Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies via the internet, social media, mobile phones, or any other digital media.
A digital marketing strategy is different from that of a digital marketing campaign. When talking about digital marketing strategy, we refer to a master plan or a blueprint to achieve a long-term or macro goal. Campaigns on the other hand are the specific tactics used to achieve more short-term goals within the digital marketing strategy.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A Digital Marketing Strategy is a plan or course of action towards achieving set marketing goals. Goals are determined by what your business objectives are and in order of priority. Once these goals are set, digital marketing campaigns will be developed and executed to achieve them.
Why is Having a Digital Marketing Strategy Important?
Having a strategy is about as important as having a plan to achieve any goal. It fully optimizes the workflow implementation, allowing high efficacy while overlooking various areas to review data analytics and acting upon them accordingly.
A digital marketing strategy involves setting marketing objectives based on the analysis of market information and target audiences, selecting digital marketing channels and platforms, determining channel-specific delivery tactics, and defining macro marketing KPIs to measure the performance of the digital marketing strategy.
Before developing any digital marketing campaigns, you should first have a strategy.
And the steps may include:
Step 1: Create a customer-friendly persona
Step 2: Layout your goals and targets.
Step 3: Focus upon Blogging.
Step 4: Evaluate Existing Digital Marketing Channels.
Step 5: Automate Marketing.
Step 6: Nail Mobile Optimization.
Step 7: Make it Easy for Customers to Reach You.
Step 8: Use the right technology.
Step 9: Try and confirm your differentiators
Step 10: Make sure you track your progress
Before you can create the perfect digital marketing strategy, you also need to learn about your ideal customer. Knowing who your customers are can help you target your marketing materials to certain groups. Elements to consider might include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Family size
- Occupation
- Income
- Interests
The better you understand who your ideal customer is, the easier it is to create marketing content for the right demographics. For example, a cosmetics company for young adult women wouldn’t want to use the same copy as a software company aimed at executive businessmen.
Once you know who your ideal customer is, you should look at your competitors. Consider what they offer and how they market their businesses online. Think about what images or copies they use on their website or social media accounts, and high regard how you may differ from them.
Use the information you find to set your business apart and to bring authentic, real, and raw content. Perhaps you have a unique experience that your competitors lack. Or maybe your products are of better quality or are more affordable than the competition.
Without goals, you won’t be able to track the success of your strategy. Your goal needs to be specific and measurable so that you can tell if you’re on track to reach it or how far apart you are from your expected tracks.
Look at the tools and platforms you use, your posting schedule, and the results you’re getting.
Review the results you get and see how close they are to the results you want. If you aren’t getting the traffic or sales you need, you’ll know you need to change something.
On the other hand, if you’re getting some results, you can use that. Then, you can figure out what is getting sales or conversions so that you can replicate them with your new digital marketing strategy.
If you find these tasks rather challenging, you can look for an agency that has experience in social media marketing, email marketing, and website content. That way, you won’t have to worry about following best practices for a specific platform.
If your digital marketing strategy will include your website, email, and social media, you may be able to handle it in-house. But hiring an agency with experts in those areas can save you a lot of time and frustration.
Creating a digital marketing strategy involves a lot of planning, goal setting, and organization. But it is a vital component of success in digital work because, without a strategy, you won’t be able to track your marketing successes or determine where and how you can improve your efforts.
