ExecutiveChronicles | How to Create a Foolproof Digital Marketing Strategy | Business owners have one goal when they set up shop: to bring in customers. Yet that can be a challenge as you navigate all the steps necessary to build a business.
To get customers in the door, it takes some sort of marketing. In today’s world, marketing should involve creating a digital marketing strategy, but what does that mean? How do you create a digital marketing strategy that attracts new customers to your business and builds more awareness for your brand?
As one customer becomes a dozen, hundreds, or even thousands, the pressure mounts to continue to bring in customers and grow your profit. It’s about growth, automation, and increasing your reach. To do this effectively, it means building a digital marketing strategy that helps you:
- Look at your business with a big-picture view: Avoid getting caught up in the small time-wasters that don’t add much to your bottom line.
- Establish a set of criteria for easy decision-making: Quickly assess what tactics will help you grow and which are mere distractions.
- Have a vision for the future: Define your ultimate goal and keep your business on track no matter what comes your way.
- Track your progress: Know where you stand today and make better decisions for tomorrow.
How do you create a digital marketing strategy that works for your business? Let’s go over seven steps.
7 Steps to Defining Your Digital Marketing Strategy
John Wanamaker is considered the godfather of modern marketing. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half,” he said, and it still rings true today.
Marketing has always been about trial and error, and that won’t change. But there are steps you can take to build a solid plan.
1. Define Your Mission and Goals
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a prepackaged plan ready and waiting for you to pick up and implement, knowing you would succeed if you followed the steps in the proper order? Unfortunately, marketing doesn’t work that way because every organization is in business for entirely different reasons. For example, Nike and Toms are both shoe companies, but they are built on entirely different premises.
Before you start crafting your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to understand your mission and goals and how they will drive your movement and growth. It helps you identify the essential elements that make your company unique.
Knowing your company, what it stands for, and who you also help you create your brand and outline the personality you share with the world. This helps you develop your value proposition, unique offers, brand voice, and so much more.
2. Know Your Audience
No matter what product or service you’re selling, the more you get to know who’s buying from you, the better persona you can build to help you streamline your marketing process. If you’ve ever said, “I sell to everybody,” it’s time to rethink your ideal customer or your customer avatar.
Digital marketing offers you the chance to speak directly to potential customers and reach them in ways traditional offline marketing never provided. You can identify key demographics and psychographics, helping you better place your products and services in front of the right audience.
3. Design Your Strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy is more than choosing what technology to use and designing robust ads. Instead, designing your strategy helps you set up a plan of action that will carry your business forward into the future. You can start creating it by asking yourself this series of questions:
- What platforms do I choose to build on?
- What message do I want to convey?
- What formats do I need to design in?
- Will I use PPC ads, social media, influencer ads, outreach, and so on?
Don’t be afraid to ask more questions. The better a marketing strategy design is, the more thought you’ll put into reaching out to the right audience on the right platform. It will also give you easy ways to analyze the details and adjust according to the plan.
4. Get to Work
As you start to define your digital strategy in more detail, it’ll help you narrow down the platforms you choose to work with. This is where the heart of the plan comes into play and where you start using the various social media platforms to achieve results.
We suggest you start small. If you have your eye on several social media sites, for example, pick one and get really good at using it. Post regularly, advertise and engage. You’ll learn a lot as you move through each piece and start to understand what works for your business and what doesn’t.
Familiarizing yourself with all the necessary details adds to your knowledge, making it easier to see the big picture. It’s a constant ebb and flow of detail work, helping you see how it impacts your business.
5. Optimize
Once your ads are in place and seem to be working, the job is not done. In order to continually grow your business, it’s essential to track how well you’re doing with those ads.
Optimization is the process of looking at what you currently have in place and doing what it takes to make it better. If your ad converts 5 percent of traffic, what would it take to boost it to 6 percent?
This isn’t entirely about sales. It’s also a way to optimize every piece of your business further. How can you grow efficiently? How can you automate your business?
Many business owners start building out more customer avatars at this stage, as they understand their target market better. They may create more landing pages and better email sequences and get even more specific with their ads. This is about speaking directly to each customer who connects with you because where there is one raving fan, there will be plenty of others just like them following behind.
6. Test
Track, evaluate, and tweak. We can’t stress this enough. New concepts and technologies are developed almost daily, and any one change can impact your strategy, sending you in a new direction. Tracking and evaluating regularly gives you a chance to catch anomalies and change course before you experience catastrophic results.
Luckily, there are many digital tools to help make the job easy. Tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Console, and so on all have reporting features that can help you analyze every step of the way. This is a great way to keep tabs on how your business functions. It’s also an easy place to outsource, allowing help to keep you up to date on where changes can make a big impact on your strategy.
7. Start All Over Again
A robust digital marketing strategy is one that is updated and refreshed for the life of the business because nothing stands still and marketing constantly changes. There are always new tools ready to build with and to attract even more new customers to your work.
With the strength of a digital marketing strategy behind you, nothing will be done by chance. You’ll have a clear path to follow, resources to use, and guidelines to help you make changes and assess.
Does your digital marketing strategy do all that for you? Contact the digital marketing team at InnoVision and let them help!
