Even after implementing marketing tactics after marketing tactics, most businesses fail to achieve eminent results from their marketing efforts due to the lack of a clear digital marketing strategy. If you currently find yourself in this category, it's about time you learned how to create an excellent digital marketing strategy that will grow your business exponentially.
In this post, we're going to discuss all the vital steps to creating a marketing strategy and everything you need to know about it.
What To Consider When Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
With so many intricacies involved in the digital marketing process, you can easily feel lost while figuring out what to do. Now, we understand this, and we'll take you through each step, starting with what you must consider before you can finally draft your digital marketing strategy.
One of the most significant aspects of creating a winning digital marketing strategy is determining what you want to achieve with your campaigns. Are you looking to generate more leads, build brand recognition, get more sales, or increase your email subscribers? It could be something else entirely, but whatever it is, you need to give it a name.
Steps To Creating a Marketing Strategy
First things first: It's vital for you to understand that a marketing strategy is quite different from a marketing plan. Your marketing plan outlines all your plans on how you'll execute your marketing strategies. Your marketing strategies, on the other hand, will evolve and need to be tracked and changed on a constant basis.
They are more tactical and you need to outline how you'll reach your overall strategic objectives. You have to factor in everything from people, promotions, placement, packaging, and pricing. That said, here's how you create a winning digital marketing strategy.
Download the free 1-page marketing plan now to guide you through the process!
Step 1: Understand Your Customers and Create a Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is essentially a semi-fictitious representation of what you'd like your ideal customer to be, and it's incredibly vital for you to take time and create the right one. Understanding your target market and target audience is a vital part of creating a winning strategy.
With a well-crafted buyer persona, you'll know what kind of issues they are looking to solve, how your business can help solve those issues, what social media platforms they're likely to be on, what they'd like to see from you, and how they're interacting with the competition.
Use analytics such as Facebook's Audience Insights as well as Google Analytics to conduct in-depth and conclusive research about your target audience. Research their age, income, location, job descriptions, interests, challenges, hobbies, wants, needs, and goals.
Step 2: Set Achievable Relevant Goals
Once you understand everything about your buyer persona, it's time to set your SMART goals. Think about fulfilling your overall mission. What are your broad goals? What are your detailed goals? Determine your key performance indicators as well.
Step 3: Identify How You Can Leverage Existing Assets
With outlined goals, it's time to determine what your existing assets are and how to make the most of each one. Your current assets may include your business website, social media profiles, infographics, paid media, videos, photos, blog posts, among others. These assets should be working together in tandem to promote your business.
For instance, your paid media should promote valuable infographics, content offers, blog posts, and so on, while at the same time building brand recognition and establishing trust.
These assets should also lead potential customers to your website through Calls to Action and ultimately steer your potential customers towards conversion. The trick here is to take these assets and create a digital marketing strategy that drives traffic, generates leads, and converts sales.
Step 4: Understand Digital Sales Funnel
This is a critical concept that involves the different steps buyers go through before finally making purchases and becoming loyal customers. The stages go from discovery to research, purchase, and lastly, loyalty. Determine where to interact with your users in all phases of the sales funnel. For instance, a potential customer looking for emergency services may find you on Google Ads on SERPs.
Another customer looking for elaborate home designs may find you on Pinterest, while those looking for services on a budget could find your Facebook campaigns. The trick here is to understand where to engage your target audience.
Step 5: Create a Killer Content Strategy
Content marketing strategy is a broad concept that we can't cover in this post, but we'll help you understand the most vital aspects. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to create a content strategy that works for your buyer persona. Keep in mind what the pain points of your target audience are to create valuable, helpful, and informative content. Offer valuable content that is irresistible and conduct keyword research to rank high on SERPs.
Step 6: Make the Most of Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing involves paid marketing strategies like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing. When planning your paid advertising strategies, remember to include content amplification and retargeting campaigns.
Step 7: Create a Marketing Automation Strategy
One of the best things about a digital marketing strategy is that you can automate most of the repetitive tasks. This is essential because it'll make a lot of things easier.
Finally: Bring It All Together: Strive to Create An Effective and Actionable Plan
With this information, we hope you're ready to create your own winning digital marketing plan. As long as you follow these steps to creating your strategy, you're bound to come up with a practical and actionable plan. To make this process easier, get a marketing strategy template that will guide you through the steps.
For more actionable insights on creating a successful marketing strategy for 2022 and beyond, feel free to reach out to us today, and we will be more than willing to assist.
Download the marketing strategy template on the image below to guide you through the process!
