Were happy to share our guide on marketing strategies. Today, we explain why it is important to have a strategy and provide tips for creating one.
These strategies will help your company gain more visibility and trust from customers.
Marketing strategy is the plan to achieve a marketing goal or goals in an organized and realistic way.
The strategy takes into account what is working well in your company and whats missing to achieve the goal you have set.
Digital Marketing: What Is It?
Digital marketing is establishing an online presence using various web-based channels, such as social media, organic search engines, paid advertisements, or your website.
Digital marketing strategies are designed to raise awareness of your company and bring in new customers.
Digital marketing strategies help your company achieve its digital goals by selecting the right mediums.
The terms "digital campaign" and "digital strategy" are often used interchangeably, similar to the difference between marketing strategies and tactics. How do they differ, then?
What are Digital Marketing Campaigns?
Digital marketing campaigns are the actions and building blocks that make up your digital marketing plan.
They help you achieve a particular result.
Suppose your goal is to increase leads via social media as part of a larger digital marketing strategy.
In that case, you may run a Twitter-based digital campaign. To generate more leads, you can share the best-gated content from your company on Twitter.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Create Buyer Personas
You need to understand your target audience before you can develop a marketing strategy, whether its digital or traditional.
Buyer personas are the foundation of any successful digital marketing strategy.
The buyer persona represents your target customer and is created through research, surveys, and interviews.
This information must be as accurate as possible. Making assumptions about your target audience could lead to a marketing strategy that could be more effective.
For a complete picture, you should also include people not in your contacts database but aligning with your audience.
What information do you need to gather about your buyer personas to develop your digital marketing strategies?
It depends on the type of business you have. For example, it may vary according to whether your company is B2B or C2C or if you are selling a low-cost or high-cost item.
You can start with these ideas and then fine-tune them to suit your business.
Demographic and Quantitative Information
- Location: Use web analytics tools to identify the location of your websites traffic.
- Age: Depending on your company, you may find this information relevant. If this is the case, it would be best to collect these data from your current prospect database.
- Income: Its better to collect sensitive information such as personal income via personal research interviewees since people may not be willing to divulge these details through online forms.
- Job title: This can be derived from the customer list of your B2B company.
Qualitative Information
- Objectives: Depending upon the challenge that your service or product solves, you likely already know your buyer personas goals. Speak to actual customers, internal customer service, and sales reps.
- Challenges: Consult with customers, customer service representatives, sales reps and other employees who interact directly with your target audience to understand their challenges.
- Interests/Hobbies: Ask your customers or those aligned with the target audience about their interests and hobbies. For example, if you are a fashion company, knowing if large segments of your target audience are interested in health and fitness can help inform content and future partnerships.
- Priorities: Speak to clients and members of your target audience to learn what is most important for them. Suppose you are a B2B company selling software, for example. In that case, knowing that your target audience places more importance on customer service than competitive pricing is important.
Combining all these details will allow you to develop buyer personas for your highly accurate company.
2. Determine Your Goals and What Digital Marketing Tools Youll Need
Marketing goals must always relate to your companys fundamental objectives. Suppose your company aims to boost online revenues by 20%.
In that case, the marketing team might want to achieve this goal by generating 50% more leads through the website than they did the year before. It would help if you used the appropriate digital marketing tools to track the progress of your overall goal.
3. Assess Your Existing Digital Channels and Assets
Its important to consider the overall picture when evaluating your digital marketing assets and channels to decide what to include in your strategy.
This will help prevent feeling confused or overwhelmed. You can categorize your vehicles or assets in an Excel spreadsheet to better understand what media you own, have earned and have paid for.
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Media Framework for Owned Earned and Paid
Use the framework of owned, earned and paid media to classify the digital assets or channels that you already use and determine what fits best with your marketing strategy.
Owned Media
Owned channels are your business or brands assets, whether its your blog, your social media profile, your website or your imagery.
Your companys channels are those over which it has full control. You can include off-site material that you have created but is not hosted on your site (e.g. A blog that you post on Medium).
Earned Media
The term earned media is used to describe the publicity you receive through marketing word of mouth.
You can use the content you have distributed to other websites, such as blogs. Guest posts, PR efforts or customer service are all examples of earned media. Media earned is recognition that you get as a direct result of your efforts.
By getting positive press reviews and having people share your content on their social media channels (e.g. social media channels).
Paid Media
Paid media is any channel or vehicle you pay money for to attract your target audience.
You can use native advertising, Google AdWords or sponsored posts on other websites. Sponsored posts on other sites or any other media through which you can pay for more visibility. Lets look at an actual example now that you know what the framework is all about.
Imagine youve created a piece of owned content for a page on your website to generate leads.
