Marketing Strategies can make or break a company’s success. We’ve put together a comprehensive guide for creating effective digital marketing strategies that can make your business stand out from the competition.
It’s fair to assume that a big chunk of your marketing budget goes on building your digital presence. Today, both businesses and consumers are always online wherever they are, and you’ll need to be able to get their attention and keep track of their behavior. However, for a growing company, the constantly shifting landscape of digital marketing can frequently seem overwhelming. With other responsibilities vying for your attention, how do you come up with an agile online marketing vision that can stay ahead of the curve? Although it takes some time and effort, a great marketing strategy can help increase conversions, boost brand visibility and create great PR across all your different channels. To be a successful marketer, it’s critical that you leverage all available digital marketing tools to create an actionable strategy that puts you in front of the competition. We’ve come up with a guide for creating digital marketing strategies to help effectively boost your online presence and help your business reach its full potential.
What are Digital Marketing Strategies?
Before we begin, it’s important to establish the difference between analogue and digital marketing strategies. Your marketing strategies should help achieve a specific marketing objective in a realistic and practical manner. It takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of your business to make it as effective as possible.
Where to Start With Online Marketing Strategies?
Your online marketing strategies should be composed of actions to help you achieve your broader marketing goals. So, if you want to generate more leads from social, you might turn to Twitter or Instagram to create online marketing strategies, by sharing some proven gated content to online users. So let’s look at how you’ll put that strategy together.
1. Build Buyer Profiles
Digital or otherwise, marketing strategies only work when they take their audiences into account. Digital marketing strategies succeed when constructed on a foundation of buyer profiles, and it’s up to you to put them together. Hard data trumps assumptions, and trying to second guess your audience without evidence can leave you with a flawed approach. To get a comprehensive picture of who your audience really is, look for research from a demographic that includes:
- Current customers
- Potential/ desired customers
- Fresh leads with interests adjacent to your target customers
Now you have a varied sample pool to draw from, but what kind of factors are you looking for to help fine-tune your marketing strategies? Start with:
- Location: What’s the source of your web traffic? Web analytics can reveal this.
- Age: How old are your target audience, and how does this affect customer trends?
- Income: What’s the income of your audience? It may be best to acquire this information through interviews, as people might not be willing to tell you on an online survey.
- Profession: What’s your customer’s job title? This can be relevant depending on your field.
You can also start making broader inquiries into who your customers are. Find out what challenges they face, what their goals are, lifestyle and hobby interests, and what are their core values. Combine this information together, and you can develop accurate buyer profiles worth their weight in gold to marketing strategies.
2. Recognize Different Types of Marketing Strategies and the Goals and the Tools to Achieve Them
Your marketing goals need to harmonize with the larger aims of your business. If your company’s main priority is boosting online revenue, then the marketing department could aim to produce more leads through its website year-on-year. Regardless of your goal, you need the proper digital marketing tools to help you measure whether your strategy is working effectively. Web analytics tools are a great start, and it’s vital to keep a close eye on available performance indices to let you know if your B2B marketing strategies need some fine-tuning along the way.
3. Reassess Your Current Digital Assets and Channels
When evaluating your current marketing framework to establish which parts will enable your digital marketing strategies, it’s wise to take a step back and take account of the big picture. This helps anchor your plan, and stops you from getting overwhelmed by the little details. Take stock of what you have, and organize your assets in a spreadsheet to give you a clear view of your current earned, paid, and owned media. This form of categorization helps you figure out the best use of your resources:
- Earned Media: This refers to brand exposure you’re garnering through word-of-mouth and inter-audience marketing. This could be content like guest writing you’ve distributed on third-party websites, successful PR campaigns, or successful customer experiences you’ve helped realize. Social media shares and likes, good reviews, and press coverage all contribute to your earned media.
- Paid Media: This refers to any marketing spend that’s gone towards broadening your audience. Paid social media coverage, Google marketing strategies like Google Ads, and native advertising all count towards this.
- Owned Media: This covers first-party digital assets belonging to your company, including digital media, your website, in-house social media, and copy. Owned channels are the ones that are under your private jurisdiction. It might also refer to off-site material not hosted on your regular website.
When working independently, these kinds of media can all be of value to marketing strategies for small business. However, to really make your campaign pop, try and see if you can combine all three together. For example, you have a piece of owned content on your site designed to return leads. You can boost its effectiveness by making it shareable, thereby allowing it to be distributed through earned media channels. You can follow this up by posting it on a social media page where you can then pay to have it appear higher up in results. Now, you have a single piece of content being leveraged in three different ways. Obviously, this needs evaluation on a case-by-case basis, but it’s a good approach for netting the widest possible audience for the best marketing strategies.
4. Plan and Audit Media Campaigns
Owned media is the lifeblood of effective marketing strategies, and more often than not, it comes in the guise of content. Content can be anything from your About Us page to podcasts and social media posting. Content hooks visitors and boosts conversion rates while helping your brand stand out online. Whatever your objectives are for your internet marketing strategies, they will have to take owned content into account.
- Audit Your Current Content
Put together a list of the owned content you currently have and rank them by performance relative to your latest objectives. This helps you see what your most effective media is, which can point the way to creating successful target marketing strategies in the future.
- Discover Where You’re Weakest
Use your buyer profiles to find the gaps in your marketing positioning strategies. This allows you to redistribute your media or alternate your marketing channels to recalibrate your different marketing strategies’ effectiveness.
- Come Up With a Content Generation Plan
Once you’ve established where you’re weakest, you can come up with a plan of attack to produce the content required to hit your targets. Consider the title, goal, format, motivations, priority, and channels that’ll deliver it. Draw this up in a spreadsheet, and be sure to include budget data and time allowances as well.
5. Put Your Digital Marketing Strategies Into Practice
Now that you’ve undertaken the required research and strategizing, you should have a good grasp of different elements at work and how they’ll complement each other. You have a great idea of who your buyers are, know what media assets are available to you, and have a plan for developing any new content that you need. Now it’s time to put together a digital marketing strategy roadmap. You want this to be a long-term strategy (approximately 6-12 months). Come up with a structured time frame for your campaign rollout that will help get your marketing team on the same page. Build contingencies into the plan to help you stay centered if the going gets difficult, and be sure to monitor your strategies’ effectiveness throughout the duration of your campaign.
Conclusion: Grow Your Business With the Best Digital Marketing Strategies
The main objective of a digital marketing strategy is to set out all the actions you need to take to hit your targets over a fixed time period. If your strategy communicates this effectively, then you’ve come up with a fundamental plan. Digital marketing is undeniably the future of business and offers limitless opportunities for you to extend the reach of your company and attract the attention of audiences you never thought possible. Get it right, and watch every aspect of your business prosper. Did we miss out on any crucial steps on the road to creating a great digital marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments section below.
Author’s Bio:
Emily Moore is an English teacher with a passion for space and blogging. She believes that current exploration should be focused on preserving our planet’s resources. With satellites circling the orbit, it is easier to get relevant data on any environmental changes. This, in turn, should help people quickly address any challenges.
