Is a large portion of your marketing focused on your digital presence? With most businesses, the answer is a resounding yes! Since online businesses are always striving to grow their presence, wouldn't it make sense to develop a digital strategy that fuels sales by converting visitors into loyal customers?
To help you understand and improve your digital presence, there are four points you need to consider: Digital Marketing Strategy, SMART Growth Goals, Customer Acquisition, Master Strategy Model. Today we'll cover the first two.
Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy involves a sequence of activities you take that use digital platforms to achieve your goals. Digital platforms include Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, just to name a few.
It's important to remember that digital marketing encompasses everything digital or, more simply, 5Ds, including digital technology, digital platforms, digital devices, digital media, and digital data.
Within the digital marketing sphere, you can market on three channels, paid, owned, and earned media. A paid channel is any channel you pay to advertise, such as Google AdWords, social media, or sponsored posts/websites. Earned media refers to advertising that is done for you through word of mouth, and an owned channel includes your digital assets such as your website and blogs, social media profile, or images.
Your business has its own digital fingerprint, which means that your digital strategy will most likely involve several approaches or a combination of approaches.
A strong digital marketing strategy incorporates three-time frames:
- Short – 1 year
- Medium- 2 years
- Long – 3 + years
SMART Goals
Setting goals within multiple time frames allows you to set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART) goals for each stage and age of your marketing journey. Not to be confused with your digital strategy, your digital campaign helps you achieve your short, medium, and long-term goals. But successfully charting your internet campaigns requires a digital marketing strategy.
How to create a digital marketing strategy
I've written about the steps in previous chapters; however, they bear repeating to illustrate how they function within the overall digital strategy. The first step you are already familiar with:
1. Create your customer persona
Knowing who to target is key. It's critical you understand your customers wants, needs, and pain points. Having a persona or personas allows you to tailor your strategy to them. Specific is terrific, and the more granular your data, the better your persona. Location, income, age, employment, gender, goals, interests, and pain points help you form your persona. A robust persona shapes your digital strategy and supports you in understanding which channels to market to specific personas.
2. Set time frames for your goals
While setting your short, medium, and long-term goals, be sure to align them with your business goals, as your strategic digital marketing goals should support your overarching goals. Undefined goals without timeframes never get done. Make sure you have defined what you want to accomplish when you want to accomplish the goal and what tool you will use to measure the accomplishment – SMART goals. Metrics provide a brutally honest yardstick of what is and isn't working and can measure views, bounce, and open rates.
3. Assess your online digital marketing strategies
As part of ongoing improvement, it's important to review your earned, owned, and paid media metrics. Are people visiting your website? Are they reading the articles? Where are your traffic coming leads coming from? Which media provides the best and most consistent results? Which provides the worst results? Are your customers engaging on your social media platforms? Are your pay-per-click ads generating leads? If so, how many? Do they convert to sales? Making a continual assessment of your digital marketing efforts will help you understand what is and isn't working within each campaign.
4. Set a budget for each campaign
Knowing what you can spend on each campaign will help you make the most of your marketing dollars and stop you from overspending. Remember to budget in your resources, including the number of people, the time needed, and the tools required for each campaign.
The idea of following these four steps in the digital marketing strategy is to see what is and isn't working, identify gaps, and continually modify your strategy until you reach your goals. The next step in a digital strategy is to create a sustainable method of bringing in new customers.
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