While a lot goes into a successful business, few things are as important as marketing. In particular, your digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing has become incredibly popular and is one of the best ways to expand your reach and get new customers.
However, you need to ensure you have a plan or strategy in place to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts. The exact structure of the plan can differ from business to business, but there are a few important steps in any marketing plan or strategy, and this article is going to go over them.
Create Goals
The first step in any business-related strategy (marketing or otherwise), is to set goals. These goals help you decide what type of marketing strategy to use, and can also help you in judging whether the strategy has been successful.
Source: PixabaySet both large and small goals, as those smaller goals can be like stepping stones for the bigger ones. The goals could be to increase your sales, build up your conversion rate, decrease your bounce rate, build more loyalty, get a larger social media following or anything else.
While all types of goals are good, SMART goals are often preferred amongst many businesses. These are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. These goals can help you define and show the kinds of things you want to achieve.
Decide on the Right Marketing Methods
Once you have goals, you need to choose the right marketing methods to help you reach those goals. All in all, there are several different methods and tactics that businesses use to get their messaging across.
You can use PPC advertising, influencer marketing, SEO, write content, perform social media marketing and many others. These are all great choices to get your product or service in front of the world, and many companies will use more than one.
Be sure to test and experiment with a couple before deciding which one to go with, and the right choice for your competitor might not always end up being the right choice for you.
Get to Know Your Audience
Your audience are the people you will be marketing to, so it’s crucial that you get to know them well. As a result, you need to create buyer personas to help you learn more about your audience.
Source: PixabayThese personas are fictional people that embody your ideal customer, and someone who is most likely to make a purchase if they see your ad.
Knowing more about them can assist you in knowing the kind of digital marketing methods and content to utilize to best reach them. You should know things like how old they are, where they live, their income, their job, their hobbies, their pain points in life and a variety of other things.
Effective and efficient targeting not only gets you more customers, but can reduce your costs, as you don’t waste a lot of resources marketing to those who will never likely become a customer.
Know Your Budget
Next, it is crucial to know your budget and be aware of how much your chosen digital marketing strategy will cost you. Advertising isn’t always cheap, and some companies will spend millions and millions of dollars on it each and every year.
In most cases, companies should be spending around 7-8% of their gross revenue on marketing and advertising.
It is crucial to come up with a budget that works for your company, before ever starting the development of your digital marketing strategy. Without setting a budget, your strategy could end up costing you far more than you can afford, which could hurt the profitability of your company.
When you set a budget, it is often a good idea to break it down on a per-channel basis so that you know how much you need for each aspect and part of the overall strategy.
Have a Marketing Calendar
Another important part of a digital marketing strategy is a marketing calendar. A marketing calendar essentially keeps track of and covers your marketing activities for a particular month or year.
It is a roadmap for your different marketing-related activities and content and will outline when certain things are released or when campaigns start and finish.
These calendars help keep you on track and ensure you always know what you have coming up and are never surprised by anything. They are also great for tracking your costs and making sure you are always focusing on the task at hand.
The calendar should be quite detailed and be filled in with other aspects of your marketing plan. It can be a physical calendar on a board in your office, but be sure to have and update a digital version, as well.
Go Over the Results
Once your digital marketing strategy has been built, implemented and is out in the world, you may think your work is done. However, that is not the case. You need to continuously analyze the results to make sure your strategy is reaching the goals you intended it to.
If you don’t monitor results, you may never know how well your efforts were and what could have been improved.
The best way to judge how successful a strategy has been so far is to look at a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs you examine and track will depend on the goals you set for your company. You may want to examine the conversion rate, the cost-per-acquisition or any number of other statistics.
If you aren’t meeting your goals, this step allows you to restructure things and fix them going forward. If you never check on the progress of your strategy and how it is performing, by the time you find out they have been failing, they may have already cost you a ton of money.
In conclusion, these are all incredibly important parts of any marketing strategy and should all be included or considered in your plan. Building a strategy isn’t always easy, but we hope this article has made things a little bit simpler.
