How To Create A Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

Most businesses fail with their digital marketing because they lack a clear digital marketing strategy with defined goals, Many companies don’t even set a clear outcome which can be measured by analytics

That’s it. Plain and simple!!

For example, most of us skip the instructions given while assembling anything from IKEA, as we want immediate results!

And when we can’t figure out where all the extra pieces are supposed to go, we just toss them all together and say “Good Bye”

This is exactly the same how most businesses fail to put up a proper digital marketing plan. According to a Digital Marketing study by Smart Insights, 49% of brands don’t have a clear digital marketing strategy, while 17% do have a strategy but haven’t yet included it into their marketing activity.

if you’re anything like the countless other business implementing tactic after tactic but not quite seeing the results you expected, It’s time to take that digital strategy apart and reconstruct it properly.

Here is how you can create a powerful digital marketing strategy that drives you toward accomplishing the relevant goals.

Create Smart Goals

“Starting with a strong goal in mind greatly increases your chances of success.”

There are many ways which lets your small business nurture & grow. You might want more customers, more recognition or maybe you’re looking to get ahead of the competition.

Or you may want to provide a platform to your prospects where you can share your stories and user generated content surrounding your industry and niche. It’s up to you.

But you should have some sense of what you’re doing before you jump in.

Digital marketing is one of the great ways for small businesses to make money, but going into the process blindly can leave you with a jumbled clutter.

Loads of strategy and precision goes into digital marketing and having a goal helps you know what to focus on.

Always be realistic with your KPIs by analyzing your prior digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.

Then identify a method to help you measure each of your KPI's. There are many tools like Google analytics and Buzzsumo which can actually help you to measure your conversions and the success of your content marketing.

Ask yourself: what your prospects are looking for? Deliver that. Write it out. Plan. Everything you do should move you closer to that goal.

Understand your Market and Competitors

There is no business that exists in a vacuum, even if you are the only brand in your own very specific niche. Sooner or later, you will find yourself with some competition with their own ideas about the best way to get customers.

Therefore it is important to spend some time doing research on the competition.

Competitor analysis is to help you find out what you can be doing better or different than the rest of the crowd. By doing the analysis you can:

Find out what’s working for them and do it better;
Explore untouched opportunities.
You can also find out what their top pages are and what their most popular content is, and use their achievements to help find ideas and inspiration for your link-building strategy.

Here are some guidelines for choosing those competitors:

Do they belong to your industry, targeting similar audiences, keywords and content pillars?
Are they active in similar marketing channels to your business – particularly social channels, paid search and content marketing or SEO?
If they are an industry standard you want to imitate?
You need answers to these questions to choose the right competitor
Get into the belly of the beast and find out what’s going on!!

Create Your Buyer Persona

One of the best ways to create a digital marketing campaign that truly engage your target audience is by creating a buyer persona.

What's a buyer persona, you ask? In a nutshell, a buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer which characterizes their preferences and behavior as they shop and interact with your online business. After all, if you don't know who you are aiming your efforts at, how are you going to sell your products or services?

By creating your own buyer personas, you will gain the ability to tailor your marketing efforts and connect with your target audience to meet their needs and solve their problems.

The process of reinforcing personas has become a lot easier these days. Look at your database to discover trends on how your customers consume your content. This provides an outline of the problems your existing customers have and how your products and services can solve them.

The process of reinforcing personas has become a lot easier these days. Look at your database to discover trends on how your customers consume your content. This provides an outline of the problems your existing customers have and how your products and services can solve them.

A buyer persona for Brandi used short questions to know its target customer.

Image: https://blog.alexa.com/10-buyer-persona-examples-help-create/

To help create their buyer persona, the company interviewed customers and prospects. Then, they included actual quotes to add a bit of reality to their fictional character.

You can closely check ‘Audience Reports of your Google Analytics account to discover main characteristics of your target persona like age, gender, career, etc.

The persona helps you to fully understand the frustrations of your target customer. You may want to add details from your research to give realistic authority to your descriptions. If you already have a broad idea of your buyer personas, taking time to detail out and update those will make your marketing more effective.

