why to create a digital marketing strategy?
Every business requires a well-thought digital marketing strategy to become successful. An effective digital strategy will help you achieve your business’s online objectives, keep a track of your goals, understand which digital channels to focus on and be more profitable.
There is no shortage of social media platform in today’s digital world and every platform demands its own digital marketing strategy to maximize the outcome.
Let’s take a look at some of the best digital marketing strategies that will help any business to maximize its marketing objective. Marketing objective can be traffic, lead generation, e-commerce sales conversions, in-store visits or brand awareness/reach.
CREATe A BUYER PERSONA
The first step is to create a buyer persona so that you know who your ideal customers are.
Buyer persona provides demographics, educational, company/industry, personal and online activity information about your ideal customer.
You will be able to create relevant content, tailor your messaging, products and services to the specific needs of your customers.
This Hubspot tool will help you quickly create a buyer persona for your business: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona
DEFINe YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Trying to appeal to everyone is one of the biggest mistakes any brand can make. Here are a few ways that will help you define your target audience:
- Analyze your products and service: Find out what makes your business unique, what are some of the unique selling points, list down the features and benefits. Next, list down a list of group/audience that needs your products and services. If the answer is YES, add them to the target audience list, If the answer is NO, remove them from your audience list. If the answer is MAYBE, create a separate list that can be used for testing.
- Analyze your current competition: Competitor analysis will help you uncover who your competitors are targeting and who are their current customers?
- Use the current customer database: This is one of the best ways to accurately define your target audience because the quality of the data from your current customers will be much higher than any other source. Your customers are already using your products/services so the should be on the top of your list.
- Understand and define characteristics of your existing customers: conduct a customer survey and use this information for your target audience definition. This “How to define your target audience” infographics will help you speed up the process.
SELECTING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
Every company needs to have a strong social presence, it is unrealistic to find time and be active on all the social media platforms because there are just too many of them.
Finding the right social platform for your business is key to having a successful social media strategy.
Here are some ways to figure out which social media platform is right for your business:
Define social media goals and objectives -I strongly advise avoiding fluffy metrics such as “increase followers”, “increase page likes”, ”reach XXXXX number of people”. These metrics do not work in the long run and they will simply drain your digital advertising budget. Focus on engagement metrics such as engagement rate, click rate, view rate. These metrics will help you decide which platforms will give you maximum engagement on your content and align that with the type of content your produce.
Identify your team skills and resource – Every social media platform requires a different type of skill and sometimes they overlap. If you are limited with the resources that you can allocate then I would suggest you start with one or two platforms and then go from there. Read more about 21 social media sites that you can consider.
PROMOTING YOUR BUSINESS USING DIGITAL
Digital advertising will help you scale quickly, target a specific set of audience, track, analyze and keep track of your goals.
Incorporating digital advertising into your overall digital marketing strategy is a no-brainer. It is extremely cost-effective to reach new customers, increase brand visibility and acquire new leads/customers for your business.
Since there are many different digital ads platforms, choosing the right advertising platform will get you more ROI.
Advertise on platforms where you already have a presence. E..g If you have a Facebook page, then use Facebook ads to promote your business.
If your business is more into Instagram then Instagram advertising is a great way to tell your story in a visual and creative fashion.
Utilize PPC advertising: PPC ads are real-time and they show ads when people are searching for them on search engines.
Why choose PPC advertising: The quality of leads that you acquire using PPC ads are much better than other ad channels and there are higher chances of those leads converting into a customer. I would recommend starting with Google ads since it is one of the best PPC advertising platforms and helps you target audiences who are actively looking for products and services related to your business
Use the current customer database: This is one of the best ways to accurately define your target audience because the quality of data from your current customers will be much higher than any other source. Your customers are already using your products/services. Understand and define characteristics of your existing customers, conduct a customer survey and use this information for your target audience definition.
MEASURING YOUR KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Ah, where do I start with what to measure? This list is never ending but here are 10 important digital marketing metrics that you should be measuring and analyzing:
- Engagement Rate: If you have a social presence then calculate engagement rate by adding all the interactions you get on your posts and divide it by total people reached.
- Conversion Rate: Total number of leads/customers divided by the total number of visits/clicks
- Cost Per Lead: Total amount spent for a campaign divided by the total number of leads.
- Total Visits: Since the website will be your go-to marketing destination, keep a track of how many website visitors you get on a monthly basis and aim to increase every quarter by 10%
- Traffic Source: As you expand your presence on multiple different channels such a social, referrals and organic SEO, keep a track of traffic source and understand which traffic source is helping you acquire more visitors.
- Bounce Rate: This metric will tell you what percentage of visitors leave your site before interacting with any of the elements or visiting additional pages on your website. You will be able to find content, design, and user retention ideas to make your visitors stay on your website and consume more content and take actions.
- Mobile Traffic: You are probably reading this blog on your phone right? As more and more people use their smartphones for information gathering and transactions, it is critical to keep an eye on how much traffic you get from mobile devices. Optimize your website for site speed and responsiveness to please your audience on mobile devices.
- Click Through Rate: This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks divided by the total number of people who saw your post/ad. This will help you focus on improving your creative elements and make your posts/ads attractive and catchy.
- Cost Per Click: This is used to evaluate your keywords, ads and campaign performance and inspire you to optimize your campaigns so that you decrease your overall CPC.
- ROI: Ultimately you want to impact your bottom line. This helps you identify which area in your digital marketing campaign is driving sales and revenue.
