Marketing has become digital in the modern world. Instead of opting for traditional marketing channels, companies are becoming more geared towards choosing digital platforms for marketing in order to reach a wider customer base. In order to build a successful digital marketing strategy for your company, here are a few steps that you can follow:
1. Setting Your Goals
Before you can start penning down a digital marketing strategy, you need to know what you want to achieve. If you have ever picked up a business-related book in your life, you would already be familiar with the SMART goals technique. This mnemonic is commonly used to help businesses create a specialized set of objectives for themselves during every project.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time specific. By following these criteria, you can easily create a comprehensive set of goals before you start designing a new digital marketing strategy for your business.
2. Current Performance
If you have decided to create a new digital marketing strategy for your business, chances are that your current one isn’t working too well. Even if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy yet, you should sit down and evaluate your existing online presence. This will help you understand where you stand in comparison with your competitors and give you a better understanding of where you need to focus the most.
Evaluating your current performance can include a wide range of things, but you can start by considering your brand website, social media sites, email marketing campaigns, SEO, and PPC advertising. If some of these terms sound unfamiliar, you can add them to your new digital marketing strategy.
3. Buyer Persona
To reach out to your audience, you need to know what your typical customer looks like. A buyer persona includes putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and penning down their experience as they interact with your company. You should focus on a few things such as where your customers get their information from (which social media sites), what brands they currently shop from, and what their preferences are.
Knowing your customers is the initial stage of creating a successful digital marketing strategy. Once you know your buyer personas, you can easily target your digital marketing strategy to appeal to these customers directly.
4. Content Planning
Once you have completed all the prerequisites, you can start creating your own digital marketing strategy. On the internet, everything is about the content that you create. You content must be both visible to your audience as well as appealing enough to retain their attention. One of the first things that you must do is conduct a thorough keyword reseach in order to improve your search engine ranking – thus making your company more visible to the consumer.
Next, you need to create a detailed content calendar that keeps track of your short- and long-term goals. Break your goals down to actionable strategies such as posting frequently, writing on appealing topics, using the right tags, and implementing high-ranking keywords.
Remember that digital marketing is mainly focused on social media, which is why your content planning needs to include the content that you will be posting on social media. For example, you might need to plan for the holiday season in advance with a range of themed posts on social media as well as interesting content for your customers to read.
5. Analyze Results
Once you have developed a digital marketing strategy and started implementing it, you need to analyze results frequently. Every few weeks, you can conduct a thorough audit of how well your brand is performing. Consider your progress towards your goals from step 1 and make changes to your strategy accordingly.
by David Kryszczak