Strategies are crucial for digital marketing campaigns as they provide a clear direction and focus, helping to achieve specific goals and measure success. A well-defined strategy can lead to improved targeting, increased ROI, and a higher rate of customer engagement.
Modern consumers and businesses are online most of the time. So if you want to reach them and expand your customer base, you need to market yourself on the online platforms they use.
However, effectively navigating today’s ever-changing digital landscape requires an extensive marketing background and knowledge of how various strategies work.
Unfortunately, without digital marketing strategy consultants guiding their campaigns, businesses resort to one-size-fits-all techniques or end up chasing online trends blindly.
But marketing your brand without building a strategy first or conducting digital marketing strategy planning is a recipe for failure. As with any undertaking, jumping straight into execution without any digital marketing strategy consultation leads to an uncoordinated course of action, resulting in wasted resources and low return on investment (ROI).
To achieve long-term business success, you need to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy grounded on data and tailored to your company’s needs.
But what is digital marketing strategy exactly?
And what are the steps in the strategic marketing process?
What Is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is the foundation of any digital marketing campaign. It’s a series of executions meant to be performed on thoughtfully selected online channels to help organizations achieve their specific digital marketing goals.
it’s worth noting that digital marketing isn’t simply the act of marketing your brand online. Instead, digital marketing strategy planning involves analyzing what your business is doing right and what it’s not, so you can target an audience and convert them into paying customers more effectively moving forward.
Neglecting the importance of strategic planning for marketing activities makes it difficult for you to:
- Find and fix your digital marketing mistakes
- Get the most out of your digital platforms
- Grow your sales pipeline and build your customer base
- Outperform your competitors
On the other hand, creating a digital marketing strategy first enables you to:
- Determine gaps in your executions
- Improve your audience targeting and expand your reach
- Increase traffic, leads, and conversions
- Grow your brand and compete with industry giants
Learning how to create a digital marketing strategy also gives you some quick wins. Following strategic marketing, the process helps you start on the right track and makes it easier for you to scale your efforts in the future.
How To Create A Digital Marketing Strategy?
Whether you entrust your online marketing efforts to a digital marketing strategy agency or market your brand on your own, it’s essential to understand how digital marketing strategies are built.
Digital marketing strategy development is the process of creating action plans that guide you in achieving your brand objectives. This step is crucial to the overarching goal of hitting your business targets and securing your competitive edge in the online marketplace.
Setting Smart Goals
The first step in developing a marketing strategy is setting your goals. Goal setting is crucial because it gives you direction; it helps you understand where you want to go and what you need to do to get there.
However, you can’t just pursue objectives that you think are good.
A digital marketing strategy example worth following is one founded on the SMART marketing goals:
Specific: Your goals must be as clear and as detailed as possible. For example, a specific goal would be to increase your lead-to-customer conversion rate by 20 percent by the end of Q2 2022.
Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable, allowing you to track your progress. Our specific goal earlier is also measurable because it lets you know when you’ll succeed – when you’ve reached the 20 percent increase in your conversion rate.
Attainable: Your goals must be achievable depending on the skills, resources, and time available to you.
Relevant: Your marketing goals must also be relevant to your business. They should address your business needs and bring you closer to your goals as a company.
Time-bound: Finally, your goals must have a deadline by which they should be accomplished. Having a time frame helps you prioritize your long-term objectives over your daily tasks.
Study Your Audience
After understanding what the first step in developing a marketing strategy is, it’s time to move forward in the strategic marketing process by understanding who you’ll be marketing to. Creating detailed buyer personas after your digital marketing strategy consultation enables you to craft executions that genuinely speak to your audience.
But what are buyer personas?
They are data- and research-based profiles of your ideal customers containing relevant information, including their age, location, and purchasing power.
These profiles also shed light on the challenges they face concerning your industry.
If you need help creating buyer personas for your marketing strategy, consulting your trusted digital marketing strategy agency allows you to develop solid profiles and lead your digital marketing efforts in the right direction.
Evaluate Your Existing Digital Efforts
Before you proceed with new executions with your digital marketing strategy consultancy firm, you must first understand where you’re at right now.
What is your current online presence like?
Looking at your accomplishments helps you identify the best and most effective channels to focus on.
Not sure how or where to start? Have a look at your existing efforts in:
- Website audit or website design and development
- Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
- Content marketing strategy
- Pay-per-click (PPC) strategy
- Social media strategy
- Reputation management strategy
- eCommerce marketing plan
Identify your current marketing activities on these platforms and how much traffic and leads they give you. But if you aren’t sure how to audit your existing marketing strategy, consult with a digital marketing strategist to take that next step forward.
Craft Digital Marketing Strategy Using Data
Now that you have goals to pursue, a buyer persona to target, and an online presence to start from, all that’s left to do is put your marketing strategy together.
This step involves crafting the general approach and specific tactics you will implement to achieve your marketing objectives. It may also include finding strategic marketing consulting firms to help you develop a data-driven game plan.
