A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that helps your business reach its goals.
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When you create a strategy, you should understand how your business is different from competitors and why you should pursue a particular marketing goal.
A digital marketing strategy is part of your company’s strategy
Digital marketing strategies can include everything from your website CRO marketing (or Conversion Rate Optimization Marketing), social media, organic search, paid search, Amazon, display ads or PPC.
Your business may have one marketing strategy in place, or it can have several. If you don’t have a defined strategy, you won’t know where to focus your efforts.
The purpose of this in-depth article is to provide an overview of the steps needed to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.
If you’re unsure where to start, here are the steps for creating a successful digital marketing strategy.
1. Define Your Business Goals
One of the best ways to find out what you want to achieve as a business is to ask yourself the following question: What do you want to achieve in your business?
To define goals, you should use some metrics such as the ones below:
- Sales revenue.
- Brand awareness.
- Customer retention.
- Traffic.
- Cost per lead.
- Time on The Website.
- Bounce Rate.
- Increase sales.
- Get more leads.
- Build brand awareness.
- Build brand loyalty.
- Improve customer satisfaction.
- Grow your customer base.
- Among other things.
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can plan your digital marketing strategies accordingly.
Start with the SMART goals if you don’t know where to start.
SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.
What are your SMART goals?
For example, your goal could be to increase revenue by 20% in a year.
How do you know if you’re on the right track to achieve your goal?
Your goals must be SMART. You should know how much you can work towards your goal based on measurable a plan.
2. Identify Your Target Customers
The first step to creating a successful digital marketing strategy is identifying your target customers.
You can start by finding out who your customers are today.
Define Your Target Audience
Once you know who you’re trying to reach, you can start to develop a strategy to get more of your target customers.
After understanding your target audience, you can start to create content that is relevant and useful to your customers.
3. Establish Your Execution Plan
Once you understand your target audience and goals, it’s time to create an execution plan.
Steps for a complete execution plan
To create a successful execution plan, you need to consider the following tasks:
- Establish your budget.
- Select your marketing channels.
- Plan Your Content.
- Produce Your Content.
- Measure
- Improve
4. Establish Your Budget.
How much money will you invest in marketing? What’s your target cost of conversion? What’s the ROI (return on Investment) you expect to bring?
In this step you have to draft these answers on a spreadsheet, so you know what you need to do to reach your pre-defined goals.
5. Select Your Marketing Channels.
What types of channels do your target audience engage with the most?
Here is the time to understand how and when you will invest your money.
- Blog posts.
- Displays on other websites.
- Video platforms such as YouTube
- Social media.
- Podcasts.
- Emails.
- Google AdWords.
- Etc.
Having drafted a solid plan will be a guide for knowing where to invest your resources and for what channels to produce your content. And that’s when your start your content marketing plan.
6. Create A Content Marketing Plan
A content marketing plan is a document that helps you create your content strategy. This document should include:
The different types of content you’ll create:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Product Descriptions
- Catalogs
- Digital displays
- Etc.
Determine What Content Is Relevant For Your Target Audience
Content is king. That’s why it should be a priority when you’re creating a digital marketing strategy.
As mentioned above, content can include blog posts, web pages, videos, social media posts, and more. It would be best always to consider what content your target audience is likely to engage with.
7. Create A Content Calendar
Your content calendar lists all the content you plan to produce.
Your content calendar should include:
- Monthly.
- Weekly.
- Daily.
- Time-based.
By creating a content calendar, you can plan out your content a month at a time.
By planning your content ahead of time, you can ensure that you’re producing the high quality content demanded by your target audience.
8. Create Your Content
Once you’ve developed your content calendar, you should create the content.
Creating content is a crucial aspect of a successful digital marketing strategy. You should focus on your target audience.
For example, a blog post about buying the healthier dog food could be much more appealing to a dog owner than a blog post about how to fix your air conditioner.
It would help if you also considered the following aspects as you create content:
- The time of day and day of the week when you’re likely to publish.
- The kind of content you’re producing.
- The type of content you’re posting.
- The number of shares you want to receive.
- The length of the content.
- The audience you’re aiming for.
- The style of the content.
- The tone of voice and content format.
- The type of content you’re creating.
If you want to create content, you need to have a professional team of writers and creatives. It does not mean you need to hire them. There are excellent freelancers that can take care of the hard work.
9. Measure Your Results
If you want to create a successful digital marketing strategy, you need to measure your results and compare them to your goals.
By doing that you know how far you are from it and how much more efforts you need to put to reach these goals.
Measure Your Goals Using Google Search Console
The easiest way to track your results is to use a content analytics tool or even free tools such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
Summarizing, make sure you develop a solid content strategy. The steps are:
- Understand your target audience.
- Plan a content strategy.
- Create your content.
- Measure.
- Optimize.
Now let’s talk about this last step, the opmization/
10. Take Action and Improve.
After knowing how far your from your metrics it’s time to optimize. Bu tracking metrics your know how far you are from your conversion costs.
Based on your conversion cost target, you need to increase the use of the marketing techniques you’re performing better and reduce, remove or improve the ones that you’re struggling.
It’s time for you to make decisions and see your cost of conversion reduce to an acceptable level, making your ROI come faster.
In Conclusion
In short, creating a content marketing strategy is essential for your success.
If you’re planning to create content, you need to set goals. Goals should be SMART and relevant.
A successful digital marketing strategy will ensure that you:
- Find the right audience.
- Reach that audience.
- Engage with your audience.
- Generate leads.
- Improve customer experience.
- Grow your brand.
- Stay competitive in your industry.
- Create a successful business.
Also, follow the steps to make sure you are not forgetting an important piece of your strategy.
Now that you know how to create a digital marketing strategy, it’s time to create one!
About The Author
Chris Taylor is a senior digital marketing professional who worked with different fortune 500 companies. On the side, he writes for influential blogs and companies. Currently, he is one of the contributors to New-Startups.com.