A digital marketing strategy is defined as a plan that assists in helping your company achieve specific digital goals through defined online marketing channels.
Your digital marketing strategy is essentially the road map of your online marketing game plan over a certain period of time that involves laying out budgets, deciding where they should be spent, defining how success will be measured and more.
Neglecting to plan and implement a solid strategy for digital marketing risks wasted budget, inability to discover what is actually working and what is not, and overall damage to your brand.
Failing to plan is essentially planning to fail! Below we dive into some items that must be considered, and must be included when putting your digital marketing strategy together.
Know Your Audience
Before you begin digging into mapping out your digital marketing strategy, you must know your customer. If you think you know your customer already, we encourage you to take a deeper look!
Buying patterns for customers have changed drastically over the past few months and will continue to evolve. Even if your customer base has remained the same, their purchasing patterns, behaviors, and methods are likely not the same.
It is important for your strategy to evolve with your customers so you can continue to both meet their needs and expectations, as well as acquire new customers along the way.
Narrow down who your audience is if you have not already and view your business from their perspective. How can you better meet their needs? All other items in your strategy will revolve around this alone – it is essentially the most important piece of the puzzle.
Set Goals
Goal setting sets the vision for your plan and provides the motivation to achieve your plan. Some goals that should be included in your digital marketing strategy creation are:
-What message should resonate with your audience?
-What budget do you plan to stay within?
-Return on Investment
-Numerical goal for increase in sales, new customers, etc.
-Numerical goals for website traffic increase, goal conversions, etc. (Google Analytics features).
Without having set goals of what you expect to achieve from your strategy, you lack direction. When you lack direction, it is much more difficult, if possible at all, to get to your destination.
Setting goals will help you organize your time and resources and allow you to create steps to achieving those goals which is essentially what makes up the rest of your strategy. Be sure that you have methods in place to measure these goals!
Analyze What You Already Have In Place
After you understand the direction of reaching your audience and have set solid goals and ways of measuring those goals, your next step is to measure what is currently in place.
Evaluate every system and process that factors into digital marketing and look at what is working and what is not. Should anything be thrown to the curb, put on hold, or adjusted to fit new buyer behavior needs?
What is producing the highest Return on Investment, what is no longer relevant etc. This is the time to analyze the performance of your previous strategy; anything that does not lead to meeting your newly set goals should be put under the magnifying glass and be cut when necessary.
Content Schedules
Your messaging across all platforms should be consistent. Sitting down and planning the content you want to push out over the next quarter may seem like a daunting task but particularly in the world we live in now, it is time well spent.
Typically a digital marketing strategy should be addressed on an annual to bi annual basis. With the rapid changes of our current world and its impact on businesses, we would recommend a quarterly game plan.
Coming up with weekly blog topics, monthly email blast topics, social graphics and messaging, etc. will ensure all of your messaging remains consistent, prevents duplicate content on the same platforms, and ensures you go after the correct audience in the correct way.
Throw out ideas on a whiteboard and narrow down what creative is in line with your set goals. Before you know it, you will have an entire quarter of creative content.
New Trends
This step is typically done in line with your content schedule. Seek out what is new in the digital marketing industry and look for opportunities to incorporate what makes sense for your business model.
Do you have the capacity to implement some of these things, or should a marketing firm be brought in to help? Right now video content and finding a way to offer something of value in exchange for reviews, information, etc is what should be on your radar. Do you have a means of finding what the newest thing in the market is?
If you would like help solidifying your digital marketing strategy or help implementing it, Klout 9 would love to help you! We have a team dedicated just to strategy and planning and creative content is our specialty! To learn more about Klout 9, click here.