Choose the Marketing Channels right for you

There is a wide variety of ways to get your marketing message in front of your prospects, more than ever, in fact. You can chose the traditional advertising route or you can try more modern and ever-evolving campaigns like content marketing and SEO. Whatever route you choose, you need to choose the right channels which you can use to turn your audience into prospects and then into customers.

While it might be tempting to try everything at once and go for a “scattershot” kind of approach, all you’ll be doing is wasting precious resources on channels that aren’t guaranteed to work.

In order to get the ROI you want from your marketing strategy, it’s important to make focused, well-versed decisions about the channels provide the best ways to reach your target customers.

Don’t invest all your effort into a specific channel just because you feel like you should be using it. It will take a little time in order to find the right marketing channel for you, so don’t hassle if you don’t get it right one from the get go.

Prepare an Audit to Shape Your Marketing Strategy

There are plenty of lessons to be learned by analyzing digital marketing campaigns historical performance. Consider these insights as you move forward.

What worked?
What didn’t?
It will be helpful to outline your performance in great detail so that you have a benchmark for goal-setting. Make note of any tracking issues or warnings.

For example the SEMrush is an auditing and research tool widely used to track the organic keywords, competitor research, backlinks and PPC keywords of the competitors. Using this tool we can track the competitor’s digital marketing data and we can implement those in our marketing efforts in order to boost our website ranking.

Screenshot: https://www.semrush.com/au/info/adobe.com?

Identifying your strengths and weaknesses allows you to discover opportunities.

Also, keep in mind to if there are (or were) any external factors that positively or negatively influenced previous performance. Sometimes we see few dips in performance due to things that are entirely outside of our control. Those should be adjusted for when creating projections ahead.

Pick the Best Marketing Tools

Your marketing goals should always be aligned to your basic goals of the business. For instance, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute in the direction of that achievement.

Whatever your objective is, you should know how to measure it. Measuring the efficiency of your digital strategy will be different for each business and depends on your goal, but it’s crucial to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.

Not to be dramatic, but digital marketers today live and die by the tools of the trade. Businesses are expected to be at million places at once. If you are digging through the data or fine-tuning your social presence, choosing the right digital marketing tools means saving time and maintaining our sanity.

Turn your Blog into Lead Generation Machine

Blogging offers your brand a voice. Relevant and valuable content can also increase your ranking in search engines and can drive traffic to your website.

Each & every blog you build is one more indexed page on your website, making it more likely for customers to find you when searching online. It also reveals to search engines that your website is active, which will help your content to be on the top of search engine results (SERP).

Prepare a content creation plan based on your findings and then to structure the content that is crucial to help you hit your goals. This should include:

Title
Format
Goal
Promotional channels
Why you’re creating
Also include budget information if you are planning to outsource the content creation or a time estimate if you are creating it yourself.

Inorder to connect with them on a genuine and authentic level give them additional resources – from you or curated from others. Make this a part of your unique selling proportion.

The Ahrefs Blog is an example of an industry specific blog, the ultimate aim of which is to tempt visitors into purchasing (or at least trying) the Ahrefs’ software suite.

Screenshot: https://ahrefs.com/blog/

Always keep in mind that it’s necessary to have the perfect balance between target content and being too promotional. In fact, 46% of users say they’ll unfollow a brand if there are too many promotional messages. Moreover, 41% of users say they would unfollow a brand that shared too much irrelevant content.

Stay on Top of Google Algorithm Changes

SEO gives your brand a power to reach the people who are looking for it. Google updates its algorithm more than 500 times a year, therefore consider updating your SEO once every three months. You need to find the right keywords due to which your business is gaining or losing traction in the search engine cycle, to make your brand as discoverable and searchable as possible.

All Things Considered

Building a firm digital marketing strategy is crucial if you want your business to succeed. No matter how great your product or service is, if no one knows about it in the first place, you’re not making any sales. Customers don’t just turn up out of nowhere; you have to earn their attention.

This might take you anywhere between few days, to a whole month of doing nothing but constantly developing your strategy. But rest assured, once it is done you will know exactly which direction to move forward and how to get there.

It’s time for an overhaul!