In simpler words, it means performing a set of practices consistently at the right time at the right channel to improve the revenue and the relationship with the audience.

The complexity of a digital marketing strategy depends solely on the size of your business and the long-term goals. For a startup, you would just have to perform a number of actions consistently on 2-3 channels.

So, let’s jump over to the next part discussing why you need a digital marketing strategy. And then we would go through the bis question “How to create a digital marketing strategy”?

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy does help you in a number of ways, for instance:

It gives you a direction

Many businesses that do not plan a digital marketing strategy lack a clear path to their business goals. This makes it harder to decide on the right resources and marketing channels and even worse for measuring analytics, which is quite important.

It helps you to better understand your market position

Not having a digital marketing strategy can make you underestimate the demand for your product or services. A strategy enables you to better understand the dynamics of the digital marketplace that includes competitors, customer behaviours and their profiles.

It enables you to develop a USP

USP refers to the unique selling point or here you can refer to it as a value proposition. The digital marketplace nowadays is too competitive and if you cannot differentiate your product from others, it’s less likely that people will buy it. A well-thought strategy helps you do that and stand tall among the crowd.

It makes you better understand your customers

Understanding your customers is much more than just deciding a target audience or going through the analytics. You need to talk to them person to person. And a strategy helps you utilise many forms of feedback tools to better understand what they want, what are you offering and where are your weaknesses.

Saves time and avoids duplication errors

A well-planned strategy saves you a lot of time. This way each marketing department won’t have to shoot arrows in the dark, they would know what exactly they would have to do. And this would also help in avoiding duplicating errors such as different marketing teams buying the same tool or putting efforts to achieve the same marketing goal.

Now that you know what is a digital marketing strategy and why you need one. Let’s see how to plan a digital marketing strategy,

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

We will look up the 7 fundamental steps to creating an effective digital marketing strategy for your business:

1. Get a clear goal

Working without a goal is all useless.

So, before planning the strategy, you must clear out what is it that you wish to achieve from your marketing strategy.

It’s not as simple as it sounds. It might take some time and a lot of thinking to come out with a set of detailed and specific business goals.

In order to do so, you can utilise the SMART criteria.

SMART is a commonly used tool out there by business owners and entrepreneurs.

It offers the following measures to help you outline your goals:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Timely goals

Gaining more organic clicks on your website is not a SMART goal, as it’s too broad and not specific or even measurable.

Gaining 200 organic clicks every week through Google SERP is a SMART goal.

2. Understand your current digital presence

On the journey of how to plan a digital marketing strategy, the next step is to understand where you stand currently.

Even if you are just kicking off or you think it’s better to consider from 0. It’s better to understand your exact digital presence than to assume them.

It helps you get a better picture of what there is needed to be done to achieve your goals.

To start, you must get a rundown of your situation on the main marketing channels:

And then, write down which of them is getting you the most leads and traffic. Rank all of them with specific social media platforms on the basis of most to least effective (till now).

3. Study the digital sales funnel

The digital sales funnel is basically your buyer’s journey arc of how from a stranger they become your long-term customer.

One can utilize the funnel to get their desired digital marketing goals. Now the question comes how? By using the appropriate digital marketing tools on the right step of the funnel to reach their goals faster.

Studying the digital sales funnel means understanding what users at each stage need and how you can give them that using the right tools to lead them to buy your product/service.

I’ve given a simplified explanation of each stage of the funnel and the right digital marketing responses.

Awareness

Making the target audience aware that you and your product exist. How? Through running ads on different channels and ranking well in SERP through SEO.

Interest

Raising interest regarding your brand. Telling them who are you and what makes your product needed. How? Through getting features in digital publications and videos. Or through influencer outreach.

Engage

Make your relationship solid with the audience. How? Targeted ads on specific concerns and did Q&A sessions through different marketing channels.

Action

Finally, do some business with them. How? Offer incentives and discounts on purchases with proper CTAs through ads, emails and social media posts.

