What is a marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is your plan for everything online about your brand including your business’s website, social media, SEO, content strategy, and more. It helps you to achieve business goals like increasing sales or lead generation. It is a plan that guides everything you do to promote your business online.
Define your goals and target market
Start creating your plan by clearly defining your goals. Examples include: a dollar amount in sales or profit, a percentage in sales growth, or a drop in a percentage of bounces from your site. Then, define profiles of potential client-types. These are also sometimes referred to as sales funnels or buyer personas. Ideal client profiles can include information like age, location, hobbies, income level, or industry. Target your game plan towards these client funnels.
Select marketing tools and channels
Choose the tools you will use to manage your digital marketing campaigns. Many use a project management solution, a content management system, a social media manager, and powerful analytics tools. Other tools include grammar checkers and sentiment monitors. With the right tools, implementing digital marketing strategies can be a smooth process.
Subsequently, select the channels you will use for your campaigns. They could be your website, paid ads, or positive reviews on a local business review site. A digital marketing campaign could use multiple channels at the same time, but you can also target different sales funnels with different campaigns on different channels. Your choice of channels depends on your targets. For example, if you are trying to target executive level accountants, you may want to focus your social media efforts on LinkedIn instead of more casual social media sites like Twitter or Instagram.
Many digital strategies include a content calendar, which helps with how to create a digital content strategy. It includes written articles and blog posts, but may also include videos, social media posts, polls, images, press releases, e-mail newsletters, and audio posts. When planning paid ads for your business, choose outlets related to your target markets. This can include digital ad networks, ads on specific websites, social media ads, or search engine ads. Make sure to work with a specialist to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to paid digital advertising.
Putting your plan to action
Once you’ve come up with your plan, it’s time to put it into action. Include how you will evaluate success in the plan itself. A marketing plan is not done once it is implemented. Reviewing analytics and making constant tweaks to achieve the optimal results should be an ongoing process.
Each digital strategy is different. At Bosio Digital, we relish the opportunity to do a deep dive with our clients, getting to know their brand and coming up with the perfect digital marketing solutions.
Don't forget these points:
- Create a responsive website
- Claim your brand’s name on all social media sites – even ones you don’t plan to use
- Use SMART format for goal setting (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely)
- Use automation appropriately to make your plan more efficient
- Consider using a robust customer relationship manager (CRM) to directly integrate customer retention with digital marketing.
- Invest in great media
- If creating media, use professional grade cameras and editing equipment
- When buying media, make sure you own the commercial rights
- Keep up to date on marketing trends by following digital marketing news
A digital marketing example
Bill’s Furniture Company wants to improve online sales. Right now, they have a website, some search ads, and social media pages, but haven’t created any campaigns to fully harness the power of social media. They’ve never posted regularly on social media, and haven’t updated their website in 7 years. The company hires Bosio to help with a new digital initiative.
Together, the company executives and our team discover that Bill’s Furniture Company wants to target millennials who have income between $50k and $100k per year. We come up with a strategy that includes regular posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, including funny short videos about furniture shopping, and photos of products. We also discover that the current website is not mobile-friendly. Since many social media browsers use mobile devices, we add a website upgrade to the plan.
The strategy also includes blog post topics of interest to millennial furniture shoppers that are also great terms for SEO like “how to shop for furniture with a partner,” and “moving into your first apartment.” We plan to use social ads to boost social posts and drive traffic to the blog and landing pages.
A few months after implementing our plan, we evaluate all the analytics to find out that online sales have increased! Next, we do a deep dive of all the results and find ways to make the digital strategy even more powerful.
Conclusion
Creating your digital marketing strategy is easier when you separate it out into steps. Hiring a professional digital agency also helps you to implement a strong and effective strategy. Contact us to get started with a digital overhaul!
