If you have decided to take the plunge and build yourself an online persona, then you have encountered a hurdle known as marketing. There are layers to advertising something online. A good promotion makes the sale, and you want to present your product in the best light.
You will need to create a digital marketing strategy. Sounds familiar? That is because you encounter some form of it daily. Social media, SEO, SEM, email subscriptions, and more are members of the digital marketing strategy family tree.
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So, let’s create a digital marketing strategy that fits you.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy in 10 Steps
From personas, across auto marketing, to using the right tools – many factors play a role in the success of your digital marketing strategy. Without further ado, let us dive into ten steps that will give you a solid marketing foundation.
1. Create a Customer Persona
The key to making it in today’s digital marketing world is to get acquainted with your customers. The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to tailor your ads. But, how do you do that?
What you need is a buyer persona. It is a term that describes the ideal customer. You can get one by surveying a test target audience. The ideal customer persona includes:
- Age
- Occupation
- Gender
- Social media presence and reach
- Educational background
- Interests
- Professional Experience
This information will help you define and group customers that could be the perfect audience for your business or product.
2. Recognize Your Goals
Have you ever heard of anyone building a house without a floor? It’s impossible. That’s what it means to try and construct a marketing strategy without goals. Define what you are aiming to achieve.
An easy way to know you have successfully defined a goal is SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-based
Example: Increase the traffic on the website by thirty percent next year by advertising on x number of sites for the first four months.
3. Study the Digital Sales Funnel
The digital sales funnel presents your buyers’ journey from a one-time to a long-term customer. Understanding the funnel allows you to achieve your digital marketing goals. How do you know it? By covering each step of it with the proper digital marketing tools.
The funnel has four steps:
- Awareness – advertise to make potential clients aware of your existence
- Interest – spread the word about your brand. Who are you? What makes you stand out from the crowd?
- Engage – strengthen the relationships. You can do so through sponsored posts on social media that address concerns or encourage clients to ask questions.
- Action – do business with the client. This stage is about sealing the deal. For example, offer discounts in ads to encourage purchasing.
4. Blogging
Nothing can spruce up your digital marketing strategy like high-quality content. How do you create it? Blogging. Creating content via blogging brings more traffic to your site, strengthens your social media presence, positions you against other companies, and more.
Keeping a regularly updated blog about your site optimizes your SEO presence. Your website will be easier to find through search engines, and you can use it as a platform for your marketing campaign.
5. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a blessing for any business, and it keeps improving with new tech and software. It can do wonders for your digital marketing strategy. Automation marketing simplifies automating activities like email marketing, content marketing, and more.
6. Mobile Optimization
As we are approaching 2022, it’s almost criminal for a site not to be mobile-friendly. The smartphone is probably the most used tool of today. So, your customers deserve a good experience when they check your page from their phones.
To optimize your mobile page means focusing on site speed, design, SEO optimization practices, and so on. That is a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Make sure to invest time and care in it.
7. Analyze and Evaluate
A solid digital marketing strategy should always contain some reflection. And we mean, start with self-reflection. Evaluate your performance over the last year. Use analytics to determine what worked, what did not, and why.
After you have gone through your data, look at your competitors. Digital marketing makes it is easy to scope out the competition – it’s all public anyway. Try to find similarities and differences between your digital marketing strategies. It will give you an insight into what you could improve (or avoid) for yourself.
8. Evaluate Your Current Social Media Presence
It is principal to know where you currently stand in your social media presence. You can do that by ranking your main marketing channels by efficiency. Even if it’s borderline non-existent, that insight into your current position can do wonders for your future marketing.
Evaluate your:
- Website
- SEO
- PPC (Pay-per-click) ads
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Which brought in the most traffic? Which the least (so far)?
9. Simplify Communication
Connecting with potential customers is what can make or break an online business. That means that your digital marketing strategy needs to make communication between you and your customers as simple as possible.
How? Make sure that landing pages are not asking for irrelevant data. Also, the landing page should have the call-to-action visible.
With an exit popup, you gain one more chance at your visitor’s email address.
While more data certainly makes email marketing – especially automation – much easier, it’s better to have just the address than ask for more and get nothing at all.
10. Analyze results
Now that you have finished setting up a strategy, it is time to analyze the outcome. To do so, you can use analytic software.
Constantly monitoring your digital marketing strategy will show whether things are going according to plan. Also, it will give you a chance to catch and learn from your mistakes.
Conclusion
Creating a digital marketing strategy may seem frustrating, but it does not have to be so. Create a buyer persona. Set your key goals. Discover what the digital sales funnel is.
Blogging – always keep blogging. Stay mobile-friendly. Always remember: analyze, evaluate, and communicate. We hope this guide helps you out.
