What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a plan set to achieve specific business goals using digital marketing channels.
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Planning (or creating a strategy) is an important first step for success in online marketing.
It’s important to outline your objectives, how you are going to go about achieving them, which metrics will be used to measure performance and how you will analyse and optimise your marketing in the future.
Why Do You Need A Digital Marketing Strategy
Without proper planning, your online marketing efforts are exposed to the risk of turning into a misguided waste of resources.
A good strategy safeguards against such a risk by setting data-guided S.M.A.R.T (Specific-Measurable-Attainable-Realistic-Timely) goals. A good strategy will also assign owners to tactics for accountability and set time intervals for evaluation (performance checks) to ensure campaigns stay on track.
In a competitive marketing landscape of empowered buyers, it will take more than a big budget and the best tools to run successful campaigns.
Just like in the military, where a clever strategy can solely deliver victory, a good digital marketing strategy can help you edge out the competition, even those with bigger budgets and better resources.
How to create a digital marketing plan
Creating an effective digital marketing strategy can be challenging. Here are some tried and tested guidelines to help you create how to create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy from scratch that will help you accomplish specific goals.
Situational Analysis
The first thing you need to do when developing your digital marketing plan is to carry out an internal and external analysis (SWOT analysis) of the firm. A useful framework for this is the SWOT analysis that allows you to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and weaknesses for your company and the market at large.
Build your buyer personas.
The next step you’ll need to take in order to create your strategy is to get a solid understanding of who your audience is and what motivates them. This will be essential because it will help you to assess which marketing platforms you can find them on, how they’re interacting with it and what they want to see from you.
Set your SMART goals
What do you want your digital marketing campaigns to accomplish? Do you want to build name brand recognition? Generate leads? Get more sales or email subscribers?
Great! Whatever it is that you want, though, you need to name it.
Digital Tactics
Based on our objectives (attraction, conversion, and loyalty), we’ll start to implement different tactics: email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, content marketing, SEO strategies, Paid Media advertising, etc.
Considering that the number of channels to manage is multiplying, it’s critical to use Marketing Automation tools and automate some of the campaigns.
Measuring Results and KPIs
The work doesn’t stop after you’ve designed and implemented your digital marketing strategy. The next step is one of the most critical: analyzing the results. Analytics has turned into a critical pillar for successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending.
You have to measure every action using KPIs to figure out if you earned the ROI we expected. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and activities you implemented in your digital marketing will help you correct what doesn’t work to achieve the goals you set.
Benefits of a Digital Marketing Strategy
While it may be tempting to just dive in and get started with your digital marketing campaigns, it pays off to take a step back and lay out an action plan.
Having a plan in place will help you keep focus and stay on top of things. Listed below are some of the benefits a digital marketing plan:
- Set a Clear Direction - It’s common that companies with no digital strategy usually don’t have clearly defined strategic goals in order to get new customers or build stronger relationships with the customers they already have.
- To stay nimble - Staying nimble, dynamic, and coming up with new approaches and ideas is the best way to retain and gain online audiences. With a strategy for your digital audiences, you will be able to stay abreast of the changes and improvise according to the market situations.
- Smooth integration with traditional marketing - If you also using traditional marketing channels, having a digital marketing strategy will ensure that both the marketing strategies compliments each other.
- Know your target audience - Finding your target audience can be difficult for business owners when it comes to digital marketing. And knowing how to target and market to your target audience is essential.
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Outline value proposition - When it comes to marketing your product or service online, you’re bound to be competing with other competitors. So how exactly are you going to differentiate your product or service?
This is where your strategy can really help you dig deep into what makes you different, and how you can appeal to your target audience. - Reduce threats from new competitors and existing - A meticulous strategy would enable you to take strong measures against competitors and recognize the untouched market areas and target them accordingly.
Key To Success With Digital Marketing
Doing digital marketing without a proper strategy is like going to battle without a plan. To succeed with digital marketing, you need a solid strategy.
Get in touch and let us work together formulate a killer digital marketing strategy which will help your business realize it’s full potential.