Steps in creating your digital marketing strategy

 

Define Your Goal

This should be the first step of any digital marketing strategy. Your goal is what will guide you on the steps to take while building your Digital Marketing plan.

What do you intend to achieve from your digital marketing activities?

Is it to increase sales, get more people to know your brand, or engage with your customers? Whatever your goal is, that should be at the top of your mind while building your strategy.

Make sure it is aligned and supports your business strategy.

Something else that you should ensure is that all your team members and stakeholders in your business are agreeable with your goals. Making your digital strategy is more of teamwork and not a one-person show in the organization. Unless it’s a sole proprietorship where you make all the decisions, you must involve your department colleagues. 

Make sure that the goals you are setting are SMART, i.e.;

S – Specific (What are you trying to achieve and why?)
M- Measurable (Can you measure whether the campaign was successful?)
A- Attainable (Can you achieve the goals with the available resources)
R- Relevant (Are the goals helpful to your business)
T- Time-bound (Does it have a start point and a deadline?)

An example of a smart goal can be;

For example, you have an online shop selling electronics. You may want to sell at least 50% of the total computer stock at a given price by the end of the quarter. 

 

 

Know Your Target Audience

In other words, this is called audience personas.

Please get to know your customers, their challenges, how you can help them with your products or services, and how they look for solutions.

Understanding your customers is very important because there is no way you can sell to people you don't know their needs or objectives in relation to what you offer. Share on X

There are several ways you can understand your target market, not all are very effective, but at least it gives you a clear path to approach and communicate value to them.

There is no magic way of knowing your customers unless you research. These can entail surveys, direct feedback, data from your CRM, etc. 

Use your tools to understand your target market traits, pain points, and desires.
For instance, if you have an active Facebook page or Instagram business account, you can get a clue from the analytics.

You will not get 100% accurate data about your target market, but it will help you get an idea of who they are and what they want.

Also, check out queries they frequently ask about your product or services.

Essential questions to ask while building an audience persona;

• Age
• Geographical locations
• Gender (only if relevant)
• Job Title (If applicable – This is a must for B2B)
• How do they search for information or solutions?
• Social media platforms, they spend most of their time. (This isn’t easy to know, I’d recommend starting with all the major platforms). 
• Challenges they face and how your product or services can help them.
• What do they look at in a product or service before deciding?
• Who are their influencers in terms of decision-making?
• What are their sources of information in relation to what you offer?

To help you build your personas, here is a free editable MS Excel template

From your research results, combine all the expected points from the different personas to help you come up with a good understanding of your target audience.

This is not everything about audience personas. You can go deeper to get more relevant details about your business and target market.

You can learn more from our blog, going into detail about creating a good audience persona to help you market better.

 

 

Know Your Market & Competitors

It’s essential to understand your industry and competition.

Always be on the lookout for what is happening and the changes taking place within your industry. Don’t be afraid to try new things since that’s the only way to learn and excel.

You also need to know who you are competing with;

Important things to note about your competitors in terms of your digital strategy should be;

• Social media platforms are present.
• How well do they rank on search engines on competing keywords and search terms?
• Their content marketing strategy and whether it is engaging or not
• Status of their website, i.e., is it appealing and user-friendly, and does it answer the market concerns?
• What reputation do they have in the public?
• What do their customers say about them?
• Which areas do their customers feel they should improve?

Your messaging is practically your value proposition.

Now that you understand what your target market needs, their objectives, and your competition, use this information and craft a value proposition for your target customers.

Also, use the same information to create a point of differentiation between you and your competitors. Today, almost every market is saturated, and competition is getting stiffer every day.

Your messaging is what will guide you in all forms of communication you will be channeling to your current and target customers. 

This is one of the areas where your branding works together with your digital marketing strategy. An example of brand messaging is; Cocacola’s messaging is all about bringing happiness. That’s why in each of their adverts, you will always see people taking the drink when in a happy mood.

In digital marketing, your messaging will be expressed through the content and experiences you offer to your customers. 

 

 

Organize Your Digital Marketing Assets

Your assets include a website, social media pages/ accounts, YouTube channels, content strategy, email subscribers, digital marketing budget, your skills or specialists dedicated to implementing the digital marketing strategy, etc.  

Ensure your website is well organized in terms of structure, performance, web copy, and content to help you get the desired results.

If your website is not up to par, or you don’t have a website yet, check out my web design services.

This is actually where you assess your situation in digital marketing.

Use the SWOT analysis framework to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The image below describes the SWOT analysis framework which you can adopt in your digital marketing strategy.

 

 

Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy

I’m sure you know that content is king in digital marketing. The content has to be in the proper context, of course.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
-Content Marketing Institute

From your audience research, you will know the challenges and objectives that your target market is facing. You can create content that offers them solutions to their pain points and guide them to reach their goals in relation to what you offer. 

 

You can also use tools such as Google Trends and Answer the public, which will help you understand the topics which people are searching for, and the questions they ask, and you can even narrow down the search to fit your target market geographies. 

Your content should either EDUCATE, ENTERTAIN or MOTIVATE your audience to take any action that will most likely benefit your brand.

After creating your content, you will determine how to distribute your content across various mediums.
Consider the following mediums;

• SEO
• Social media platforms
• YouTube
• PPC ads
• Audio podcasts
• Email subscribers

Your content distribution matters because it helps in brand awareness and building a good audience which will help your brand become an authority in the industry.

Remember, when distributing your content to the various platforms, you have to create multiple forms of the same content that works for each platform.

For instance, you can create a blog post, then create a Youtube video out of it, which you will share on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Convert your blog into a pdf which you can post on LinkedIn as a slide show post. Also, from the important paragraphs of your blog, create some attractive posts; out of it, you can create an Instagram carousel post.

Out of the YouTube video, you can create several short videos containing the critical sections, which you can share as YouTube shots, Instagram reels, stories, and TikTok videos. 

Use some parts of your paragraphs on the blog as makes some tweets out of them.

From those tweets. Convert them into Instagram-friendly posts, and you can also share them as stories.

Once a good number of your audience have shown interest in that particular topic, you can plan for a webinar and Twitter space to discuss and explore more about it. 

Content marketing and distribution strategy is a broad field on its own and cant be exhausted in this blog post. We will have a completely separate post dedicated to this.

Measure, Report & Adjust Your Digital Marketing Strategy

You have worked so hard to implement all the above strategies. Now, it’s time to measure your Digital Marketing efforts and improve on your weaknesses.

To measure your strategy, think about the SMART goal you came up with in the first stage. Create a report that you can share with the relevant persons for their input.

Look at areas where you did well, and find ways to get better results. Also, check on areas you never did as well as you had expected, then find alternative means of achieving better results. 

This should be a continuous process; try to make it your weekly or monthly activities. The more you understand where you are not doing well and find better ways, the more you will keep improving on your goals.

 

 

 

Conclusion

Developing your digital strategy is a continuous process. I’m saying this because you will keep changing the strategy from time to time based on factors such as results from your analytics, etc.
A great digital marketing strategy is only useful when it is implemented. So, do yourself a favor and implement the strategy.