There are four things you have to remember about creating a successful digital marketing strategy: define, implement, analyze, and optimize. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world or what industry you are a part of. These are the key ingredients to a successful digital marketing strategy. There is no shortcut to this.
Any digital marketing company will tell you that these are the steps they must take to create a workable, implementable, and successful strategy for your business. These four things will take a look into your audiences, their triggers, pain points, etc. But more than that, they will also analyze the data they collected and adjust the strategies according to the data generated.
Define
The best digital marketing framework starts with defining who your audience is, setting the goals of the business, and finding out how to trigger their interests to buy. Your digital marketing strategy needs to be tailored to your audience. Who are they? How do they earn a living? What are their interests?
Do you know how to create a buyer persona? The buyer persona is a representation of your buyer. It is a profile of your customers based on their interests, pain points, gender, demographics, lifestyles, finances, and many more. So, how can you make one? You have to evaluate your present customers and learn from your competitors. Using Google surveys and audience insights from social media are great methods to learn about who you should target, too.
Implement
With the information you have in your hand, you can now start to choose what methods to use to target your audience. There are plenty of ways to market your business. From website design and user interface to content marketing to influencer marketing, there seem to be no gaps for marketing strategists who want to reach a specific audience.
It can be confusing to pick the right strategy for your business, but this is why you need to know your audience first and foremost. With that in mind, you need to choose a method that your target audience will respond to positively. Is content marketing a good fit for your audience? It usually is. How about online public relations and pay-per-click advertising? Will these reach your market?
Analyze
Can you manage a marketing strategy without measuring it? How would you know if it will work or not if you have no way of evaluating it? Strategies need to be measurable. You need to consider the kind of metrics that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. This will help you understand when you will achieve a return on investment (ROI) and whether certain strategies deserve your investment.
Digital marketing strategies have to be data-driven. They need to follow trends and behaviors. For example, you have an e-commerce site. What is the best way to measure the effectiveness of your strategies? You will look at the web visits, traffic, returning visitors, retention rates, online conversion rates, and click-thru rates. With the help of Google Analytics, you can track these metrics and come up with the best strategy.
Optimize
Finally, optimizing your digital marketing strategies is the key to its success. It’s cheaper to optimize digital efforts than traditional marketing methods. Not only that, but digital marketing is three times more effective than traditional advertising and marketing. There are three tenets to optimizing a digital marketing strategy: the first is to use images and videos, the second is to integrate social media, and the third is to do a website performance test.
How does one optimize a digital marketing strategy using videos, images, social media, and performance tests? Optimizing a marketing strategy is all about understanding how the internet works. In particular, the search engines. When you search for something on Google, you use a variety of keywords and key phrases. Google will come up with a list of results based on the metadata of the web page and the content on-site. Optimization will include using the right keywords and key phrases on both the metadata and the on-site content.
Who said that digital marketing is easy? It is not, but it’s also a cost-efficient marketing method to reach your audience, give them what they want, and watch your business become a success. It is not as time-consuming and expensive as traditional marketing, and it’s proven to be more effective in a wide range of industries and across sectors. Whether you’ve been heavily affected by the pandemic or not, your ability to implement digital marketing strategies will become a success indicator for your business.