This means that 62% of companies are not sufficiently organized. Here we are talking about the global market which tends to be more advanced on this subject than the Swiss market.
So they don’t have the strategy, tactics or tools to properly promote their business. Worse yet, marketers waste 37-95% of their marketing budget. This is a very common phenomenon, but it doesn’t have to be; with the right digital marketing strategy, it will be easier to grow your business.
Today we’re going to show you how to build a successful digital marketing strategy.
Why you need a digital marketing strategy?
The digital marketing strategy should guide the company in its actions. In a well-established plan, define the details you need to help your business grow consistently. Your digital strategy document should:
- Define your short and long term goals
- Show who your customers are
- Demonstrate where you can find them
- Describe what you need to get your customers’ attention
- Provide a step-by-step plan to attract and retain customer attention
- Demonstrate how to analyze and improve marketing performance
Why bother?
Is it worth taking the time to create a strategy document? CoSchedule’s State of Marketing Strategy
- Document their digital marketing strategy . Marketers who document their strategy are 538% more likely to be successful than those who don’t.
- Document their marketing processes . Those who do are 466% more likely to be consistently successful over time than those who don’t.
- Set Goals . Goal setters are 429% more likely to succeed than those who don’t; 81% of these marketers achieve their goals; 10% of organized marketers always achieve their goals.
- Research their audience . These marketers are 242% more likely to be successful . Nearly 60% of the elite marketers in their study conduct audience research once a month or more.
The more time you spend thinking about your goals, getting to know your audience, and planning your digital marketing approach, the more likely you are to succeed.
What should be included in your digital marketing strategy
To continue with the perspectives offered by the study cited above, I suggest you include specific elements in your digital marketing strategy.
To be successful, your digital marketing strategy must focus on four specific areas.
- Set goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Understanding and defining your audiences
- Create and implement your digital marketing strategy
- Check and improve your marketing campaigns
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You need to break down each of these areas in enough detail that you (and your team) can work on each of them properly. For each of these areas, you should have a pretty clear idea of the following:
- What information, tools and resources will you need to implement the plan?
- Who will be responsible for creating your plan?
- Who will be responsible for implementing your plan? (Project Management)
- What are the key performance indicators and metrics you will use to assess the success (or failure) of your plan?
- What tools and resources will you need to implement and improve campaign performance?
Each of these points must be clearly defined for the four steps above.
Let’s go into detail in the 4 areas mentioned and break down the elements in a more precise way.
1. Define goals, objectives and key performance indicators
This step is about deciding and defining what you want.
Planning your marketing strategy starts with setting quantitative and qualitative goals; you will also need to define key performance indicators. These goals are like the rails that keep your digital marketing strategy on track.
What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative objectives?
Quantitative goals can be counted, measured, or displayed using numbers. Goals like increasing monthly recurring revenue by 15% or increasing conversion rate by 3% are good examples of quantitative goals. Qualitative goals are abstract, descriptive, or conceptual—these goals are typically tied to the “why” question. Goals like increasing customer trust or improving brand reputation are examples of qualitative goals. They are difficult to measure but just as important.
You need to make sure that your goals are :
- Linked to your company’s mission, vision and values
- Few – 2-3 main objectives 3-5 secondary objectives
- Specific, clear and timely
- Broken down into smaller steps, step by step.
Your goals are important, but it will be difficult to achieve them if you don’t have a plan to follow for each step. This is where you will need to set up tactical recent mobile phone number resource milestones and use them to measure progress toward your goals.
About key performance indicators :
Scoro offers a list of that you can use to kick-start your planning. Below is a list of some of the most common examples to use.
- Unique visitors per day/month
- Pages per visit
- New leads per day/month
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Conversion rate
- Unsubscribe/attrition rate
- Cost per conversion
- Conversion rate by keyword
- ROI by content
- Click-through rates on paid ads
Knowing that it is always difficult to focus on too many KPIs at once, focus instead on a small number of truly meaningful key performance indicators and metrics.
Which ones are significant?
These are the KPIs that have the biggest impact on your business, the ones that generate consistent returns or a large amount of cash for your business. You are looking for the 20% of KPIs and metrics that produce 80% of your results.
This is a pretty easy starting point.
If you’re not sure which KPIs you should focus on, start with common KPIs and metrics that directly impact your business. These are typically metrics that focus on traffic, conversions, and optimization.
2. Understand and define your audience
You’ve determined what your goals and objectives are. Now you need to determine the same things for your customers. This step requires some preliminary research, but the success (or failure) of your digital marketing strategy starts here.
If you can identify the right customers, that is, those who are excited to buy your products or services, then selling and engaging with them will be much faster and easier. This will be made even easier if you can understand what they want and how you can sell to them. To do this, you will need information about your customers’ demographics and psychographics.
So you will need to determine the following:
- The size of your market : You’ll want to know some important details about your market – is it new or established, niche or mainstream, broad or adb directory specialized. You’ll want to know who the major and minor players are, what the market expectations are, what areas you can disrupt, and what the financial benefits are in your specific market.
- Who are your customers : Are you targeting new moms, weekend warriors who are active on the weekends? You should have a basic idea of the customer base you are targeting. Are you focusing on a specific niche, for example, affluent travelers, price-conscious fashionistas? Use past sales, competitor research, and market research sources like Ubersuggest and Google Trends to find the answer.
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Your customers have specific hangouts.
