When influencer Y gets a large following, they’re sending her free products Many brands are just following whatever the latest digital marketing trend is. For example, when social media platform X becomes popular, they start posting on it. Or when influencer Y gets a large following, they start sending her free products.
There are many brands that are working hard to create successful digital marketing strategies. It takes a lot of dedication and focus to achieve success.
You should want to succeed not just today or this year, but always. That is why it is important to have a digital marketing strategy that will help you continue to grow steadily over time.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy establishes an internet presence for a business through online channels. The goal of such strategies is to increase brand awareness and attract new customers. Web-based mediums such as a company website are part of these efforts.
A digital marketing strategy is a high-level plan that outlines your overall goals and the methods you will use to achieve them. A digital marketing campaign is a shorter-term effort that uses specific tactics to achieve more immediate goals. Mediums are the specific tools or channels you will use to reach your target audience, such as email, social media, or paid advertising.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
Build Your Buyer Personas
If you want to create an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to start by creating detailed buyer personas. This will give you a better understanding of who you should be targeting with your marketing efforts.
You can improve your marketing by organizing your audience into segments and creating buyer personas. Templates can help you create these personas.
Your buyer personas are your ideal customers, and you can create them by researching your target audience, surveying them, and interviewing them.
It is important to note that this information should be based on real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to move in the wrong direction.
Your research pool should consist of a mix of customers, potential customers, and people who fit your target audience but who are not in your contacts database. This will give you a more complete picture of your persona.
What kind of information should you gather about your target audience to inform your digital marketing strategy?
The answer to this question varies depending on the type of business you have and what kind of product you are selling. Businesses that are B2B or B2C may have different answer, as well as those that sell high-cost or low-cost products.
Identify Goals and Digital Marketing Tools
Your marketing goals should always be consistent with the overall goals of your business.
For example, if you want your business to make 20% more money online, your marketing team’s goal might be to get 50% more leads from the website than last year.
Create a high-level marketing plan to outline your annual marketing strategy, identify top priorities, and track progress throughout the year.
No matter what your goal is for your digital marketing strategy, you should be able to track your progress using the appropriate digital marketing tools.
The HubSpot Reporting Dashboard consolidates all of your marketing and sales data so you can quickly gauge what’s working and what needs improvement in your strategy.
Evaluate Your Existing Digital Channels and Assets
First consider the big picture when reviewing digital marketing channels and assets to determine what to incorporate into your strategy. This will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed or confused.
Organize all the vehicles and assets you have into a spreadsheet, so you can see which ones are owned, earned, or paid media.
Audit and Plan Your Owned Media Campaigns
Digital marketing is all about content, which takes many forms including website pages, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts.
Content on your website helps convert visitors into leads and customers, while also improving your brand’s online presence. If this content is optimized for search engines (SEO), it can also boost your search and organic traffic.
Your digital marketing strategy goal will dictate the type of content you’ll want to create. Once you know what kind of content will help you achieve your goal, you can begin producing it.
Unless your About Us page has been very successful in generating leads in the past, it is unlikely that it will be part of your strategy if your goal is to increase leads by 50% compared to last year.
Here’s a brief process you can follow to work out what owned content you need to meet your digital marketing strategy goals: 1. Start by defining what your digital marketing strategy goals are. What do you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy? 2. Once you know what your goals are, you can start to identify the types of content that will help you achieve those goals. 3. Once you know what types of content you need, you can start to develop a plan for creating that content. 4. Finally, once you have a plan in place, you can start to execute on that plan and create the content that will help you achieve your digital marketing strategy goals.
Audit and Plan Your Earned Media Campaigns
You can figure out where to focus your time by evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from, and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.
You can get this information from Traffic Analytics in HubSpot by using the Sources reports.
A particular article you wrote for an industry publication may have generated a lot of traffic to your website from qualified leads, resulting in increased conversions. Alternatively, you may have found that LinkedIn is the platform on which most people share your content, resulting in increased traffic.
The goal is to create a model of the types of earned media that will help you achieve your goals, based on data from the past. However, if you want to try something new, don’t rule it out just because it’s never been done before.
Audit and Plan Your Paid Media Campaigns
The process of optimizing your paid media spend for maximum ROI involves many of the same steps regardless of the platform. You need to take a close look at your paid media campaigns on each platform (Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out which ones are most likely to help you meet your current goals.
If you’re unhappy with the results you’ve gotten from AdWords, it might be time to try a different approach or switch to a different platform.
This guide provides more information on how you can use AdWords to improve your digital marketing strategy.
After completing the process, you should have a better understanding of which paid media platforms you want to continue using and which you would like to remove from your strategy.
Bring Your Digital Marketing Campaign Together
You have planned and researched and have a solid vision of what will be included in your digital marketing strategy.
To review, here’s what you should have solidified so far:
- Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
- One or more digital marketing-specific goals
- An inventory of your existing owned earned and paid media
- An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
- An owned content creation plan or wish list
Here is a list of basic marketing strategies that are commonly used by teams in different industries:
Why Should You Have a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A well-defined digital marketing strategy has some immediate benefits. The most obvious benefit is that it provides protection for your brand. By having a plan, you can ensure that your brand is spending its resources wisely.