You need to work with different framework elements rather than only working with paid, owned or earned media.
You can increase the amount of leads generated by your content if you ensure it is shareable.
This allows users to distribute the material via social media. This will, in turn, increase the traffic on your landing page. Earned media is a component of the overall strategy.
You can pay for more exposure to your targeted audience by posting your content on Facebook.
Its important to note that this is optional for success. If your earned and owned media is already working, you may not have to spend money on paid media.
Evaluate the solution that will help you achieve your goals, then integrate the channels which work well for your company into your digital strategy.
4. Audition and Planning of Your Own Media Campaigns
Owned media is at the core of digital marketing, and it almost always comes in the shape of content.
Content is almost everything your brand says, including blog posts, eBooks, infographics and podcasts.
The content you create can help convert website visitors into customers and leads while improving your brands online visibility.
When this content has been optimized for search engines (SEO), you can increase your organic and search traffic. Owned content is a must for any digital marketing strategy.
Decide what type of content you need to reach your marketing goals. Your About Us page will not be part of your plan if you aim to increase leads by 50% on your website compared to last year.
This is unless it has been an effective lead generator in the past. This is a quick process that you can use to determine what content to own to achieve your goals for digital marketing.
Check Your Content
List all of the content you already own and rate each piece based on what performed well compared to your goals.
If you want to generate leads, you can rank content based on which items generated the highest number of leads in the past year. Its important to know what is currently working and what isnt so you can successfully plan future content.
Find the Gaps in Your Existing Content
Identify any content gaps based on the buyer personas you created. Create some if, for example, you are a tutoring business that knows through research that the biggest challenge your clients face is learning to study effectively.
Your content audit reveals ebooks on certain landing pages convert very well (better, perhaps, than webinars).
If you are a math tutoring business, your plan might include an ebook on "how to study more effectively".
Plan Your Content Creation
Create a plan for creating content based on your findings and any gaps you identified.
This will help you achieve your goals.
Included in this list is:
- Title
- You can also download the format of your choice
- Goal
- Promoting channels
- What is the purpose of creating content?
- Priority of content
It can also be a spreadsheet that includes budget and time estimates if content creation is being outsourced.
5. Audition and Planning of Your Earned Media Campaigns
You can better understand where you should spend your time by comparing your earned media with your goals.
If you want to increase traffic or leads, look at the sources of your earned media and rate them from the most effective down.
A particular article you wrote for your industrys press may have driven a large amount of traffic and boosted conversions.
LinkedIn is the place where most people share content. This increases traffic.
It is important to use historical data to clearly understand which types of earned media are most likely (and least likely) for you to achieve your goal.
Dont be afraid to try something different, even if it hasnt been tried before.
Read More: Ways to grow your E-commerce audience and start making money online
6. Audition and Planning Your Paid-Media Campaigns
The process is similar: you need to assess your current paid media on each platform.
Google AdWords (e.g., Facebook, Twitter etc.). Figure out which of these options will help you achieve your goals.
Consider re-evaluating your AdWords campaign if you do not see the desired results.
Or, you can abandon it and move on to another advertising platform. You should know by the end of which platforms (if any) you would like to keep in your paid-media strategy and which you wish to eliminate.
7. Your Digital Marketing Campaign: Bring it Together
After doing the necessary planning and research, you know what elements will be included in your digital marketing plan.
Heres a review of what you should be able to solidify so far.
- Your buyer personas should be clearly defined.
- Digital marketing goals
- A list of all your owned, earned and paid media
- Audit your current owned, earned and paid media
- A plan for creating owned content or a wishlist
Check out this list of common marketing tactics used by teams in various industries to get a better idea of digital strategies.
Digital Marketing Strategies
1. It is Possible to Publish a Blog
Blogs are a great way to market your company digitally. Some people claim blogging is a "massive waste of time", but it can be a powerful tool for companies who want to reach customers interested in what they offer.
A blog to help your customers. Understanding your audiences pain points and target market is key. You can then write highly relevant and helpful content for your readers.
2. Advertising on Specific Platforms Advertise on Specific Platforms (e.g., Google Ads or Facebook Ads)
An organic blogging strategy only tells part of the story. The importance of non-organic strategies, like paid advertising, is just as high.
This will help increase brand awareness and reach people who have not found your company organically. Its important to use this strategy when your blog is still in its early stages, and you need to get the desired traffic.
You should add the following types of digital advertising to your strategy:
- Advertising on Social Media
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Google Ads
- Advertise Online
You can advertise on almost every platform using a display network, such as Google, or its built-in advertising systems, like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Advertising is a great way to promote your business without worrying about SEO or content. Its as simple as writing a few copy sentences and choosing your imagery. Then, you can launch the advertising campaign.
