In a world where technology is advancing at a breakneck speed, its influence is felt across different aspects of a business including marketing. Digital marketing is marketing in an online space. Online is where most individuals spend their free time, engaged in activities such as surfing the web for information and entertainment. Digital marketing offers a great opportunity for businesses to reach their audience online. This needs to be approached with a plan in mind, which is known as a digital marketing strategy. Having a digital marketing strategy can help a business build and create brand awareness in online spaces like websites, social media, email, online forums and applications. A digital marketing strategy can help a business or brand reach the right audience and help convert valuable leads into loyal customers. Below we will look at what a digital marketing strategy is in detail.
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing is any form of marketing done online. Digital marketing is done through creating content and publishing them as organic and paid content on places like websites, blogs, forums, social media and email. A digital marketing strategy will help reach the right audience that will be invested in the product or services that it offers. Creating a digital marketing strategy will help a business resonate more with their target audience. It is important to tweak these digital marketing strategies to ensure that your business targets or objectives are achieved through them.
Having a digital marketing strategy will help a business identify digital marketing trends that will help build brand awareness and establish the credibility of a brand and build trust amongst customers converting them into loyal customers.
Crafting an effective digital marketing strategy can have a positive impact on ROI and return on investment as more and more people spend time online and digital spaces take up most time in the lives of most individuals.
Having a proper and structured digital marketing plan or digital marketing strategy will help you business to build up a base of loyal customers who will turn into repeat buyers and thus create repeat sales, which in turn will yield additional profits for you business, helping you scale and grow your business.
A digital marketing strategy involves planned tactics that uses the online strategies to promote a business in the digital space and further propel brand awareness.
A digital marketing strategy can have several different components. These components include content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization or SEO, social media marketing, website and pay per click or PPC marketing (Google Ads campaigns).
Experienced and qualified digital marketers will use these channels in their digital marketing efforts when putting digital marketing strategies into place to help promote a business’s brand awareness in order to generate leads and convert these leads into repeat buyers or customers.
A comprehensive digital marketing strategy uses these components to craft plans that act as a blueprint for digital marketing activities of a business. A business can use different digital marketing channels such as SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, and Influencer marketing to reach new audiences by building brand awareness through online marketing efforts.
Six Steps to Craft an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
When crafting an effective digital marketing strategy, it is important for businesses to have a clear idea about their target audience members.
Research Target Audience
Carefully researching the target audience looking to purchase the goods or services offered by your business will be helpful when designing a digital marketing strategy for your business.
One key step a business can take towards understanding its audience is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona will help you collect customer data using different tools, channels and platforms. By having a clear idea about your potential client’s buying power, age, demographics and consumer behavior, a business can create online advertising campaigns that target the right audience.
Researching competitors is important to create an effective digital marketing strategy. This includes collecting information on digital marketing activities conducted by competitors of your business such as campaigns, target audiences and content creation strategies that they use and put in place to promote their products or services.
This can be done by carrying out an audit of your competitor’s digital marketing strategies to identify what is working for them. The objective of this should be not to copy but to learn what works and put your own unique spin on what works and use it the digital marketing strategy of your business.
There are different tools that can be used to conduct a social media audit such as those offered by online tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to analyze the online presence of your competitors and their performance. In addition to these tools you can also use Social Blade and IG Audit to analyze different metrics and gain insights into the authenticity and engagement levels of different social media channels of your competitors to get a better understanding of what works and how you can use your observation to elevate the online presence of you business to the next level.
When choosing where to focus your digital marketing efforts online, it is important to consider relevant channels for your business. If your business is targeting a B2B or business to business audience then social media channels such as LinkedIn might be where you want to put most of your efforts in your digital marketing activities. On the other hand if you are a business selling visually interesting products like clothing and fashion items, you might want to consider focusing more on creating content for social media channels such as Instagram and TikTok.
In addition to social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, a website is an important component that needs to be considered when discussing digital marketing for business activities. SEO or Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in getting your business discovered by potential customers who might be searching for products or services online. As a reliable SEO agency in Sydney, SEO services in Melbourne and Brisbane we were able to enhanced our clients web presence by comprehensive SEO approach.
Website content can be optimized using different SEO tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog and Moz. SEO tools are widely used as a SEO tool by many digital marketing agencies to analyze the backlinks, search rankings and other SEO metrics related to a website.
Using SEO tools your business can conduct SEO audits on competitor websites to discover valuable insights and understand SEO strategies and tactics.
