It is crucial to have a plan when it comes to digital marketing, in order to get what you need out of your marketing efforts as well as being smart on the spending side. For this, creating an effective digital marketing strategy will work perfectly.
A company’s digital strategy is like a master plan of how you want to build out your business’s online goals and objectives. From your email campaigns to your website, having a digital strategy takes out the guessing game of throwing ideas around and hoping they work. With a digital strategy, you can measure both your failures and successes when you connect them to your business objectives.
It is important to define your goals first before getting started with any plans. You will need to dig deeper to describe and define your digital marketing goals even though every company’s main goal is just to be profitable. Perhaps it can be that you want online sales to increase by 25%. Or it could even be that you want to aim for adding 500 people to the email subscription list or aim for 100 shares on social media. Prioritize the goals you have made once you have defined them, and take your top three. Next, ingrain them in your mind so you are always focused on them, as they are going to be the guide of your digital strategy.
Omnichannel marketing works for all businesses. However, the problem is that there are several businesses that have to use every channel of digital marketing. This is the step where you will weed out what is not necessarily needed for the business and instead focus more on the audience and the channels they use. For example, if you work for a company that caters to adults over 50 years old, you do not need Snapchat in your digital plans. It could be a good idea to align that focus on email or Facebook instead.
Understanding your key channels aid you in focusing on the important aspects of your digital strategy by reaching your target audience more efficiently along with getting rid of any unnecessary spending.
For marketing budgets, brands now spend 25-45% on content marketing. Whatever it may be, social media posts, blogs, emails, or visual content, content is what the internet was based on and is what runs the entire thing. Because of this, the driving force of your strategy should be your content in order for it to work and be effective.
When creating your content strategy, point your focus and the wants and needs of your audience. For instance, if your customers keep asking the same questions about your service or products, it is a good idea to create an email drip campaign to answer these FAQs. If you find that email is not the best channel for your target audience, you should try another route like a business blog or social media. It is important to be sure that when you are creating content, it is useful because people only share what is interesting to them. The more that you get them to share, the closer you will be to getting to those goals.
Whenever you know the content type that will be utilized for your business, create and build out a calendar or even a timeline to stay consistent and organized. You are most likely going to use multiple marketing channels rather than just one and also have several different pieces of content to manage, so the calendar should be the lifeline of your digital strategy,
By making sure that everything is all in one central location, it will make the process simpler as the workload gets more and more increased.
We have all of our planning done. Now it is time to set it all in motion.
Take a second to stop and look at the strategy you have created. Think about having enough resources, money and time to execute the items in your digital strategy properly. It is completely okay to cut down your list a little bit if you do not feel fully equipped at the time.
Once everything has been started and is running, the final objective is monitoring and measuring your digital strategy’s results. Now that it seems every major platform has some sort of its own analytics, so getting this information is very easy.
This is the part where you can go in and check and balance those goals that we made in the first step to help figure out what worked well and what did not. When you learn this information first hand, your future digital marketing efforts will be made even stronger.
Here at YuzzBuzz, we are experts in digital marketing at our own full-service digital marketing agency. One of the things we specialize in is developing a digital strategy in a similar way that was just described. We will help you every step of the way to set you up for success in your company’s digital marketing. For more information, check out our digital marketing strategy section of our website here.