- Web developers spend their time on sites like Le temps, Reddit, Anibis, etc. Young moms spend their time on sites like Babble, Supermamans or La chouquette. If you know where your customers like to spend their time, you have a pretty good idea of which channels to target and what content to use.
- What they consume : This overlaps a bit with where they spend their time. When there’s an overlap, you’ll want to break down the differences even further. For example, your customers may spend a lot of time on Reddit, but that doesn’t tell you what they consume on Reddit. Reddit is where they spend their time; the r/RobinHood subreddit is what they consume. See the difference? One tells you about their specific interests and desires, the other focuses on location.
- Why they buy : Your customers don’t buy for the same reasons. Sources like online reviews are a great way to get very useful and in-depth feedback on why customers buy, from the customers themselves. You can also use tools like surveys or polls to elicit responses. You’re not looking for an individual response, but trends.
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Do customers shop offline
- In your store, and then order online from Amazon, Zalando? Maybe your customers prefer a one-time purchase over recurring payment options? If you understand when and how your customers buy, you will be able to adapt your marketing to their expectations. This could mean convincing customers to do something different or stick to market expectations.
- What they need to buy : Online reviews are a useful tool here too. If you’re a new business, you can start with your competitors’ reviews. Review your competitors’ reviews, then make a list of the issues raised in each review. Look for customer objections, technology issues, complaints, reputation issues—any issues that customers see as deal breakers. If you have your own reviews, you can do the same thing.
Elite marketers study their audience
conducting audience research once a month or more. This step is important because it gives you the guidance you need to create a successful digital marketing strategy. Audience research shows you how to persuade your customers.
This requires more effort than most companies are willing to put in:
Most companies assume they already know their customers. They think they know what their customers want and the best ways to approach them. Maybe they’re right? But the data they have about their customers changes often. Constant research is the only way to stay on top of what a company’s customers really want.
Now let’s move on to the third step.
3. Create and implement your digital marketing strategy
If you’ve done your homework, you should have the building blocks needed to create a well-defined digital marketing strategy. You should be able to identify the levers that best fit your business development strategy.
In fact, there are over 50 different marketing channels you can use to promote your business. But how do you choose?
It is possible to consider this question from several investment angles:
- Invest in the channels your customers use (e.g. search, social media).
- Invest in channels that give you independence and control (e.g. email, partnerships).
- Invest in the most common/popular channels (e.g. SEO, social media).
Start by testing the channels where there is the most overlap.
If your customers are using popular channels like Google Search (in Switzerland, search engines are the main channel for brand research and discovery, far ahead of social media) or Facebook, these are great places to start. If you are looking for a channel that gives you maximum control and works well with other channels (e.g. email), you can start there.
Don’t forget to test, it’s one of the keys to success!
Testing shows you what works. The tools you use for testing tend to be consistent with the channel (e.g., email comes with analytics, Google offers Google Analytics, etc.) Generally, you can branch out once you’ve identified the best performing marketing channels for your business.
Seek stability!
You want two or three channels to be performing well before you decide to add more. Once you’ve identified your channels, use the data you gathered in Step 2 to create the type of marketing content that resonates with the customers you’ve identified.
Your content must:
- Get their attention
- Be fascinating
- Addressing a problem or challenge
- Offer a solution to the problem or challenge you have just identified
Here’s another important detail. The research you’ve done should help you create a strong value proposition that answers the question, “Why choose my company’s offering?” Your value proposition is actually a promise. It’s the most important part of your marketing copy.
It gives your customers a compelling reason to do business with you.
Your value proposition sets you apart from the competition. It gives your business an unfair advantage and gives you the opening you need to attract more customers, retain them, command higher prices, and beat your competitors.
Here’s a detailed analysis if you need help creating your own value proposition.
If you followed the steps I mentioned above, you should have the information you need to create amazing content that attracts customers.
4. Audit and improve your marketing campaigns
If you can’t measure your marketing efforts, you can’t improve them. Lack of measurement is part of the reason why marketers waste 37% to 95% of their marketing budget. A Forrester study indicates that 60% to 73% of a company’s analytics data goes unused.
Companies don’t know how to use their data.
- They don’t know what problems need to be solved.
- They don’t know what they have
- They don’t see the value of their data.
- They don’t know how to evaluate or analyze their data.
- Their data is not available to analysts who might use it.
- There is too much data to examine and not enough people or time to use it.
The first three steps of planning won’t be much use if you can’t verify your results!
If you want to create an effective digital marketing strategy , you’ll need a plan that will help you capture, report, and analyze data.
You will need analysts and specialist advice to use your data to solve problems encountered during the execution of the plan.
Most businesses don’t have the people or processes in place to handle this.
That’s why it’s so important for businesses to get help. Small, medium and large businesses all face these issues.
If this is the case for your business, it may be a good idea to seek help from an agency.
You need to be able to plan, implement, and optimize your digital marketing strategy. If not, it makes sense to get help with all or part of the process.
Conclusion
Nearly half of all companies do not have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy in place. A smaller portion of marketing departments have not made the connection between their strategy and their marketing. Most companies are unprepared; they are not ready to deal with the demands of creating their digital marketing strategy.
If you’re feeling a little lost with strategic planning, we hope you’ll find this short guide helpful in getting started with an effective strategic plan that will lead you to success.
Do you want to define your digital strategy but you don’t know where to start?
Contact us for a free initial interview during which we can advise you on your current project and give you some ideas for developing your digital strategy.
