Table of Contents
What Really is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Businesses that want to make their mark in the industry cannot do so without a solid digital marketing strategy in their plan. It is, basically, a high-level plan spread over a long time period that helps a business accomplish set goals. With a digital marketing strategy, a business can better define its objectives and milestones. Once a business understands its targets, the ones running it can create a proper plan to achieve those goals. Additionally, a digital marketing strategy also helps identify their specific target audience so they can adopt the right tactics to captivate their attention. Moreover, a digital marketing strategy also gives a detailed framework that lays the foundation for a business’s different marketing activities. Typically, these activities include performance across diverse digital platforms such as search engines, email, social media channels, and websites.
Important Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy usually serves as a strategic compass for your business. It guides you in the right direction that will take you closer to where you wish to be.
Concrete and well-structured digital marketing strategies clarify confusions and simplify complexities. That happens as they help you answer some important questions related to your business.
- What do you wish to accomplish?
- How can you accomplish it?
- Why does a certain goal really matter?
- What will happen if you achieve it?
- What routes can you take to achieve the goals?
- How should you start, and what steps should you take next?
- How much budget will I require to get the desired success?
- What tactics do I need to adopt?
As you answer these concerns, you start to decode the secret formula to shape your business’s success. The core components of a value-driven digital marketing strategy comprise:
- Goals: The set targets you aspire to achieve. Your goals also help you uncover your priorities and align them with your business’s targets.
- Campaigns: These are the time-tagged specific initiatives that mainly center on certain, substantial milestones in your strategy.
- Marketing Tactics: These are the granular steps, mostly related to specific campaigns, that help you achieve set targets. Generally, these granular steps include running ads, creating blog posts, starting a competition on social media, and the like.
So a digital marketing strategy uses a layered methodology to create a sense of cohesion in all your marketing efforts.
Together, a strategy along with its campaigns and tactics propels your business towards success. A strategy helps you uncover your long-term vision, which you achieve by setting certain goals. For instance, your vision could be to become an industry leader in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) sector. One of the goals to materialize this vision could be to increase your market share by 35% in 2025.
The campaigns basically switch on your strategy and breathe life into it. For example, an initiative such as running an email campaign to target your audience is a powerful approach to widen your market share.
A digital marketing campaign comes into actual shape with the right tactics. These help you carry out the campaign in real-time by practicing certain tasks. Continuing with the example of an email campaign, you’d need an email template and design, email copy, and landing pages to run a successful campaign.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy comes into place with its goals, audience, budget, and metrics. You need all four of these to formulate and execute your business’s digital marketing strategy.
- Goals: These help determine specific targets that must be in sync with the organization’s goals. For example, ABC company’s goal is to improve the brand engagement by 30%.
- Audience: The people you are targeting to achieve a specific goal. By understanding the audience, you know how to tailor your messaging accordingly. For instance, Pepsi emphasizes Gen Z across the world with video campaigns.
- Budget: The total funds to cover the activities required to achieve goals. With the budget, you figure out the resources to allocate to the high-impact channels. For instance, Coke sets aside $5 million for digital ads and influencer partnerships.
- Metrics: They help you monitor and track the performance so you can fine-tune the tactics accordingly. Engagement rates, brand sentiments, and reach are important metrics to measure a campaign’s success.
When you have these four components, it becomes easier to structure your digital marketing strategy.
Let’s see how you can create your digital marketing strategy.
1. Set Clear Goals and Targets
The process starts with defining the brand’s goals, targets, and milestones. It is crucial that they align with the business’s broader targets.
Use the SMART tool to create specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals.
- Specific: Clearly mention what you are trying to achieve, for instance, achieving a 15% increase in the click through rate in Google Analytics.
- Measurable: Define how to measure your goals. For example, you can measure the success of your campaign by evaluating the email open rate.
- Attainable: These are goals that you try to achieve with the resources available to you. For instance, if you are trying to improve customer engagement, you can leverage your social media platforms for that purpose.
- Realistic: A realistic goal is one that seems achievable. Of course, you should have big dreams and goals, but when you are starting out with executing your vision, set realistic goals. This also makes things clearer for your team so they find it easy to work on the set targets.
- Time-bound: The goal must have a timeline. You should know when to start working on a goal and its deadline so you can plan accordingly. For instance, if you want to start a social media campaign to launch a new product, mention its starting and ending dates.
By setting SMART goals, you get a clearer idea of the direction to head in. As a result, you can better guide your team and achieve measurable success.
2. Describe Buyer Personas
Knowing your audience is crucial to achieving all your business and marketing goals. If you don’t understand your audience, you will never know their pain points. Naturally, when you are unaware of what they want and need, you’ll struggle to effectively market your offering and reach your audience.
This is why you must describe and create buyer personas for the different segments of your target audience.
