A How-to Guide to Grow Your Business with Digital Marketing
Succeed in Building a Digital Marketing Strategy with These Steps and worksheet
Business professionals today are almost entirely online or on-the-go. You want to promote your business on platforms where they spend their time. That said, your marketing strategy needs to include robust digital marketing elements.
Focusing on sales and business growth can make it hard to prioritize digital marketing. With several other responsibilities on your shoulders, how will you create and maintain a flexible, thorough digital marketing strategy?
This guide covers what you need to know to be successful in digital marketing and will help you improve and grow your business.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan to advertise your products and services to online customers. This includes tactics, or objectives, such as an optimized website, social media, video, blog posts and paid advertising programs. Your strategy should include some of these tactics and goals that you will use to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing team.
What is the difference between a strategy and tactic?
Before we teach you how to make a digital marketing strategy, let's clarify the distinction between strategies and tactics. A strategy outlines a destination—where you want your business to be--and includes steps needed to get there. To meet your goals, the plan needs to be measurable, achievable and focused.
Tactics, also referred to as components or objectives, are the concrete and defined tasks you implement as part of your strategy. A group of these digital components form a campaign.
What Should a Digital Strategy Include?
To create an innovative digital marketing plan, it's best to use a mix of campaigns and tactics that match your resources and business goals.
Here's a brief digital marketing strategy example and the elements within it:
Strategy: Create 50 high-quality leads from a specific target audience online.
Campaign: Develop paid social media ads that drive people to a landing page with a lead generation form.
Tactic 1: Develop a white paper that communicates a specific topic of interest to the target audience. This will serve as the incentive for submitting contact information on a form.
Tactic 2: Create a webpage with important company details and resources. Add a form for potential customers to submit info and get the white paper via email or link.
Tactic 3: Write, design and launch a paid ad on the social media platform where your audience is most active. Once the ad duration has elapsed, you should analyze your campaign to measure its return on investment (ROI).
Depending on the size of your business, your strategy may include several campaigns and tactics, each with different goals. Your business may event have several strategies running concurrently. Referring to the following steps will help make building an effective digital marketing strategy less overwhelming.
Steps to Building a Digital Marketing Strategy
Follow these steps for every strategy you make. Whether it's for traditional marketing or digital marketing, these simple steps hold true. This will lead to more genuine and effective marketing programs.
Define your target audience: Understanding your audience goes beyond simply assuming who you want to target. It involves having the necessary data to truly comprehend them. Thoroughly defined audience personas form the foundation of the best strategies. Follow this guide to truly understand and define your target audience.
Identify your goals: Setting clear, measurable strategy goals that align with your overall business goals ensures everything will work cohesively. Also, by outlining your goals, you will have something to track and compare against to measure success.
List the digital marketing tools you need: List the tools you already have access to. Do you have all the resources required to complete the strategy? For example, do you need a search engine optimization (SEO) or content development tool to optimize your website?
Organize your current channels and assets: This references owned, paid and earned assets, not just graphics or document assets. Consider the below assets, the customer base on each and how each will accomplish your goals.
Owned media: This is all the digital assets your business owns. Some examples include your website, social media posts, email campaigns, blog content and imagery. These are all the assets you have total control over.
Paid media: This is the channel or assets you would spend money on to gain the attention of your customer base. This might include good digital ads on Google, social media or other sponsored opportunities on websites (e.g., industry associations).
Earned media: This third grouping of assets includes all the exposure gained through word-of-mouth or organic marketing. This type of asset can be PR work. Examples could be websites linking to your site, or guest articles on industry websites or social channels.
Audit and plan your owned assets: Now that you have listed your assets, analyze each asset that you own, or could own. Are any of these currently supporting your goals? Do these communicate the proper messages to audiences? Are there assets that aren’t working for you? Are there assets you aren’t taking advantage of but should?
Audit and plan your paid assets: This step is much like the last, only with this one, you put a dollar amount to the asset. Here you can see if your investment on the asset is returning potential value to your business. Are the time and money you spend on your website returning leads that your team can convert to sales? Answer this for your Google or paid social media advertisements too.
Audit and plan your earned assets: Evaluate all areas of your existing business coverage. We can't do this activity for potential opportunities because we can't predict what those look like. Then rank these current, earned assets in order from most effective to least. This will help you determine where you should spend time to ensure you communicate the right messages.
Create digital strategy guide: This digital strategy worksheet will organize your lists from the steps above in a way that creates your step-by-step digital marketing strategy framework. This worksheet includes an area where you can analyze your digital marketing efforts, and determine where you can improve on future digital marketing projects.
Building your first targeted marketing strategy was once overwhelming. You now know how to practice digital marketing. You understand your audience, goals and objectives, existing and potential resources, and the tools at your disposal. Now, it’s time to create a vision of these elements to decide your next steps. Continue to put these into practice, and soon you will know how to succeed in digital marketing.