Digital Marketing Strategy should be one component of your overall marketing strategy, and for many businesses, it is a major focus. With 4 billion Internet users around the world today, creating a Digital Marketing Strategy is essential to reach customers and grow your business.
Digital Marketing covers marketing conducted through digital channels such as websites, email, search engines (SEM and SEO), social media, mobile phones and online advertising.
Today, so much of our business is conducted online. Our customers and potential customers hang out online making it an efficient way to reach them. This is why a Digital Marketing Strategy is essential!
Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
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Set Realistic Goals
Define what you want to achieve. What are your digital marketing objectives? Align them with your company’s mission, vision and strategic objectives. Set 3-5 SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) to measure against. Decide on how you are going to measure the success of your goals and what metrics you will track.
For example, A 20% increase in website traffic within 1 month of the digital marketing campaign.
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Know Your Audience
Put your target audience at the heart of your digital marketing strategy. Define who they are including their demographics, their needs, their emotions and what makes them tick. Use tools such as online surveys, website and social media analytics and your sales data to define your audience.
It is helpful to set up audience personas to get clear on your audience, especially if you have a few different audience segments you want to target.
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Set a Budget
Setting a budget is important as not all digital marketing methods are free. You may have to outsource the work and provide additional budget to run advertising or build a website. Your budget will determine what tools you can use. Many tools such as email marketing and social media can cost little or no money.
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Identify the Right Digital Marketing Method for Your Business
Identify what resources you already have at your disposal such as your budget, staffing resources, sales data and the marketing tools you currently use. If you have run a similar campaign in the past, now is the best time to look at the results. Do a cost-benefit analysis and see what did and did not generate significant returns. It is important to understand why something may not have worked in the past. You may find that with simple tweaks, it could work for future campaigns.
If this is your first time running a digital marketing campaign, it is worth research what similar businesses have done to give you some ideas.
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Map Out your Digital Marketing Campaign Activities
Create a plan that has all the specific activities or tasks to be completed during the campaign period. Include relevant information such as description of the task, goal, person responsible, timeline, what are needed to execute the task, status, and result. This will help you ensure that your campaign is on track.
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Execute Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Now that you have done your due diligence, it’s time to put your digital marketing strategy into play. It’s a good idea to keep a record during the strategy execution. Record what was delivered and what wasn’t and why, what worked and what didn’t. This will give you something to look back on when you develop your next digital marketing strategy.
Create a post-campaign report that includes all this information and any data and insights you might have gathered. Include a list of recommendations for future campaigns.
Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Our team of experienced Digital Marketing Strategists are here to help, CONTACT US now.