Many brands are afraid of wasting time and money on marketing campaigns, but not having critical information about your marketing intentions and decision-making process can be a much bigger problem.
When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you can take specific marketing data points and test them to see if they work. For example, your latest campaign is about reaching out to customers with a certain type of behavior.
A clear digital marketing strategy is useful for stress-testing your marketing assumptions and for targeting certain audiences.
A digital marketing strategy lays the groundwork for continued marketing growth. If a brand’s first marketing push does not perform well, it can be difficult to determine what went wrong without a strategy in place.
Were the wrong key performance indicators being focused on? Were the goals unrealistic to begin with? Was there an issue with the competitor analysis? These questions are much easier to answer when there is already a digital marketing strategy that is well-defined.
Steps to Develop Your Digital Marketing Strategy
However, you can’t focus on all of them at once—you need to choose the right mix of tactics that work for your business and products. When creating a digital marketing strategy, it is important to select the most effective tactics that will work for your business and products. Trying to implement too many techniques at one time can be overwhelming and ultimately unproductive.
Right now, we should focus on two key things: being clear and trying new things. To make sure we’re clear, we’ll spend time defining our target audience and what we want to achieve. As for trying new things, we’ll focus on growing and using different marketing strategies.
The more data you collect, the more complex your digital marketing strategy will need to be. Therefore, it is very important to establish a strong foundation at the beginning of the process.
Research and Understand Your Audience
First, we need to understand who our target audience is. Who are we trying to reach with our message? What are their needs and wants? How can we best reach them? Once we have a good understanding of our target audience, we can start to develop a digital marketing strategy that will reach them where they are spending their time online.
If you target a specific group of people with your advertising, you will be spending your budget most effectively.
One of the most challenging aspects of audience targeting is properly defining your audience.
Start by looking at your market and seeing what kind of shape it is in. Figure out if it is an established market or one that is still being developed. Is the industry something that is well known or something that is just starting to be recognized? Who are the biggest competitors that you have?
After you have a good understanding of who your target market is, consider what type of customer you want to attract. A good rule to follow is to start with a broad idea of your ideal customer and then use specific data to further narrow your audience.
Your product might be targeted at men aged 25-35 living in Colorado, with a monthly income of $4000-$6000. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to really understand your target audience, you need to identify how they spend their time in the digital sphere.
To find out what popular blogs your industry is reading, as well as the e-commerce stores and YouTube videos they are watching, keep track of this information. This will give you insight into what content they consume, which will make it easier to reach out and create content that appeals to them.
Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Now that the basics are out of the way, it’s time to focus on creating and carrying out a digital marketing strategy.
Figuring out which digital marketing channel to focus on is the biggest challenge here. A lot of people feel stressed out about this decision because they’re afraid of investing in a channel that won’t work.
Our digital marketing framework helps reduce the risk of failed campaigns by starting with small, focused campaigns. This allows brands to track how effective a channel is without spending a large amount of money.
If you’re looking to get paid for your social media ads, you’ll need to set up a goal, and put some effort into marketing. Then, you can determine how effective Facebook ads are for your brand. With that data, you can plan future campaigns within that channel.
This approach can be used for multiple channels to develop a clear sense of which channels your audience responds to. Test marketing tactics and different target audiences constantly to collect as many relevant data points as possible.
In just twelve months, you will have a wealth of data that is simple to understand and can be used to create effective marketing strategies.
Some people believe that your audience is only looking to be entertained, while others believe that this is not always the case. Fun content can be a powerful tool if it is appropriate for the brand and you are confident in your content creation abilities.
While not the right choice for everyone, employing funny videos or memes as part of a marketing strategy can be effective when done correctly. A good example of this is Old Spice and how its use of humor reflects the brand’s voice.
If you do not feel confident about your comedic timing or if your brand does not fit well with absurdist internet humor, there is another option. educating your audience can be just as effective as entertaining them.
It is important to note that when we are discussing how to educate your audience, we are not only talking about how to educate them on your brand. It is essential to understand that consumers have different pain points that need to be addressed. These pain points are typically industry-related and might not have a direct solution.
You could discuss the best hiking trails, you could do a rundown of the best camping gear, you could even talk about the best hiking apps. For example, if you are selling hiking backpacks, you could create content about the best hiking trails, a rundown of the best camping gear, or even the best hiking apps. This would provide more information for your potential customers and help you to rank higher in search engines.
The hiking community has a lot of questions about grills, hiking tips, and sleeping bags. If you’re an expert in your field, you probably have a lot of content that you could share in a blog.
If you think that something would have been useful to know when you were just starting out, then it will probably be useful to someone else. You don’t need a lot of money to connect with consumers. You just need to create marketing content that feels genuinely helpful. If you can do that, you can create marketing campaigns that will have a real impact.
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