How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy – The Ultimate Guide
Today, the majority of our content consumption takes place in the digital world. To keep pace with our reliance on technology, marketing has also gone digital. This evolution demands that your brand be present in the digital world.
In order to establish a successful digital presence for your brand, you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy.
Newspapers are starting to become scarce — content consumption trends are shifting to digital.
That’s why you need a good digital marketing strategy.
So, what is digital marketing and why do you need a digital marketing strategy? “Digital marketing strategy” is a term that encompasses many things. It can be difficult to tackle it alone. That’s why we’ve created this handy guide to help you build a solid digital marketing strategy in 7 clear steps:
- Set a goal
- Assess your current digital marketing presence
- Understanding the Digital Sales Funnel
- Create buyer personas
- Putting your customers in the funnel
- Create a content plan
- Analyze the results
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a step-by-step and achievable process that aims to achieve your company’s digital marketing goals.
Digital marketing is carried out through digital marketing channels. These channels include social media, digital publishing, and paid, acquired, or owned media.
A digital marketing strategy involves a very deliberate decision-making process regarding your digital marketing goals and the most appropriate channels that will help you achieve them.
7 steps to develop a digital marketing strategy
Here are the fundamental steps to building a solid digital marketing strategy for your brand:
1.Set a goal:
Before you start developing a strategy, you need to ask yourself what you hope to achieve with your marketing strategy. It sounds simple, but this step requires you to define a set of very detailed and specific goals.
To do this, you can use smart criteria.
SMART is a very useful and commonly used mnemonic tool for setting goals. SMART offers the following criteria for setting goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely objectives
Gaining more views on your website is not a SMART goal.
Generating 10% more visits to your website through ads on social media platform X over the next two months is a SMART goal. It is all the more SMART as you describe the exact steps you will follow to achieve this.
2. Assess your current digital marketing presence:
Even if it is almost non-existent, it is good to understand what you have already accomplished. This step will help you understand what you need to focus on to achieve your current goals.
First, you need to understand your main marketing channels:
- Your website
- Social media
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing/SEO
- Pay-per-click advertising
Which of these means brings you the most leads and traffic? Rank each specific channel and media from most effective to least effective (so far).
3. Understand the digital sales funnel:
The digital sales funnel is the arc of your buyer’s journey, from abroad to the loyal customer or in the long term. A brand with a strong digital presence can use the funnel to achieve its digital marketing goals. How? By approaching each step of the funnel with the appropriate digital marketing tools.
Understanding the digital sales funnel means that you need to grasp every step of the funnel and the appropriate digital tools that complement it.
Here’s a simplified breakdown of the steps and appropriate responses when it comes to digital marketing.Sensitization:
Let your potential customers know about your existence. For example, through ads on social media or a good ranking in search engines.
Interest:
Spark interest in your brand. Who are you and what sets you apart from your competitors? Common digital tools for this step are articles about your brand in digital publications and videos.
Agree:
Strengthen your relationships. Sponsored social media posts that address the customer’s concerns or encourage them to ask questions are a great tool for this step.
Action:
Do business with the client. One tool for this step is to set up calls to action for the customer to make a purchase. For example, incentivizing purchase by offering discounts in ads or emails aimed at the customer.
4. Create buyer personas:
You need to know who your audience is before attempting to reach it successfully. So how do you understand who your audience is?
- Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Once you can imagine who this person is, you can make assumptions about what might interest them.
- Create a story: Where does this person shop? What does she read? On which marketing channels can you find it?
- Be specific. What do they need? What are their preferences? How can you meet (or exceed) their expectations?
Customer example: Trevor, 26, prioritizes experiences over objects. He does not own a car. He is an “expressionist” who prefers to buy unique items and does not want to look like everyone else. - Do your research using analytics services.
There are many funnel services provider you can check all of them. but my recommended is System.io it’s free and premium packages also, but you try free version first
5. Locate your customers on the funnel
You then need to locate your customers at the different stages of the funnel. In all likelihood, there will be customers at every stage of the funnel who are ready to connect with you.
For example, let’s say your product is an organic deodorant. Your potential customer can be:
- Someone who does a Google search on organic deodorants and ends up reading an article that introduces you.
- Someone looking to buy an organic and zero waste deodorant and sees your sponsored Facebook post about the fact that your deodorant is made with compostable packaging.
- A person who has already bought your deodorant and that you now include in an email campaign offering the opportunity to buy your deodorant at a discounted price.
Once you have this information, you can start targeting separate groups of customers through different channels.
6. Create a content plan
At this point, you’ll develop a specific marketing strategy for each channel that attracts your customers. What kind of content do you need to achieve your digital marketing goals for each of these channels?
Your strategy will consist of a series of actions that meet specific objectives. It will also be accompanied by a specific timetable so that actions can have measurable deadlines.
Some of these actions will be:
- Develop a keyword strategy: identify important keywords to improve SEO.
- Create a content calendar: This will allow you to have long-term and easily traceable goals. Your content calendar will be very specific. Each achievable element will include (at least) the author, publication date, keywords, topic, and potential tags.
- There must be a digital marketing goal for each month. For example, starting in January, you’ll post articles on your blog every two weeks on a specific topic.
- Social media posting: Use the research you’ve done to determine what type of content you need to post on different social media channels and how often you should do so.
- Using CTAs and widgets: It’s essential to include CTAs and widgets in your digital marketing content to make it easy for customers to engage with you and your products.
- Marketing automation tools: Once you’ve established your content strategy, these tools are a great way to save time and be effective.
7. Analyze the results
Once you’ve set up a strategy, practice this step at regular intervals (add it to your calendar). How do customers react to what you share with them? How do you progress towards your goals? These analyses will help you rectify the situation and learn from what didn’t work as intended.
Using analytics software, you can observe your progress at different stages of the funnel. You want to understand:
Clicks turn into conversions. Is there mobility in the funnel? Why or why not?
If there is a point where you lose engagement with customers. What is the reason for this and how can you fix it?
What works well and what doesn’t.
Keep up to date with the latest digital marketing tools, there may be something new on the market that perfectly meets your analysis needs.
With the results you collect, you can create charts using data visualization tools that will help you make comparisons, track goals, and make presentations.
Thank you much for reading my article, ask me question I am very friendly person :)