There are several metrics that are measured when conducting SEO audits such as Domain Ratings, Backlinks, Referring Domains, Organic Keywords and Organic Traffic. For example if your business is using the Ahrefs SEO tools by clicking on traffic value, your business can discover the most important keywords your competitors are using in their SEO marketing plans.
Set Clear SMART Goals
When creating digital marketing strategy it is important to create effective digital marketing strategy. By having a clear understanding of your businesses target audience as well as thoroughly analyzing your competitors can help your business create golas that match with your business’s objectives.
Setting goals can be important towards achieving the objectives put in place by your business. Using the SMART method when establishing goals will help your business break down your goals into actionable steps to achieve targets more effectively and efficiently.
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Having specific goals will help your business have a clear idea about what you want to achieve. Measurable means having quantifiable goals such as the number of leads you hope to gather every month. Relevancy ensures that your business goals align with your overall business objectives.
Adhere to the RACE framework
The RACE which was introduced by Dr Dave Chaffey, the author of Digitla Marketing Strategy and Practice, which is a digital marketing structure that allows marketers to plan, manage, and optimize every area of all customer’s online and offline brand experiences.
By implementing the RACE framework, a business can focus on the right channels and tactics to achieve their goals.
The ICE scoring method is another alternative method established by Sean Ellis. This strategy uses agile marketing teams to help with growth marketing experiments and techniques. This system puts into place a score to every experiment and initiatives based on things like potential impact and confidence.
I in ICE stands for impact, which means the possible impact of an experiment of initiative on a business. This might mean increased revenue, increased customer loyalty and better brand awareness. The C in ICE is for confidence, which might consist of past data, market research, or expert suggestions.
E in ICE refers to ease of implementation, which means ease with which the experiment or initiative to be put in place. This means available resources, technical requirements, or time frame.
Craft a User Friendly and Mobile Friendly Website
More and more people are using mobile devices like mobile phones to access the internet, it has become vital for a business website to be mobile friendly. It is important to create websites that have full functionality for users on mobile devices.
Tools like Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to understand if your website is mobile friendly so that there are enough insights to keep it error-free. This tool will provide suggestions to optimize your website to create a mobile friendly experience.
Mobile friendliness is a key factor search engines like Google considers when ranking websites on Google. If you want to appear higher on the Google Search Result Pages or SERPs then it is important to optimize your website for mobile.
It is important to choose a responsive and fast layout that adjusts to different screen sizes. Choosing a hosting provider which is faster will help you optimize your website speed. Additionally things like keeping the website design simple and user friendly will enhance the mobile friendliness of your business website. Promise Media, as a website design and digital marketing agency we have developed 100+ websites for our clients and reliable web design agency in Brisbane. Our Sydney web design team have delivered more than 30 custom web projects and our Melbourne web design team have already engaged with big brand in Australia.
Have Consistent Branding Across Online Channels
When promoting your business online across diverse platforms like social media, websites, and email is important in digital marketing. It’s crucial to maintain brand uniformity across these different online channels to ensure that your customers can identify your business brand from the competition.
Uniformity across your business branding will help build trust and credibility among your customers and help establish brand authority. Creating a uniform branding strategy is important when it comes to building a strong brand identity.
The first step towards building a consistent business brand is to create a branding strategy. It’s important to understand the wants, needs and preferences of your audience in order to offer them value and meet their expectations, to ensure customer satisfaction. This can be approached through creating a buyer persona, which will allow you to have valuable insights into different aspects of your potential customer’s life such as language, behavior, and brand preferences which will resonate with the right audience.
For example different generations will have different preferences when it comes to digital marketing. Gen X, which includes individuals born between 1965 – 1980 tend to prefer email marketing, whereas Gen Y or Millennials who were born between 1981 and 1996 prefer social media and mobile apps. Finally the extra-tech savvy Gen Z born between 1997 and 2012 often tend to have short attention spans preferring short form video content when it comes to their preferred form of content.
It is important to keep these facts in mind when creating buyer personas and keep factors such as demographics, age, gender, location, education, income and occupation. It is important to take these factors into consideration to create relatable and engaging marketing material that your target audience will consume.
For instance, if you are creating content for a specific ethnic group it is important to take their interest, lifestyles and needs when crafting your content in order to appeal to your target audience.
It is important to take time to gain a clear idea of the different backgrounds, characteristics and traits of your target audience to tailor the digital marketing strategy of your business.
Having a clear idea about the branding you want to utilize for your business, the next stage is to create a set of guidelines that will help your brand stay consistent throughout its digital marketing efforts. These brand guidelines should include things like colors, logo usage, voice, tone, fonts, typography, media formatting, mission and graphic styles.
