We all understand the value digital marketing holds in this current world where virtual transactions value over the physical ones.
Hence, it only makes sense for the businesses to build a well-crafted digital marketing strategy that allows them to connect with the target audience effectively.
However, coming up with a quality digital marketing strategy would require a good understanding of your target audience and clear objectives with careful planning.
Getting a hang of it is easy when you follow effective processes that drive quality results.
Step 1: Know Your Goals
Do you want your product to be the go-to solution for the clients? Or do you wish to become a subject matter expert in a niche industry?
Head towards your goal by establishing clear and measurable objectives. Here are some of the common considerations that businesses of various industries actively practice,
- Increasing brand awareness
- Driving website traffic
- Generating leads
- Boosting sales and
- Enhancing customer engagement
When you have a clear understanding on what benefits the business for growth, you can move tactfully and prepare a fool-proof strategy.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience's interests and pain points allows you to create content that precisely matches. Conducting thorough market research enables you to learn your ideal customer persona.
However, during the research, ensure to include demographic factors, online behavior, interests, age range, etc. Gather information about your target audience enough to create content that resonates with their needs.
Protip: Identifying your target audience has now become easy. Thanks to email search tools like GetEmail.io, you can now get an email address of any professional verified for free. Its Chrome extension allows you to validate email addresses on LinkedIn, Gmail and Salesforce.
Step 3: A Thorough Competitor Analysis
In an ideal world, it is not right to see what your neighbors are up to. However, things work a little differently in the business landscape. You need to see what your competitors are doing to learn if you're any unique or need to make changes to stand out of the crowd!
This begins by examining your competition's digital marketing efforts like the content they post, what time they post, what measures do they take to appeal to their audience and who are they reaching out to! These are just to name a few. A SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat) analysis is a very effective way to understand your brand.
Since you already are gaining insights from what your competitors do, it can be your base to start a new marketing strategy!
Step 4: Choose the Right Digital Marketing Channels
Is there a perfect one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy? Absolutely not! Every business is as unique as their owners, so the approach would also differ from one another.
However, here is the list of most common channels that actually make heads turn - when done right!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The website's visibility improves organically on the search engines.
Email Marketing: A personal note to your audience can not only create quality leads but retain existing ones.
Influencer Marketing: Influencers are the new ambassadors for validating your brand. And, people do listen to their suggestions!
Social Media Marketing: Social media platforms have become a great space for e-commerce businesses to thrive. Build connections and promote your brand.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Platforms like Google ads and Facebook ads are the best place to start driving traffic with your paid ads.
Content Marketing: We all know content is the king these days. Create relevant content and keep it real to establish authenticity and authority.
Step 5: The Content Strategy
Regardless of what marketing strategy you choose, content needs to have an upper hand to make the campaign work. Creating a content strategy that is unique to your target audience while maintaining its authenticity will fetch you success.
Start by planning what kind of content you want to produce then head to where you wish to share it. Do not forget to cover all the relevant topics to your business and ensure that it addresses the interests and pain points of the customers.
Step 6: Budget and Resources
You will head nowhere without having a proper budget. Now, this doesn't mean that businesses with less finances will not make it to the top - even top companies lose their brand value because they didn't budget appropriately.
Play smart by aptly budgeting the digital marketing efforts. Remember, this is not a gamble to put all your money on one bet. Make an informed decision using past experiences and present trends.
Digital marketing might be cost-effective compared to traditional means but it requires just as much appropriation as any marketing plan.
Step 7: Timeline and Milestones
Having a timeline and milestones ensures that the business doesn't spend its time, energy and resources on unsuccessful marketing aspects.
Instead, developing a timeline enables you to achieve greater targets. Hence, you'll observe many companies dividing these strategies into manageable tasks to achieve the set goal steadily, in a focused way.
You can regularly evaluate the progress and performance against these milestones and change the strategy's trajectory when needed.
Step 8: Monitor and Adjust
Why should the business monitor its marketing campaigns? A regular check-up allows the business to understand what works for it and what doesn't. Although a marketing plan might have worked a month ago, nothing is set in stone.
We live in an ever-changing digital world and regular monitoring means that you're seeing what's currently trending around and how you can adjust as per the new norm.
Track KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like conversion rates, engagement rates, email open rates, website bounce rates, website traffic, etc.
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal for any businesses and to attain that, the businesses need to invest gathering customer's attention and loyalty.
While digital marketing is the current trend that is here to stay, it should be done with careful planning and data-driven decision-making.
Being adaptable and responsive to the market's evolution and changing customer behavior is one effective way to stay ahead in the competition.
