How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

As the world becomes increasingly digitised, each business must adapt their digital marketing strategy to keep up.

A digital marketing strategy is the process of creating a plan that uses various digital channels to reach and engage customers.

There are many advantages to having a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy. For one, it can help you save budget by targeting customers more effectively. Additionally, it allows you to track your progress and gauge your results more accurately than traditional marketing methods.

Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this blog post, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to create a digital marketing strategy that will help your business reach its goals.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Before you can create a digital marketing strategy, you need to know what you want to achieve. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Drive more traffic to your website? Boost sales? Once you’ve pinpointed your goals, you can start outlining your strategy.

Step 2: Research Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach with your digital marketing efforts? It’s important to have a good understanding of your target audience before you begin planning your strategy. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What motivates them? Once you know who you’re targeting, you can start to create content that will resonate with them.

Step 3: Choose Your Channels

There are a variety of digital channels that you can use to reach your target audience. These include email, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and search engine optimisation (SEO). It’s important to choose the channels that will be most effective for reaching your target audience. For example, if you’re trying to reach millennials, social media channels like TikTok and Instagram may be the most relevant. Your research should have helped you define which channels your audience will engage with. 

Step 4: Create Compelling Content

Once you’ve chosen your channels, it’s time to start creating content. This could include blog posts, infographics, videos, or even just simple social media posts. The important thing is that your content is compelling, consistent and engaging. Otherwise, it will be a challenge to reach your goals. For example, engagement will reduce and audiences will be more transient. 

Step 5: Monitor Your Progress

It’s important to track your progress and analyse your results on a regular basis. This will help you determine what’s working and what’s not so that you can optimise and adjust your spending. Additionally, it will give you insights on how you can improve your digital marketing strategy.

Creating a digital marketing strategy can seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to developing a successful strategy that will help your business reach its goals.

Defining your goals 

We’ve already discussed the need to first define your goals when starting the planning for your digital marketing strategy. You’ll need to speak to your wider team and work out what you are hoping to achieve with your digital marketing efforts. There will also be a few things to keep in mind before you get started. 

SMART goals

First, your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). In order to create an effective digital marketing strategy, your goals must meet these criteria.

Some examples of SMART goals for digital marketing are:

• Increase website traffic by 25% within 6 months
• Generate 50 new leads per month within 3 months
• Achieve a 10% conversion rate within 6 months

This will help you to avoid setting yourself up for disappointment by setting unrealistic goals that will be difficult to achieve.

The importance of setting SMART goals

One of the biggest pitfalls of failing to set SMART goals is that your strategy will lack focus.

Without specific goals, it will be difficult to determine what your priorities should be. You’ll likely end up scattered and pulled in too many directions.

You also won’t have any way of measuring your progress or determining whether or not you’re on track to achieve your objectives.

Creating a realistic strategy

Another reason why it’s so important to set SMART goals is that it will make it much easier to create a realistic and achievable strategy.

If your goals are too vague or unrealistic, you’ll likely find yourself getting frustrated and giving up before you even get started.

But if you set achievable goals that are also challenging but realistic, you’ll be much more likely to stick with your plan and see it through to completion.

Finally, setting SMART goals is important because it will help ensure that your strategy remains relevant and timely.

If you set goals that are too far in the future, you run the risk of your strategy becoming outdated before you even have a chance to implement it.

But if you set shorter-term goals, you can ensure that your strategy stays relevant and evolves along with the ever-changing digital landscape.

Second, your goals should be aligned with your overall business objectives to ensure the time and money you spend on digital marketing campaigns will be helping you to achieve your larger business goals. 

Finally, make sure you have a way to track and measure progress towards your goals.

This could involve setting up Google Analytics tracking codes and goals, setting up conversion tracking in your email marketing software, or using a tool like UTM codes to track the results of your social media campaigns.

By taking the time to define your goals and create a plan for measuring progress, you’ll be well on your way to developing a successful digital marketing strategy.

Researching your target audience 

When you’re planning a digital marketing strategy, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your target audience.

This will allow you to create content and campaigns that are relevant and engaging for them.

It’s also important to investigate your market size i.e. working out how many customers there are actually in the market for your service. This will help you to work out budgets and project potential business return.

There are a number of ways to research your target audience. One is to look at demographic information such as age, gender, location and interests.

This can be gathered from a variety of sources, including government data, market research reports and social media platforms.

Another way to research your target audience is to look at their online behaviour.

This includes finding out what websites they visit and what type of content they consume. This information can be gleaned from web analytics tools and social media listening platforms.

Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can start to create content and campaigns that resonate with your users and drive them to take action.

This will help you to build relationships with them and ultimately increase sales and conversions.

Methods 

There are a few key methods for researching your target audience when developing a digital marketing strategy.

First, you can use online tools like Google Analytics to get an idea of who is already visiting your website and engaging with your content.

Secondly, you can use social media listening tools to track what people are saying about your brand and your competitors online.

Finally, you can conduct surveys and interviews with your target audience to get a better idea of their needs and wants.

By using these research methods, you can develop a digital marketing strategy that will reach your target audience and help you achieve your business goals.

Choosing your channels

There are many digital channels available to reach your target market, with that number growing all the time.

How do you determine which ones will be most effective to use as part of your digital marketing strategy?

There are a few considerations that will help you choose the right channels for your business.

