How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
It doesn’t matter if you run a small or a large business; managing your digital marketing efforts is a challenging task. After all, staying competitive on the Internet depends largely on how effective you are with your digital marketing. You need to consistently improve your digital marketing efforts, starting with setting up a good strategy. Knowing how to create a digital marketing strategy is critical for growing your business.
A digital marketing strategy is a plan to improve online presence through various online channels. Main goals usually include obtaining a wider audience and bigger sales, increasing website traffic, and improving brand awareness. Digital marketing strategy revolves around your company’s efforts to continuously engage with potential audiences and grow.
Let’s go over six key steps on how to create a digital marketing strategy in 2023.
1. Identify Existing Digital Channels and Assets
Evaluating your existing digital marketing assets is a great first step to kickstart the process. Identifying and categorizing your digital assets will be helpful in understanding where you are and where you need to go.
Digital assets can be your website, social media, content marketing, SEO efforts, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, imagery, blog content, etc. Every digital asset or channel contributes to your digital marketing efforts. So, take a good look and prioritize which of the assets you’ve listed generate the most traffic.
It’s a good idea to rank each channel and asset from most to least effective and gain some perspective. Once you do this, you can identify the weak points in your digital marketing presence and decide what to keep.
2. Set Your Goals
Once you identify your assets and digital marketing channels, it’s time to set some new goals. Having goals is essential as it allows you to benchmark your actual progress against what you expect to accomplish. So, set some specific goals before you start working on your digital marketing strategy.
You can use the SMART criteria for setting your goals. It’s a guide on how to set objectives in an organized way. The SMART acronym stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely goals
Let’s give a simple example. Getting more organic traffic is not a SMART goal. However, reaching 20% more clicks from Google Search in the next three months is a SMART goal.
All five elements of the SMART criteria have a subset of questions you can answer to create better goals for your business.
3. Evaluate Your Digital Marketing Sales Funnel
A digital marketing sales funnel is the process of attracting customers. It covers all the steps customers go through – from being complete strangers to purchasing your products/services and becoming loyal customers.
Each step of the digital marketing sales funnel can be addressed with different digital marketing tools. If you understand and optimize each step of the funnel, you’ll have a greater chance to drive more sales and grow your business successfully.
There are usually five main stages of a sales funnel:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Engagement
- Action
- Retention
Let’s review these stages and see how you can improve your digital marketing strategy by taking appropriate action at each step.
Awareness
Awareness is the first step of a sales funnel. It represents the first time someone becomes aware of your product, service, or company. Customers can interact with you in many different ways. For example, they can read something you wrote, click on an ad, hear about you by a reference from another person, etc.
Your main goal in this step is to ensure the customer identifies they have a problem that needs solving. Once you do this, you can position yourself to offer the solution to that problem. You can make the customer aware of your products or services and how they may help them.
What actionable steps can you take to make sure that the customer is aware of your existence? For example, consider creating ads and content to increase organic traffic through search engines. You can also offer affiliate marketing, publish infographics, and post engaging social media content.
Interest
The second stage of the sales funnel has to do with raising interest. Once potential customers know your brand, you’ll have to find ways to increase their interest in what you’re offering.
In the interest stage, customers become proactive about your product or service and begin to engage with you in different ways. For example, they might follow you on social media, ask questions, chat with you directly, or subscribe to your newsletters. In other words, customers will start looking at how your offering solves their problem. And this is the point in the sales funnel where you build trust with people interested in your brand.
You’ll need to refine your content strategy to make the most of the interest stage. Work on crafting engaging blog posts and email campaigns that your potential customers can relate to, and start identifying relevant keywords that you can utilize. Also, you can offer free trials or worry-free refund policies.
Engagement
Engagement is the third phase of the sales funnel. It’s where you’ll invest efforts to solidify the relationships with your potential customers. You’ll need to stand out of the crowd and provide additional value to the customer. Why? Because in this phase, they may look for alternative solutions to their problems.
Demonstrating value is always challenging. That’s why you’ll need to invest effort into developing trust with your audience. Sharing testimonials, case studies, and product reviews can be the perfect tools to show your product or service’s value.
Consider doing giveaways, quizzes, surveys, demo and training sessions, workshops, and how-to manuals.
Action
The Action phase relates to impacting your potential customers so that they make a purchase. Your sole purpose in this stage of the sales funnel would be to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.
Nothing builds more trust and rapport than showing your customers that they’ve made the right choice by purchasing your product. You must develop and maintain a relationship with your customer base. Send relevant emails, be proactive when customers reach out with inquiries, offer live demos, and do special promos, discounts, and limited-time special offers.
Retention
User retention refers to making customers loyal and willing to continue to purchase your products or services. User retention is a critical component of the digital marketing sales funnel as it reduces the cost of finding new customers.
There are a number of strategies you can implement when trying to retain customers. For instance, you can introduce customer loyalty and reward programs, provide good customer support, follow up on customer inquiries to ask for feedback, offer discounts for referrals, etc.
Feel free to check our guide for the best digital marketing courses to find additional resources and expand your knowledge.
4. Create Buyer Personas
Creating a successful digital marketing strategy primarily depends on knowing your audience and market. That’s why you need to create buyer personas before reaching out to potential prospects.
Buyer personas are a representation of your ideal customer. You create these customer personas by doing surveys, research, and looking at analytical data from your target audience.
You’ll need to create a narrative about your ideal buyer and their personality. What do they like? Which hobbies do they enjoy? What would they expect from your product? How old are they? You’ll need to answer these questions based on real data sources.
When creating buyer personas, you can look at two distinctive areas:
- Demographic information – covers factors like age, location, income, employment, education, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation – refers to personality, goals, challenges, lifestyle, social status, opinions, activities, interests, etc.
5. Develop a Content Plan
By now, you’ve identified your digital marketing channels and assets and set some SMART goals. You know your audience and the type of customer profiles you’ll target.
The fifth step of creating a digital marketing strategy will be to develop a specific plan for every channel that drives traffic and is a potential source of new customers.
The strategy must cover all your marketing channels, including your marketing website, landing pages, blog, newsletter, and social media platforms. You can start by auditing your existing content and finding ways to improve it. For example, you can make your CTAs more engaging, update your landing pages, retarget your ad campaigns, develop a keyword strategy, and identify ways to grow organic traffic.
All of your efforts must follow a realistic timeline. Organize your work, distribute it per your budget and goals, and start improving every aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
6. Monitor, Analyze, and Refine
Once everything is in place, it’s time to start tracking trends and customer behavior. You’ll need to monitor how your digital marketing channels perform compared to your goals and strategy.
Find out what’s working and what needs to be improved. If you need more engagement at any stage of the sales funnel, look into what you can do to fix it and increase your conversions.
The purpose of your digital marketing strategy is to provide a blueprint of the exact steps you’ll need to take to grow your online presence.