If you have your target audience in mind as well as brand guidelines, these will ensure that all your digital marketing efforts have consistency across different digital channels.
It is important to share these business brand guidelines across digital marketing team members involved in production, creating publishing and designing your digital marketing material. This will ensure that the content created in campaigns will be following the same guidelines and therefore will maintain their uniformity across different digital platforms.
Branding is one of the key ways to represent your business and build a strong customer relationship. It will help keep your digital marketing team members familiar with any changes or updates to your core brand guidelines as required.
It is important to keep digital marketing trends in mind to stay connected with your customers and build a strong brand identity for your business.
Vary Your Digital Marketing Channels
To craft a successful digital marketing strategy for your business it is important to diversify your approach or methods of using digital marketing to grow your business. If your digital marketing strategy or plan falls short, then you can hedge the risks of a failed plan with different channels and tactics. Diversification will lower the reliance on one particular channel, which boosts opportunities to engage with your target customers.
One method that can help your business is using the Hooked Model introduced by creating habit forming products and services across many different channels and tactics. Diversification also means avoiding dependence on one particular channel to increase chances to engage with customers.
This model will help your business use many different triggers and rewards to reach a broader audience and boost the chances of creating a product or service that is habit-forming.
There are other models that can also be useful when creating a digital marketing strategy for a business such as the Bullseye model by Gabriel Weinberg, in order to figure out the right channels to acquire customers for your business.
The Bullseye framework has three parts to it which represents three varieties of channels each with unique characteristics and advantages. The central circle channels like email marketing and referral programs are usually better focused and specific when it comes to customer activation. The inner circle channels are the highly targeted and best converting channels that can be utilized to retain customers such as personal email outreach and discount programs.
The inner ring includes channels that have the best potential for success. They include viral marketing, PR or Public Relations, Unconventional PR, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), social and display ads.
The middle ring contains channels that have some possibility of success. They include offline ads, content marketing, email marketing, engineering as marketing, targeting blogs, and business development.
The outer ring consists of channels that have a low potential for success but might be worth taking into account. They include sales, affiliate programs, existing platforms such as social media networks, trade shows, offline events, speaking engagements, community building and sponsorships.
Establish Budget and Digital Marketing Resources
Establishing a budget and allocating resources is crucial when it comes to crafting a digital marketing strategy when it comes to choosing your budget and resources. It is important to allocate adequate resources and budget to achieve your business goals.
A key consideration is if you will be able to handle all your digital marketing efforts with the budget and resources you plan to allocate for it. For example if you choose to have an in-house digital marketing team to handle your digital marketing, it means you have a greater control over the digital marketing of your business, though it might not be as efficient as hiring a separate digital marketing agency or outsourcing your digital marketing.
Outsourcing can be cost effective and help you acquire the services of more highly specialized experts. But this requires finding the right digital marketing agency in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne that meets and understands your business requirements as well as goals and values. The decision of you choosing to hire an agency or have an in-house team for your digital marketing strategy will need to be decided on your unique situation, goals and available resources.
Once you have figured out your marketing goals and decided on what resources to allocate for your digital marketing efforts, it is important to consider different aspects of a digital marketing strategy. There are several things you might want to consider such as ROI (Return On Investment) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
Bonus Tip: Measure the success of each campaign
It is important to effectively measure how successful your digital marketing campaign was to identify if your digital marketing strategy was effective. This will help you make data driven choices to help your business optimize your campaigns with the insights you derived through measuring the success of the campaigns that have been run.
One of the first things you can do to measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns is to identify your campaign objectives. You might want to identify what you want to achieve with your campaigns. For example, are you looking to boost website traffic, generate leads, improve brand awareness or get more sales?
Establishing clear campaign objectives will help you decide what metrics you need to track and measure.
One other thing you might want to do is to choose relevant KPIs. For instance, if your objective is to boost website traffic, you might want to keep an eye on metrics like website sessions, bounce rate, and time spent on browsing your site. Taking note of metrics like conversion rate, lead quality, and cost per lead generated.
When running digital marketing campaigns, it is important to set benchmarks for your chosen KPIs. These benchmarks should be based on past data or industry standards.
Setting proper benchmarks will let you evaluate the success of your campaign against a pre-established baseline.
After your campaign is set to run, it is important to track and measure the performance of your selected KPIs. Tools such as Google Analytics, social media analytics and email marketing software can be used for this purpose.
