Creating an expert digital marketing strategy is easier said than done. We live in a digital age where everyone spends more time online, whether they are browsing the Internet, engaging on social media platforms, or doing their own market research. In response to this reality, any business looking to thrive needs to invest a significant part of its marketing budget in the digital space.
Despite the best intentions, it is easy to miss digital marketing opportunities without a proper plan in place. Unfortunately, though, without a solid digital marketing strategy, you are unlikely to see the best return on investment. Taking the time to get to grips with the digital marketing basics or enlisting the services of a reputable digital marketing agency to help formulate a solid strategy will undoubtedly focus your efforts on the most productive opportunities and reduce resource waste while building on any foundations that are already in place.
Why a Digital Marketing Strategy Is Important for Every Business
Before we get started on helping you create a custom digital marketing strategy, let us explain why it is so important for any enterprise operating in this digital age to do so. A properly thought-out digital marketing strategy will establish what you want to achieve, how you are going to do it and the metrics for success you are going to use. Investing in your digital marketing strategy will also help you decide on the marketing tactics you are going to use and what tools you will need to monitor the results.
With a well-formed, adaptable digital marketing strategy, you will:
Reach Your Online Audience
Simply launching a website or creating a social media account for your business is not enough these days. You need to find ways of reaching your target market. A wonderful way of doing this is to engage with platforms that are popular amongst your target audience and build relationships with online groups or influencers that are followed by your typical customer base.
Grow Your Audience & Increase Exposure
On a related note, having a good digital marketing strategy will not just allow you to target the right people but will grow that audience through increased exposure. The internet has broken down geographic boundaries, so having a solid online presence will mean there are no actual limits to the size of your business’s potential audience.
Gain Better Insights Into Your Online Marketing Performance
A solid digital marketing strategy will naturally focus on the results generated for your marketing team and the wider business. Traditional media marketing efforts are notoriously difficult to quantify. You cannot always be sure which advert a new customer saw or at which stage of the customer experience they decided to become a buyer. Conversely, online activity is straightforward to trace. For instance, online marketing can be tracked to allow you to see when a person clicks on a particular link, which keyword searches generated an advertisement that they bought from, or which Instagram ad took them to one specific lead-generation landing page.
Ultimately, Digital Marketing Makes Financial Sense
When compared to traditional media streams, choosing digital marketing activities requires a lower investment to get started. For instance, it is much cheaper to run content marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) with a new blog than it is to have thousands of pamphlets sent out to a mailing list. Studies predict that by 2023 over two-thirds of all media spending will focus on digital marketing. The main reason for this is that businesses have realised how lucrative and effective digital marketing can be, as it is likely to generate a higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional channels. For instance, a TV ad may generate an ROI of around $USD 4 over a 3-year period, whereas influencer marketing has the potential to generate an ROI of approximately $USD 6 in a much shorter space of time.
Follow These Steps to Create Your Custom Digital Marketing Strategy
So, are you ready to get your digital marketing strategy underway?
1. Understand the Environment, Your Competition & Your Customers
Creating a sound digital marketing strategy begins by analysing and examining your environment. This understanding gives you a clear idea of where you are at and how you compare to your competitors. Moreover, it helps you understand your customers and their needs.
So, before you begin formulating your strategy, evaluate your performance over the last few years and explore the analytics to determine what is working well and what has not and why. Spend some time looking at your competitors’ digital presence to work out what they are doing well and whether you may be able to incorporate the same strategies. Finally, get to know your customers by using digital tools such as Facebook Audience Insights and Google Trends, which provide a breakdown of your audience size, demographics, behaviours, and interests, as well as the type of things they search for.
2. Identify Your Business Goals and Objectives
Every business has its own goals and objectives, and you should use these to establish and shape your digital marketing strategy to help you achieve those desired outcomes.
Your goals could include anything from increasing brand awareness to increasing engagement across social media channels or having the company’s CEO recognised as an industry authority. When establishing your business objectives, ensure they are precise, measurable, achievable, results focused, and deadline driven. An example of a good goal would be to increase engagement rates on Instagram posts by 5% over the next 3 months. You can then look at strategies to achieve this goal and use tools to measure your success and scale up from there as needed.
3. Define Your Digital Marketing Channels
Through your background research and analysis, you should have a pretty good idea of what resonates with your audience. In turn, this should help you choose the channels that are most likely to give you the best results. It is a clever idea to consider all the potential digital media, tools, and tactics that you could use before prioritising the ones that are most likely to contribute towards your business goals and objectives.
4. Follow Best Practices
It is important to be meticulous when creating a custom digital marketing strategy. If you end up missing an important step in the execution of your strategy, you will find that you are unlikely to get the results you may have expected. Therefore, it is important to ensure you always follow the best practices. Remember that digital marketing is a dynamic field, so something that worked well a year ago may need a bit of adapting now. Don’t try to do too much though. Instead, focus your efforts and acknowledge your limitations too. Therefore, it is important to be flexible and adaptable with your strategies to help them scale up with your business and the changing industry.
5. Re-evaluate & Make Adjustments
One of the things that makes digital marketing so dynamic and powerful is that it gives you the flexibility to pivot and adjust without too much hassle. Any digital marketing strategy you produce is not set in stone. For example, if an ad is not delivering results, pause it and try a new approach. If your website is not converting visitors, run an A/B comparison test with different calls to action to figure out which one works best. A good digital marketing strategy will evolve organically, but you need to remain flexible and open to change.
Put Your Best Foot Forward Online With a Dynamic Digital Marketing Strategy & Agency
In short, to stay ahead in this digital age and have your business thrive, you need to execute a custom-designed digital marketing strategy. This is the best digital marketing strategy. This is because there is no one-size-fits-all model. Each business is different and comes with its own unique strengths and weaknesses. It often takes a few attempts before you get your digital marketing strategy right, and, even then, this sphere is so fast paced that you need to have the ability to constantly adapt your tactics to accommodate changes to the landscape.
If you are feeling a little overwhelmed by the thought of having to formulate your own digital marketing strategy, it is a clever idea to consult a professional digital marketing agency to help steer you in the right direction.
We recommend using Blank Theory. As a full-service digital marketing agency, Blank Theory helps brands across a range of industries define their authentic selves, define their goals and plan exactly how they are going to reach them. With an expert team of talented digital professionals, they can help you not only develop your strategy but put it in place with quality creatives and monitor and adapt it based on detailed research and analysis. Take your brand to new heights and connect with Blank Theory today.