4. Getting a better image of your buyer’s personas

It’s too obvious that you must know who your audience really is, what they want, what they like and what they don’t before you reach out to them to sell. Now, how to do that?

To get your buyer personas, you should keep yourself in your customer’s shoes. Once done that, you can start with rough assumptions slowly leading to more specific ones about what that person needs from your product.

Start with rough assumptions: Where does this person usually shop? Where does he spend his time? What does he read for the news? Which marketing or social platforms does he spend most of his time?

Get specific: What does he need? What are his expectations? His preferences? How can you meet them?

5. Set your customers on the funnel

The next step in how to write a digital marketing strategy is to locate the customers at each stage of the funnel.

You will have customers at each stage that are open to connecting and are potential buyers.

For instance, let’s assume that your product is jute bags. Your potential buyer may be:

Someone who searched on Google for jute bags which leads him to read an article referring to your brand.
Someone who is up to buying a no-plastic jute bag and has seen your sponsored Facebook post regarding how your jute bag is made without any use of plastic.
Or someone who is already bought one of your products and is now included in your email campaign offering the same products with a discount.

Once you have collected all this info, you can start targeting people at each stage through different marketing channels.

6. Build a content plan

You will build a customised marketing plan for each channel that draws your clients at this point. What kind of content can you use for every one of those channels to meet your digital marketing objectives?

A succession of activities will make up your strategy, each of which will respond to a certain aim. It will also provide a detailed timeframe so that the activities may be measured.

These are some of the activities that will be taken:

Creating a keyword strategy entails finding significant keywords in order to boost SEO.
Creating a content calendar entails the following steps: This will help you to set long-term goals that are easy to track. Your editorial calendar will be highly detailed. Author, publishing date, keywords, topic, and possible tags will all be included in each actionable item.
Each month ought to have a digital marketing target. Beginning in January, for instance, you’ll have bi-weekly content on a certain subject on your site.
Sharing on social media: Use the data you’ve done to figure out what kind of content to publish on which social media channels as well as how to post it.
Including CTAs and widgets in your digital marketing content is critical for allowing customers to simply connect with you and your items.

7. Examine results

Now once you got the strategy up and working, keep this on a regular interval on your calendar.

The rate of interaction with your customers, the progress towards your objectives and the type of content you’re sharing. These analytics will help you stay on the right path and learn from the practises that didn’t go well.

You can use analytics software to do so, they will help you track the progress on each stage of the funnel. You would like to keep an eye on:

Is each lead (clicks) converting or not? Is there effective mobility throughout the funnel? Why or why not?
Is there a specific stage or point that isn’t engaging enough and making you lose customers? Why is that and how to fix it?
What’s going as planned and what’s not?
Keep an eye on the new digital marketing tools rolling out, there might come a tool that makes things much easier for you.

With the obtained results, you can make graphics to better visualize things and track progress easily.

The Bottom Line

A digital marketing strategy can help your brand a lot.

You can find a huge number of marketing channels out there differing in price, usability, outreach potential and most important, purpose. Now you need a robust mixture of all the channels that can be useful for your business.

Now the other question that we’ve been asked a lot is “What is the best digital marketing strategy”?

Always remember, that one plan can not work out for every business. You must not stick to a single plan.

Not everything would work out, you will have to learn what’s not working and fix that. There are a number of options which offer a nice room for experiments. So, be open-minded and keep experimenting.

Do you require assistance in implementing a digital marketing strategy?

Just drop us a mail at [email protected], if you want help with the development or execution of a digital marketing plan.

ItsGeekynerd’s experienced professionals have made us among the top digital marketing strategy companies. They will help you out in planning and implementing a detailed and well-thought digital marketing strategy.

So, we’ve learned what is digital marketing strategy and its process and I hope you would have found all the answers that you were looking for.

If not, then the comment box is wide open for you. Or you can mail us your query at [email protected]. We would be more than happy to help you out.

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How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy in 7 Easy Steps

What is Digital Marketing Strategy?