How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is advertising delivered through digital media, such as social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc.), search engines, email, etc. Digital marketing helps a marketer know if their marketing is in the right place, targeting the right audience, or being displayed at the right time. It helps to derive more leads from digital channels. A strategy, when well carried out, gets your business ahead of the competition.

In order to build a digital marketing strategy, you need to first identify several aspects of your business.

Know your present position

Understand your position against your competitors and within your industry. Use social media to know your ratings as compared to your competitors. Monitor which tweets or posts are popular and come up with a winning formula to generate more engagement.

Set goals and objectives

Define your company’s goals and objectives. What are the specific outcomes you want to achieve with your actions? This helps you not to overlook the very important, small and simple actions needed in your marketing. Set your goals in a simple and clear manner. Do you want to generate more leads or close more sales? How many leads? How many more sales? How do you intend to measure the increase in brand awareness if that’s your goal? It is easy to act once you know what exactly you want to achieve.

Identify your customers

Know who your customers are. Identify the consumers of your products and learn their trends. Research their needs and interests. The better you can relate to your customers, the more your strategy can convert. Once you understand what resonates with your customers, you can offer targeted deals and offers and the conversion rate goes up.

Identify your competitors

Identifying your competitors is very crucial to the success of your digital marketing strategy. Getting to know them helps you analyze your own strengths and weaknesses. See what they are doing and how they are doing it then devise a different strategy to avoid their mistakes and replicate their successes.

After identifying the above aspects, get down to formulating your strategy. Digital marketing has several components.

Content Marketing

As the old adage goes, “content is the king” so goes for any successful digital marketing strategy. A great content conveys a brands’ message. Think about the message you want to put across then create content to convey that message clearly. Sell the benefits of your product and not the features. Great content promotes more leads, more traffic, and brand awareness.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still very much viable in today’s marketing space. Its definition according to Wikipedia is “Any email sent to the potential or current customer to request business, advertise products or services and its aim is to build trust, loyalty or brand awareness.”

Plan out your email marketing carefully so that they don’t end up being a turnoff instead of a tool to put across information. Get permission first from current and potential clients, then build an emailing list. This can be done by getting people to subscribe by offering something for free or downloadable content. Have a clear reason for wanting the email and let the client know what they will get in return. Set up expectations and fulfill them. Have a clear call to action and consistent follow-up plan. Consider the value you are providing and know when to pitch.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the organic or non-paid process of improving visibility and ranking for search results on search engines like google, yahoo, etc. Make your website SEO friendly. Make sure the user experience is a good one. Integrate social media on your website. Use keywords across the website several times. Ensure the website URL is SEO friendly to increase its ranking.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a way to engage with current and future customers. It increases exposure of your products and traffic. It improves search ranking and lead generation. Interact with your customers through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. social media creates brand awareness and advocacy and drives leads and sales. Post relevant content and give room for discussions and feedback.

Conclusion

Creating a digital marketing strategy is quite important if you want your digital marketing to be successful. It is not every method that is suitable for every business, therefore, analyze your business to see which digital marketing tools and methods will be helpful.