffic.
Find gaps in the content you already have. If you are selling software that may be difficult for beginners to understand, create tutorials using a screen recorder for PC. If you have an e-commerce store, make sure that colorful product photos without strong color correction are placed on your page. And if you have too much expert content on the site, maybe you should dilute it with entertaining compilations or memes.
Moreover, we strongly advise you to create a content calendar. This will allow you to set long-term and easily trackable goals.
#5. Determine necessary resources deadlines and responsible specialists
As you have set your goals, outlined the action plans for implementing your digital strategy, and gathered tools to use, plan your resources.
- Team (those who will directly develop plans for specific actions and implement them). It can be several people, one, it can be a project manager from your company plus an outsourced team – there are many options.
- Budget (including amounts for developing new or reworking existing points of contact, budgets for paid traffic, SEO, copywriters, etc.)
- Deadline. Evaluate time soberly, don’t try to solve all problems in two weeks. An effective strategy can take from a couple of months to a year to work.
#6. Analyze results
Conduct strategy analysis at regular intervals (by the way, you can add it to your calendar). How do customers interact with what you share with them? How are you progressing towards your goals? This data will help you adjust the course and learn from what didn’t go as planned.
Using analytics software, you can monitor your progress at all stages of the sales funnel.
#7. Follow the trends
There is always something new and edgy on the market that can be perfect for your marketing needs.
For example, this year influencer marketing is gaining momentum, and you can allocate a certain share of the budget to collaboration with famous bloggers. Another trend is the presence in one sales channel. The explosive growth of digital marketing tools is causing many companies to opt for a weak presence across multiple channels. Smart business is focused on dominating only one traffic channel.
Therefore, it may be worth not wasting your resources and striving to do less, but better.
Wrap up
A digital marketing strategy is really effective in promoting a company. To implement the plan, there are many digital channels that differ in price, potential reach, and goals. Find the most suitable and effective set for your business.
However, don’t stick to one single strategy, especially if it doesn’t bring the desired results. Experiment, follow market trends, and always stay open to something new.