Youll need to develop an advertising strategy outlining who your campaign is aimed at, what channels you intend to use, and the budget you have set aside.
3. Get Free Educational Resources
Digital marketing doesnt end when people visit your site or click on your ads. In exchange for the email, you should also offer additional value.
The gated content may be free, but users are "charged" by their contact details. Lead generation is a practice thats crucial if you hope to convert visitors into customers.
You would then create a landing page offering a free resource: an eBook, guide, template or kit.
Consider what your customers require to be successful in the workplace. Make a tool that helps them to do that.
Use best landing page practices to encourage visitors to free download your resource.
Remove unnecessary information and buttons, limit the navigation menus and eliminate links and buttons that take the visitor away from the landing page. The only way to access the content should be by downloading it.
4. Search Engine Optimize Digital Content
It is important to include SEO in your digital marketing strategy. This will allow you to rank higher for your product-related keywords and increase the number of people who view your blog posts, educational content, or other digital offers.
SEO will help you get your pages to those looking for your products or services. On-page SEO is important for ensuring your content engages and converts users.
5. Make an Online Giveaway or Contest
Contests and giveaways can also help you boost your online strategy and increase brand recognition.
You can get thousands of followers by offering a product for free. It is especially useful when selling a product to consumers or providing a service that includes physical deliverables.
A beauty brand may choose to offer beauty products, while a portrait photographer could choose to provide a complimentary session.
This strategy is suitable for something other than B2B companies or manufacturers.
However, you can still use it in your favor. For example, offer a free product box to the first customer on your mailing list. This is one example.
6. Webinars Can Be Organized
You can use webinars as an alternative to a contest, especially if your company is B2B.
These webinars are essential to educating your customers about your products and services. They also give interested prospects an opportunity for direct communication with a representative of your company. They can then ask any questions they have and receive answers instantly.
Selling a complex product takes work. Consider creating a webinar page for your website where you can list both past and upcoming webinars.
Customers can access educational content, while prospects can learn more about you and your products through a more interactive medium than just a blog or case study.
7. Create a Podcast
You only have to look at how Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces competed to gain market share to see that audio marketing is rising.
Although platforms like Clubhouse differ from podcasting in many ways, the concept is similar: you can educate and engage your audience on the move. They only need a device capable of playing audio.
You can use podcasts to expand your reach beyond search engines and other social media platforms.
Its also a more natural, unplanned medium. Of course, you still need to plan every episode and ensure you deliver relevant content for your audience.
8. Email Marketing Campaign
It is the best digital strategy you can use today. You can nurture your customers who show great interest in your product.
You wouldnt subscribe to a companys newsletter if it didnt appeal to you. And a business should only email clients who are on its mailing list. It can only be if they want to take the risk of reducing email delivery.
Subscribers can be gained through your blog or webinars. You can target people with email campaigns whenever they provide you with their email addresses and consent to receive communication.
Its time to put all this information into a marketing strategy document. Based on your research, your strategy document will outline the steps you need to take to reach your goal.
Digital Marketing Strategy Template
A spreadsheet is a good way to map out your digital strategy. However, it can become cluttered and confusing.
It would help to plan your long-term strategy - usually between 6 and 12 months in advance - with a solid digital marketing strategy.
Where do you begin? Our free template for a digital marketing plan will help you get started. The template helps you build your market information and target audience, as well as your marketing plan, including budget, channels, metrics, and specific targets.
This digital strategy template will help you create your digital marketing tactics and strategy for the year.
You can plan your yearly strategy and then overlay the dates when you will execute each action with your team. You can, for example:
- You will start your blog in January. Itll be updated every week for an entire year.
- Youll be launching a brand new eBook in March. Paid promotion will accompany it.
- What will you have learned when you prepare your largest business month in July?
- Youll focus on PR and earned media to increase traffic in September.
The timeline will make it easier to communicate your plans with colleagues.
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Conclusion
Making a template that fits all digital marketing strategies is nearly impossible.
It would help if you always remembered that the goal of your digital strategy is to outline the steps you will take over time to reach your goals. If you can do this, you have nailed it. Todays edition discusses digital marketing, how it works, and the best ways to enhance your online presence.
It would help if you created your marketing strategy by following the guideline.
This includes understanding your product and its features, analyzing the market, defining what makes it unique, selecting the best tools and platforms to launch, and finally launching.
There are many ways to increase your digital presence and gain more recognition.
Some of the most effective ways to gain recognition and strengthen your digital business presence are blogging, advertising through different channels, giving away free guides and ebooks, organizing a webinar or podcast, and offering giveaways.
