Let’s face it. In today technological advanced world, every business has at least a website and some form of social media presence. What is more important is having an effective strategy to integrate all your digital assets.

What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Whenever digital marketing is mentioned, SEO or PPC advertising are often among the first few jargon that comes to mind. For those who are not aware, they are acronyms for Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising. However, many seldom mention and discus about establishing a digital marketing strategy.

“The series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business.”

Digital Marketing Strategy
HubSpot Blog

According to HubSpot, digital marketing strategy “the series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business”.

That’s a huge bunch of words. In short, it is simply how you are going to achieve your objectives by leveraging on your digital assets such as your website or social media accounts.

Why Your Business Needs A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Having mentioned that most business owns a website and a couple of social media accounts means that your competitors are also able to level the playing field. Hence, the only way to stay competitive is to have an effective digital marketing strategy to achieve your objectives.

Some may argue that there are other forms of marketing and digital marketing is just one of them. That may be true, but digital advertising spending is set to overtake traditional in the United States. This underscore the importance of not only having a credible brand image but also the strategy.

The trend in many small and mid-market companies is to outsource various areas of web development, marketing and graphic design to agencies. This fact makes it more important to understand your own strategy. A digital marketing strategy not only convey a unified message to your audience but also helps to establish a reliable brand image.

How To Develop Your Own Digital Marketing Strategy?

For those not in the marketing industry, it may seem like an uphill battle to craft a digital marketing strategy. Don’t let the word ‘strategy’ scare you off. The steps outline in this article can be applied for both large and small companies.

Step 1: Identify your objective and goals

This step should be obvious since nailing down your objectives and goals will help you determine how your digital marketing objective contribute to your overall business objectives. For example, if the business objective is to increase revenue by 50%, your digital marketing goal would possibly be to increase leads from your website by at least 50%. By having a quantitative goal, it helps to determine the best tactics to be successful.

Step 2: Analyze your past campaigns

Chances are that your business has done a digital campaign previously. By identifying the past mistakes and results, it can provide useful insights and help focus the marketing resources.  Based on the insights, you may need to revisit step 1 and change your goal.

For instance, after analyzing your leads from your digital assets, you discover that most came from Facebook. Hence, you may want to focus on a KPI regarding Facebook such as increasing Facebook followers by 30%.

Step 3: Identify your target audience persona

Every business will not be profitable without their customers. Hence, it is of utmost importance for a business to know their key customer groups and their profile. This includes identifying their demographic and psychographics attributes. A simple way to build your audience persona is to take a look at your Google Analytics’ Audience Reports and identify the key characteristics such as age, sex, career, etc.

Step 4: Identify your means

At this junction, it is important to identify three aspect: budget, digital channels and your team. It is important to determine if you have the required budget need to achieve your goals. This could be done by using historical data of your past campaigns to create a forecast of the results. Most importantly, you should also allocate your budget to each channel you intend to use.

This is also the best time to do an audit of your digital channels. You may want to focus more on a certain channel or even explore new channels you haven’t explored in the past. You may also want to evaluate if A/B testing should be implemented for certain channels. If KPI has not been set for each individual channel, it may also be a good time to do so.

The last aspect is your own team. You should assess and evaluate if your team possess the capacity and expertise to execute your digital marketing initiative. This is also the time to determine if you should hire more team members or to outsource certain elements to an agency.

Step 5: Develop, execute and review the plan

After all the research and evaluation, it is time to put everything into the plan. Certain elements may have to be achieved first before others can begin, just like your website has to be completed before beginning SEO and thereafter, social media marketing. This may require a certain degree of expertise and coordination and should be best left to a professional agency if your team is small or does not possess the required capabilities.

Don’t be surprised if your plan is not executed successfully because not all assumptions will be correct. The key in this step is to regularly review the performance and tweak the necessary elements as needed. At regular intervals, ideally on an annual basis, scrutinize the performance and do a complete review. If necessary, don’t be afraid to go back to Step 1 and repeat the process.

A Final Note

Digital marketing may seem easy. After all, most millennials are already savvy with social media and you probably use Google as the starting point when looking for products. However, crafting a digital strategy and reviewing it regularly may not be that easy since most marketers also have other tasks. This is when consulting a full-service agency really helps. You may even consider outsourcing your marketing department and focus on your strengths to develop your business. If your business has not started or is in the process of developing your digital marketing strategy, contact MarketingGuru to find out how we can help you today.