Everything You Need To Know About A Digital Marketing Strategy And How To Create Your Own

October 28, 2019Digital Marketing Strategy 0

Article by Ananya Sinha

Google ads, social media, content marketing, influencers, SEO… Creating a digital marketing strategy from scratch can be overwhelming.

But whether you’re a seasoned marketing manager or a complete beginner, there are ways to divide and conquer your digital marketing strategy so you can make a significant impact on your organization’s bottom line.

Read on for everything you need to know about digital marketing strategies and how to optimize your tactics for digital marketing success.

PLANNING YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

It’s easy to get carried away and dive straight in, but before you do anything, here are some critical steps to ensuring your digital marketing strategy is built for success.

1. Goals & Objectives

Time to get specific. You won’t know what the right tactics are until you understand what you want to achieve, especially when it comes to executing specific digital marketing activities.

“Increasing website traffic” provides you with next to no guidance. “Increase demo requests by 20% by X date” will give you a much better idea of how to prioritize, assign budget, and choose activities that will help you achieve this goal.

2. Assigning Budget

Once you have your goals and objectives defined and timelines set, take some time to prioritize these goals.

When you have defined the most important achievements you want to make as part of your digital marketing strategy, you can start assigning budget for each activity accordingly.

3. Measuring Success

No matter what your digital marketing strategy looks like, it’s imperative that you track and measure the success of each activity, aligning metrics closely with your goals and objectives.

Examples of digital marketing results to track include:

Click-through rates
Engagement rates
Leads generated
Cost per conversion
Content downloads
Search rankings/keyword success

DECIDING ON DIGITAL MARKETING ACTIVITIES

Now that you’ve set some goals and understand what you want to achieve, it’s time to choose which digital marketing activities to focus on. These considerations will help you understand the most valuable way to invest your time and budget.

Time

Are you a team of 100 or a team of 10? Many digital marketing activities may sound simple at the outset, but require a bigger investment of time than most people realize.

Try to be realistic in terms of what your team can achieve with the working hours allotted to them.

Budget

The great thing about digital marketing is that you can do it low cost, or with a multi-million dollar budget. The size of your budget will play a significant part in deciding which tactics make up your digital marketing strategy.

Audience

Is there any point running an Instagram page if your audience is primarily in the 50+ age bracket? Probably not.

Ensure you research where your audience is active online and how best to reach them before diving headfirst in your digital marketing activities.

TRIED AND TESTED DIGITAL MARKETING ACTIVITIES

So you’re ready to get going. What digital marketing activities will you employ? Here’s a list to get you started.

YOUR WEBSITE

You can put all the budget, creativity and technology you want into paid search or email marketing, but if you’re not directing users to a beautiful, easy-to-use website where you can capture their lead information, then it may all be in vain.

Your website should:

Have a clean, eye-catching design
Be aligned with your brand messaging
Include clear calls-to-action
Make it obvious who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch

CONTENT MARKETING

Content is so much more than just a buzzword. It’s a way of creating valuable resources for your audience and creating a positive association with your brand.

Using a content strategy to its greatest effect will allow you to draw prospects down the sales funnel. It’s a way of creating organic, authentic touchpoints with your brand before eventually closing a sale. That’s why it’s so popular for B2B companies rather than relying solely on an outbound sales strategy.

Content marketing strategies can include:

Webinars/Podcasts
eBooks
Video marketing
Social media
Blogs
Infographics
Whitepapers
Articles

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

The best SEO strategies use a mix of organic and paid tactics to move your website pages up the search rankings and have prospective customers finding your business based on their search terms.

There are a few branches of tactics within the broad terminology of “SEO”, incuding technical SEO (the functionality, speed, and layout of your website, to name a few), on-page SEO (blogs, articles, keyword structures directly on your website), and off-page SEO (when other websites backlink to your site within their own content).

EMAIL MARKETING

One of the most cost-effective ways to gather prospects and retain existing customers, email marketing continues to be one of the most popular digital marketing strategies.

It’s important that your email campaigns offer customers something of value, whether that’s a piece of content to download, a free subscription, or a discount.

Tips for impactful email marketing campaigns include:

Use snappy, eye-grabbing, or clever subject lines
Make it easy to navigate to your website/offer directly from the email
Personalize the subject line and the email content

SOCIAL MEDIA

Just like email marketing, social media should be a core part of your digital marketing strategy.

Whether you’re using purely organic social media posts or investing in paid social ads, here are some tips to get the most out of your social media presence:

Use hashtags to reach a larger audience and increase engagement.
Make sure your posts are attractive – use the correct size and spec for imagery.
Know your audience – people behave differently and have different expectations from platform to platform.
Be authentic – social media is all about personality, so let it shine!
Use video – video is king when it comes to social media.

PAID SEARCH (PPC)

There’s a lot to developing a fully-fledged paid search strategy, so if you’re new to PPC marketing, just take it one step at a time. The best way to learn is through trial and error, and real-world experience will quickly make you a pro.