Whether you are just starting out or you decided its time to up your digital marketing strategy, it can be difficult understanding where to begin. You might be wondering, is there a “perfect”, one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy that will be an ideal strategy for everyone? The answer, obviously, is no.
With a new year around the corner come budget and marketing planning. Let’s take a closer look at 7 of the most effective digital marketing strategies you should consider before commencing on your digital marketing campaign.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
The first thing that is vital to know before beginning any marketing campaign, is who your target audience is. There’s no point in delivering content and information out in the open without analyzing who you want to reach and who your potential customers are.
Overall, your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers who are most likely to want your product or service. These are the groups of people who should be viewing your content and ad campaigns. Furthermore, target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests or other related factors.
Take some time to identify who you want to communicate with:
- If your company is B2B, what industry are you targeting? What specific type of client within that organization will be the one interested in your services?
- If your company is B2C then always make note of everything you can think of that might make up your ideal customer – like their age, gender, location, interests, career, and other related factors.
Depending upon what you sell, your target audience might be niche or broader. In addition to increasing ROI (return on investment), understanding your target market allows you to build relationships and better communicate with consumers and/or clients.
Set SMART Goals For Your Digital Marketing Strategy
SMART is an acronym that you can use to guide your goal setting. Before you launch your digital marketing campaign, think about what you would need to achieve to consider your campaign successful. What is it that you’re aiming for?
To make sure your goals are clearly identified and reachable, each one should be:
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
- Achievable (agreed, attainable).
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).
Overall, SMART is an effective tool that provides the clarity, overall focus and motivation that you need to achieve your specific goals.
Research Your Competitors
Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy your service or products or your competitors and how your competition is marketing their products or services. Over time, this can help you improve your own marketing techniques.
It can be beneficial to conduct some research into what digital strategies your competitors are using to communicate with customers, including which channels or social networks they use, the kind of content they share (and how they share it), and the level of interaction they’re getting on these platforms.
Remember, just because your competitor is doing something, doesn’t mean you need to do it too. Studying your competitors allows you to gain ideas and figure out what may work and what may not work when it comes to marketing your business. It’s key to define what is unique about your business, and ensure it’s something your market values.
Refine Your Brand Voice For Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Your company’s brand voice refers to the way you talk to your customers and is defined by your brand’s style of communication which thus influences how people perceive your messaging.
Are you going for witty and informal, or a more professional and authoritative brand voice?
Keep in mind, once you have become aware of who your target audience is, you also need to figure out the key messages you need to communicate to them. This includes the core information about your products or services, and what differentiates you from your competitors. It is vital to share your key messages on a regular basis in a way for your target audience to understand and engage with.
Choose The Right Channels For Your Digital Marketing Strategy
First, its important to analyze the different types of online marketing activities. Next, its important to analyze the cost involved. Though, it may be tempting to launch campaigns on every single digital media channel available if your budget allows, it’s much easier and more cost-effective and efficient to focus on a few. Consider demographic and behavior patterns when creating content strategy. Consider what kind of information your audience will find most useful and create content around each stage of the sales funnel.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Does your target market use social media a lot? Or, do they prefer engaging with content in their emails? Are they fans of reading blog posts and sharing them with others? When prospects are ready to engage with you, how are they most likely to do that? Is there a product or service you can offer to buy online or do you need to provide channels such as email, forms, online chat or telephone?
Then, once your marketing technique has got the attention of your prospects, you then need to think about building specific campaigns to get them to commit to you.
Create a list of the channels and social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) you want to use, how you want to use them, and how important they are in terms of reaching your target audience.
Remember Your Customers Journey
A customer journey refers to the entire experience a customer has while communicating with a brand. It’s the complete interaction roadmap from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond.
The customer journey is something that many business owners tend to forget. However, it’s critical to keep the journey in mind when creating content for your company. Customers will go through several stages during the purchasing decision. What steps are your customers taking to purchase your product or service? The more important the purchase, the more in-depth their journey may be.
Mapping the customer journey can help you to get answers to a range of questions. You can learn more about where customers might be dropping out of your sales funnel. Are they leaving your website? Or, are they only spending 5 seconds on your website? This could mean that the site is not user-friendly, and it might not meet the customer expectations. What interactions is the customer having with your brand before they make a purchase, or before they leave and don’t come back? When you have the answers to these questions and when you are creating quality customer journey maps for the services and products you offer, it can help immensely.
Overall, it’s important to understand the buyers goals. Defining the purchasing journey will help you develop content around the different decision stages and help nurture customers down the sales funnel. You’ll want to create strategic campaigns and marketing automation for each part of the buyer’s journey. Remember to keep you messaging simple and outline a clear plan for potential purchasers.
Conduct A Digital Asset Audit For Your Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital audit is an assessment of all active media channels and to evaluate how effective they are in marketing campaigns. In fact, if your brand has an online presence, then the first thing you need to do is conduct an audit of all your online platforms. You must create an internal inventory of your current assets which include:
- Website
- Social media accounts
- Videos (live or yet to be posted)
- Email campaigns
- Ads
- Offline marketing materials
Analytical information such as Google Analytics can allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your online content. And, analytical information can allow you to determine which online channels/platforms can help you reach your goals.
Analyze & Adjust Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Overall, the key to an effective digital marketing campaign is having the ability to measure its success. The type of data and information you focus on will depend on what specific types of goals you have set and the channel you are analyzing.
In addition, there are many different analytics tools available to help track website traffic, lead sources, social media interactions and engagement rate, conversion rates and so much more.
Remember, focusing on all of these building blocs will help make your digital marketing marketing strategy successful.