- Start with figuring out their location. Find out where your customers live and how they shop with the help of analytics.
- Next, use forms or surveys to gather insights about their occupation and income level. This information helps you gauge their buying power so you can set pricing strategies accordingly.
- Also analyze their interests, aspirations, and hobbies to find out what they need, want, and desire.
By crafting and considering the buyer personas, you will have a deeper understanding of your audience. Once you know what motivates and inspires them and what absolutely ticks them off, you will create a winning digital marketing strategy.
3. Audit All the Assets
A foolproof digital marketing strategy is one that leverages your brand’s strengths and finds ways to overcome or improve on the shortcomings. To ensure your digital marketing strategy is robust enough to materialize your goals, audit all your assets.
- Start with assessing the current digital assets so you can find the growth areas, gaps, and strengths.
- Crawl the entire website and gather all the URLs across category pages, blogs, and other digital assets.
- Check if there is any weak content or a missing functionality for specific campaigns or target audiences.
- Use tools to analyze the performance of keywords, and look for opportunities to better optimize your site’s performance.
- Similarly, go through all your social media platforms and analyze their performance in detail. Check the analytics of each platform to assess your profile’s reach and engagement. See if your posts are aligned with your blog and marketing goals. Find out areas where you could improve to maximize the results.
Make sure to document all your findings to keep track of your performance and to utilize them in your digital marketing strategy. Companies with the best brand awareness make sure to audit their assets so they can improve their SEO and digital presence.
4. Plan Your Brand’s Content
A campaign loses its spark if its content isn’t powerful and isn’t executed properly. You must plan how to create, manage, and deliver your content.
- Begin by figuring out the kind of content your audience expects.
- Find out how much content you’ll need to create the desired impact. For instance, if you are trying to create awareness for a product you’re planning to launch next month, you will need dozens of videos, articles, and a few press releases.
- Also determine the financial resources you will have access to.
- Identify all the tasks that the in-house resources can handle and those that you may need to outsource.
- Check if you have all the technological tools you need for content creation. Perhaps you need a graphic design tool or video editing software.
- Create a timeline for the entire content and specify the due dates for each piece.
- Assign different tasks to your team, keeping in mind their expertise, skill, and interest.
Once you have planned all your content and the resources, document it. Assign a competent project manager the task of monitoring the project’s performance so you can timely track and improvise it.
5. Pinpoint All the Key Performance Indicators
Moving on, figure out the KPIs (key performance indicators) relevant to your digital marketing strategy. The KPIs help you figure out whether or not your strategy was successful.
If your strategy has somehow been unsuccessful in achieving the set targets, you’d need to improve it. But that can only happen when you know what went wrong. And this is where the KPIs help you out.
Some of the commonly used KPIs include:
- Google Analytics CTR (click-through rates)
- Digital conversion rates
- Rates of engaged visits
- Cost per lead
- Customer lifetime value
- bookings
The KPIs can vary according to a certain goal and its accompanying digital marketing strategy. Ensure to have a detailed brainstorming session with your team to identify and set the right key performance indicators.
Get the Best Results with Top-Tier Digital Marketing Services
A robust digital presence comes with an excellent digital marketing strategy. ITechSole can simplify the problem for you with its cutting-edge and results-driven digital marketing services. We create customized and powerful strategies according to your business, audience, niche, and budget.
Whether you need strategies for your PPC campaigns or want full-spectrum digital marketing, we have got you covered.
What is the next step?
Book a FREE consultation call with our experts by dropping us an email, giving us a call, or filling out the form below.
FAQs
What are some major digital marketing services?
Some of the most important digital marketing services for businesses are search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, and email marketing. While website design and development don’t exactly fall under digital marketing services, they are often included in it as the two are closely related.
On average, what is the cost of digital marketing services for a small business?
The cost of digital marketing services for small businesses vary according to the nature of business, client’s budget, type of service, region and the digital marketing company you’re getting the services from. However, businesses usually spend anywhere from $500 to $5,000 or even more every month on digital marketing services.
Which service is the best and most important for digital marketing?
The most important digital marketing service a business should invest in depends on the business’s type, niche, competition, and goals. Typically, search engine optimization is a key digital marketing service businesses invest in. That’s because it improves their online visibility and search engine ranking, which drives traffic to their website.
What kinds of businesses should get digital marketing services?
Digital marketing works for every business. Typically, ecommerce stores, restaurants, bars, cafes, auto dealerships, real estate businesses, law firms, healthcare facilities, clinics, contractors, fashion and lifestyle stores, and educational institutes benefit greatly from digital marketing.
How effective can online advertising be for a business?
Digital ads have the power to improve your brand awareness by 80%. Around 90% of all the users online do see at least one Google ad while using the internet. This means if you advertise your business online, you’ll get more reach for it.
4 Responses