First, consider your target market. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests? Where do they spend their time online?

Once you have a good understanding of your target market, you can start to narrow down your choices.

If your target market is active on particular social media channels, then you should create a strategy for those channels and start activity on them.

If they regularly engage with blog content, then including SEO optimised blogs as part of your digital marketing strategy would help you to engage with your audience through this activity.

Another consideration is your budget.

Some digital channels are more expensive to use than others. If you have a limited budget, you may need to focus on the more affordable channels or be more targeted with spend on more expensive ones.

Once you have considered all of these factors, you can start to create your digital marketing strategy.

Include a mix of channels that will reach your target market where they are spending their time online. And, be sure to monitor your results so you can adjust your strategy as needed.

Digital marketing channels 

There are many different digital marketing channels, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Some of these channels are ‘pull’ channels i.e. customers are already looking for the service, and others are ‘push’ channels which means that customers aren’t actively looking for your service. 

Some of the most popular digital marketing channels include:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising a website for higher search engine rankings and is a pull channel. The higher a website ranks, the more likely people are to find it. But it’s important to note that SEO is a long-term strategy that can take months or even years to see results.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is the process of using paid advertising to promote a website in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and is therefore a pull channel. SEM is a short-term strategy that can provide immediate results.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM is the process of using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to promote a product or service and is therefore a push channel. SMM is a great way to build relationships with potential and current customers.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the process of sending marketing messages, such as newsletters and special offers, to a list of subscribers and is therefore a pull channel. Email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with customers and build loyalty.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, making it a pull channel. Content marketing is a great way to build trust and credibility with potential and current customers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a product or service on behalf of another company and is therefore a push channel. Affiliates earn a commission for each sale they generate. Affiliate marketing is a great way to reach new customers and grow sales.

There are many other digital marketing channels, such as display advertising and digital radio. Each channel should be evaluated for the relevance to your users to ensure you choose the right mix of channels for your business. We’ve recently published a blog covering the digital marketing trends in 2023 that goes into a more detail around some other channels available.

Creating compelling content 

When you’re devising a digital marketing strategy, one of the most important aspects to consider is the content you’ll use to populate your website and social media channels. After all, without compelling content, you won’t be able to engage your audience or drive conversions.

So, what makes for great campaigns and content?

1. Create for your audience

Before you start creating content, it’s important to take some time to understand who your target audience is and what they’re interested in. What kind of language do they use? What kind of information are they looking for? Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can start tailoring your content to them.

2. Keep it concise

There’s a lot of competition for audience attention, so it’s important to make your content easy to digest. If you’re working on written content, break up your text with subheadings, bullet points and images to make it more skimmable. And, wherever possible, try to get your point across in as few words as possible.

3. Make it visual

Your audience is more likely to engage with content that is visually appealing. So, in addition to written content, consider incorporating images, infographics, videos and other rich media. Infographics will also have a positive impact on your SEO so they’re definitely worth including. 

4. Use calls to action (CTAs)

Your content should always have a purpose, whether it’s to drive sales, generate leads or raise awareness. Make sure you have a UX focused approach and include calls to action throughout your content so that your audience knows what you want them to do next and take the actions that you want them to take.

5. Promote your content

Just because you’ve published some great content doesn’t mean people will automatically see it. You need to promote your content through social media, email marketing and other channels.

Creating compelling content is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. By following these tips, you can produce content that will engage your audience and help you achieve your business goals.

Tracking progress and monitoring results 

Through tracking metrics, you can get a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not, and make necessary adjustments to your strategy accordingly.

Some of the most important metrics to track include:

Reach

This is perhaps the most obvious metric to track, as it will give you an idea of how many people are actually seeing your content. There are a number of ways to track reach – for example on your website, you can use Google Analytics and other similar tools. Having said this, it’s important to be wary of this metric as it doesn’t actually tell you anything useful or about how successful your content or campaigns are.

Engagement

Once your audience views your content or campaigns, it’s important to track how engaged they are with it. On your website for example, are they spending a lot of time on the site, or immediately bouncing? Are they reading your blog posts, or just skimming them? Engagement is a key metric to track because it can give you insights into whether or not your audience is actually finding your content valuable.

Conversions

Another important metric to track is conversions, or the number of people taking the desired action. This could be signing up for your email list, downloading a white paper, or making a purchase. Whatever the desired action is, tracking conversions will give you an idea of how effective your digital marketing strategy is at achieving its goals.

There are a number of other metrics that you may want to track as well, depending on your specific goals. But these three are a good place to start. By tracking your progress and results with a digital marketing strategy, you can make necessary adjustments to ensure that you are getting the most out of your efforts.

Put your plan into action 

Now that you know the basics of how to create a digital marketing strategy, it’s time to put your plan into action. Begin by setting realistic goals for your campaign and then track your progress over time. As you gain experience, you can fine-tune your strategy until you find what works best for your business. Just remember to keep your goals in mind and always be willing to adapt your approach as needed. With some thought and planning, you can create a digital marketing strategy that will help you reach your target audience and achieve your business goals.

If you’re still not sure where to start, or if you need help fine-tuning your strategy, why not get in touch with a digital marketing agency like Crucible! We can help you create a personalised plan that fits your specific needs and budget. With the right team in your corner, you can take your digital marketing strategy to the next level and reach new heights with your business.

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