Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy That Works

                  Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy That Works

Hello,

Do you know your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that are going to help you achieve your goal(s) using online marketing?

The term ‘strategy’ might seem intimidating, but building an effective digital strategy doesn’t need to be difficult.

In simple terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to achieve a desired goal, or multiple goals.

For example, your goal might be to generate 25% more leads via your website this year than you drove last year.

So what is a digital marketing strategy you may ask?

In an ever-changing digital landscape, success in business can often depend on what you do (or don’t do) in terms of marketing your company online.

From SEO to content marketing and analytic, it can be overwhelming figuring out where to start -- and, more importantly, what’s going to have the biggest impact on your business.

To be effective in your online business, you’ll need a strategy.

Now depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals and a lot of moving parts, but coming back to this simple way of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives.

Despite our simplification of the term ‘strategy’, there’s no doubt it can be difficult to get started actually building one.

So, we’ve put together a series of seven building blocks to help you create an effective digital marketing strategy and set your business up for online success.

But first let’s differentiate between a digital strategy and a digital marketing campaign because it’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here’s how to distinguish the two.

As we defined earlier your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal.

While your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal.

For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel.

That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.

It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy -- it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy.

Now we understand the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy.

1) Build your buyer personas.

For any marketing strategy -- offline or online -- you need to know who you’re marketing to.

The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience.

It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.

But you may ask, what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy?

Here are some starting points, but you’ll want to switch them up depending on your particular business.

You will need quantitative or demographic information such as location, age, income, job title; qualitative information such as goals, challenges, hobbies and interests, priorities

Take this information and create a buyer persona and ensure they’re at the core of your digital marketing strategy.

2) Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business.

For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to measure it.

Because, how you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goal(s), but it’s vital to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.

3) Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate into your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed.

The owned, earned and paid media framework helps to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets or channels that you’re already using.

Owned media

This refers to the digital assets literally owned by you.

Whether that’s your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the things your business has complete control over.

Earned media

Quite simply, earned media refers to the exposure you’ve earned through word-of-mouth.

Whether that’s content you've distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you’ve been doing, or the customer experience you've delivered, earned media is the recognition you receive as a result.

You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people sharing your content on social media, etc.

Paid media

Paid media is very self-explanatory and refers to any vehicle or channel that you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas.

This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other vehicle which you directly pay for in exchange for visibility.

Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy might incorporate elements of all three channels, all working together to help you reach your goal.

For example, you might have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that’s been created to help you generate leads.

To amplify the amount of leads that content generates, you might have made a real effort to make it shareable, meaning others are distributing it via their personal social media profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page.

This is the earned media component.

To support the content’s success, you might have posted about the content to your Facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more people in your target audience.

That’s exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal.

Of course, it’s not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media is very successful, you might not need to invest in paid.

It’s all about evaluating the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what’s already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut.

4) Audit and plan your owned media.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content.

Everything your brand says is your content, whether that’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, social media posts -- it’s all considered content.

Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand’s profile online.

Whatever your goal, you’re going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

To build your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what content is going to help you reach your goals.

Auditing your content by identifying gaps in your existing content, you can then create a content creation plan outlining the content that’s needed to help you hit your goals.

The idea here is to figure out what’s currently working, and what’s not, so that you can set yourself up for future success.

6) Evaluate  your earned media.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time.

Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.

For example, you might discover that LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing your content, which in turn drives a lot of traffic.

The idea here is to build up a picture of what earned media will help you reach your goals, and what won’t, based on historic data.

7) Evaluate  your paid media.

This process involves much of the same process:

You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what’s likely to help you meet your current goals.

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you’d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results.

By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you’d like to scrap.

8) Bring it all together.

You’ve done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that are going to make up your digital marketing strategy.

Now, it’s time to bring all of this together to form a solid strategy template.

Your strategy template will be very individual to your business, which is why it’s almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template.

Remember that the purpose of your strategy template is to map out the actions you’re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time -- as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.

Happy reading....