Most of the companies aim to drive sales and increase the success ratio but finding new pathways to success is a challenging endeavor. That’s where a marketing strategy can help.
However, marketing strategy alone is not enough in these times. Therefore, to compete with others in the modern world, you must combine traditional marketing strategies with the internet. And that’s where a digital marketing strategy comes into the picture.
But what is digital marketing strategy? How to create one for your business? If you want the answers to these questions, let’s delve into this guide.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Before understanding the concept of a digital marketing strategy, let’s first discuss what a strategy is. This way, we can easily relate the strategy’s concept to the idea of digital marketing strategy.
A strategy is a combination of different steps that a company follows to achieve a particular goal. So, a digital marketing strategy will contain a series of phases to help achieve a company’s digital marketing goals.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
The term ‘strategy’ itself explains that you will need creative thinking to create a digital marketing strategy that can help you stand out. So, it won’t be easy. But with the right guide, you can develop a digital marketing strategy for any business. Therefore, let’s see how you can create a digital marketing strategy for a brand.
Understand Your Company’s Objective:
Figure 1: This picture is taken from https://www.pexels.com/photo/marketing-exit-technology-business-7413915/
When creating a digital marketing strategy, your first task is understanding the objectives of your business, company, or brand.
As mentioned earlier, goals can be different for every business. Therefore, you can ask yourself the following questions to understand the objectives of your business:
- Do you want to take assistance from digital marketing to get brand awareness for your business?
- Do you want to produce leads for your company through digital marketing?
- Are you trying to drive sales and grow your e-commerce platform via digital marketing?
Thus, whatever the reason is, you must identify and outline your objectives for getting into digital marketing. Doing this will help you identify the success of your digital marketing strategy. So, this phase is crucial.
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Understand Your Target Audience:
Figure 2: This image is taken from https://pixabay.com/illustrations/buyer-persona-business-dental-clinic-6231739/
Understanding your business’s target audience is another crucial phase of any digital marketing strategy framework. So, like the previous step, you can also prepare an outline here to identify your target audience.
Some common filters you can try to identify your target audience are:
- Gender.
- Pay scale.
- The age group (young, old, retired, etc.).
- The geographical location (states or cities).
- Behaviors.
However, we don’t recommend targeting your desired age group in the entire country if you have a limited budget. Instead, you can target the age group of your target audience in a city from where you can expect the most sales.
Similarly, some audiences like to shop online, whereas others like to search online and shop in the offline market. That is why the behavior identification of the target audience is also crucial.
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Try Multiple Messaging Pillars to Build Your Credibility:
Once you’ve understood your goal and target audience, it’s time to build your credibility in the eyes of your customers because, eventually, they will be judging you. So, you need to set an evaluation criterion for yourself. And for that, you can take assistance from messaging.
You can’t try one message everywhere because different messages will resonate with different people. Therefore, you will have to test multiple messaging pillars in this phase. But for this example, we’ll discuss the three messaging pillars.
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Value Proposition:
While creating your marketing communications online, you can inform your consumers about the benefits of buying a product from you. You can also implement the same strategy for submitting leads or building affinity to your business.
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Social Proofing:
As the name depicts, social proofing refers to proving your success over social media. So, with this messaging pillar, you can take assistance from statistics and numbers to showcase your success to your customers.
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Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO):
Statistics show that people are afraid of missing out on things. So, you can utilize people’s fear of missing out on your marketing communication.
This marketing pillar doesn’t guarantee success because its success ratio differs according to the target audience. But testing this won’t cause any harm.
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Determine the Channels:
Once you have your business’s objectives and audience and know how you will message them, your next task is to determine the channels.
Obviously, your target audience is not shopping with you right now because otherwise, you won’t be building this digital marketing strategy. But your target audience is somewhere out there in the world. So, your job is to bring the target audience to your platform. And that’s where you can take assistance from digital marketing channels.
In today’s world, some popular digital marketing channels are:
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Social media:
Figure 3: This image is taken from https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photography-of-smartphone-icons-267350/
Several social media platforms are available now. So, you can try those social media platforms to build a relationship with your audience, which will eventually help in bringing the audience to your digital marketing platform.
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SEO:
Figure 4: This picture is taken from https://pixabay.com/illustrations/seo-search-engine-optimization-1288976/
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to increasing the likelihood of a website’s visibility in search engines.
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Email marketing:
Email marketing is still popular and one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Therefore, you won’t want to miss this.
Thus, if you want to maximize the success ratio of this phase, you should try the proper channels.
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Determine the Content-Type:
Once you have found the proper digital marketing channels, your next task is identifying the content type your audience prefers. So, again, you should build a questionnaire for this phase, which will contain questions that will help you select the appropriate content type according to your audience.
Some common content types are:
- Videos.
- Articles and blog posts.
- eBooks.
- Podcasts.
- Webinars.
Once you have understood the appropriate form of content according to your audience, you should focus on building high-quality content. For instance, an excellent way to write a high-quality blog post is by including a conclusion and relevant infographics or pictures. A simple way to write a conclusion is to summarize your article in one or two paragraphs.
Since the conclusion should conclude the complete information of your article or blog post in a few words, you can take assistance from a summarizer. This way, you will never miss a single essential detail while writing a conclusion.
A summarizer can create extractive summaries by picking out sentences that best explain the core concept. By stringing these sentences together a complete summary is formed.
As far as infographics and pictures are concerned, they help to break the walls of text, and add some visual appeal to the content.
Conclusion:
In these times, businesses need to have an effective digital marketing strategy in place. But most people do not even know the concept of a digital marketing strategy. Therefore, they take social media as a digital marketing strategy. As a result, their entire social media campaign goes in vain.
Social media is a tiny part of digital marketing strategy. But it’s not for everyone because even in these times, some people still do not rely on social media to communicate with others. So, if you want to target those people in this digital world, you will need a proper digital marketing strategy for your business.
Thus, read the above guide to understand the concept and the steps you will need to build a digital marketing strategy for your business.
