Crafting an effective digital marketing strategy
In the current digital age, the internet is where people spend most of their time. Because of this, if you want your brand to connect with audiences, it is essential that you involve yourself in digital marketing. Since the internet is such a virtually endless space, there are an infinite number of ways in which you can market your brand online. While this is very conducive to creativity and experimentation, it can also seem like a daunting task. To make your job easier, you should have a digital marketing strategy process that you can use while devising new campaigns.
Here are the major components of a successful digital marketing process
Research
Before you do anything else, you must gather all the information you need for your marketing campaign. There are three principal sources that you should use for your research.
Your business, brand, and product line
When it comes to your business, it is essential that you analyze your past performance and build an understanding of what worked and why. You have to consider everything from which channels gave you the most conversions to which products performed the best. At this point, you should also inspect your budget and get estimates from vendors of what your digital marketing costs will be.
Your target audience
You can use Facebook Audience Insights to find out how large your audience is, but you can also use it to get a nuanced understanding of their interests and behavior. This will help you design engaging strategies and content that is more likely to turn into conversions. Google trends is another free tool you can use to see what people are finding interesting at any given point in time.
One of the best ways to get a deeper understanding of your target audience is to create customer personas. This goes beyond basic information like age, gender, occupation, and location. A customer persona is a profile of what your ideal customer would be like, and should include their challenges, expectations, and factors that influence their shopping behavior. You can get this information by analyzing the data you have already collected and through customer feedback and reviews. You want to make sure that each of these personas is simple and easy to share across your organization.
Your competitors’ marketing strategies
Since digital marketing is fundamentally a public endeavor, it is easy to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing. Understanding their digital presence will undoubtedly give you some insight into which kinds of strategies work in your field and which do not.
Plan
Once you have gathered all the data you need, you can begin to develop your digital marketing plan. The GSOT model (Goals, Strategies, Objectives, Tactics) is a great place to start.
Goal and strategies
Your goals are the end result that you want to obtain. For example, you might want to grow your sales by 10% or get 100 signups for an event. How you choose to approach your goals is your strategy. Your approach will largely depend on where in the marketing funnel your audience is and whether you are trying to create awareness, interest, desire, or action.
Objectives
To simplify your goals, you can break them down into smaller steps. You can use these steps – or objectives – to ensure that your plan is on track. For example, if your goal is to get 100 signups for an event in three months, one of your weekly goals could be to get 10 signups every week (with a couple of weeks as a buffer). By the third week, if you only have 15 registrations, you know that you have to change something.
Tactics
This is where tactics come into play. In the same way that you can break your goals down into objectives, you can break your strategy down into tactics. Once again, what tactics you choose to use will depend on what you are trying to get from your audience. For example, if you want to create awareness, it might make sense to create sponsored posts because they have better reach. On the other hand, if your objective is to get consumers to purchase your offerings, you have to optimize your landing and product pages to make them as attractive as possible.
Create
Once you have your marketing objectives in place and have a grasp of your target audience, you can begin to think about your content. The first step in your content strategy should be to identify what topics you want to include in the final content you publish. Here are some places from where you can draw inspiration: Information about your target audience and competitor activity that you gathered during your research phase. Trending hashtags on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Pinterest is a visual platform that can help you find an initial creative direction.
The next step is to choose what form you want your content to take. The choice you make will depend on your target audience. Which platforms do they use the most? Do they tend to prefer long-form or short-form content? Based on your consumer research, decide on a mix of different types of content that will appeal most to your audience.
Publish
Once you have your content in place, it is time to post it! Ideally, you should have a basic idea of what channels you are going to use before you finalize your content. This will help your content creators know the specifications of what they need to create. This is especially true for content that has graphic elements to it. Your work continues even after you publish. You have to analyze the data that comes in from your customers. Are the number of visits to your website in line with your estimations? How many of those visits result in conversions? On channels like Instagram and Facebook, you will probably also have to interact with your audience to keep them engaged.
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