What is Marketing Strategy?
Marketing strategy is the plan to achieve a marketing goal or goals in an organized and realistic way. The strategy takes into account what is working well in your company and what's missing to achieve the goal you have set.
Small Business Digital Marketing
This digital marketing template can help you if you are a small company and don't know how to start your strategy. This template includes templates and actionable tips to help you achieve success. Are you still confused? Below, we'll cover this.
Strategy vs. Tactic
The strategy you use to reach your goal is the plan that will help you achieve it. The tactics are the concrete, definable actions within your strategy to ensure that you achieve your goal.
Any strategy, whether marketing-based or otherwise, has three main components:
- Diagnose your problem.
- The policy should be a guideline for tackling the problem.
- The procedure is a set of actions to achieve the desired result.
Your marketing strategy could include multiple moving pieces, all with their own goals, depending on how big your company is. It can be challenging to work on your marketing strategy at times. If you ever feel overwhelmed by your marketing plan, follow these steps to stay focused and achieve your goals. Let's now look at Digital Marketing Strategy.
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing is the plan to establish an online presence using various web-based channels, such as social media, organic search engines, paid advertisements, or your website. Digital marketing strategies are designed to raise awareness of your company and bring in new customers.
Digital marketing strategies help your company achieve its digital goals by carefully selecting the correct mediums. The terms "digital campaign" and "digital strategy" are often used interchangeably, similar to the difference between marketing tactics and marketing strategies. How do they differ, then?
What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?
Digital marketing campaigns can be defined as the actions and building blocks that make up your digital marketing plan. They help you achieve a particular result.
If your goal is to increase leads via social media as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, then you may run a Twitter-based digital campaign. To generate more information, you can share the best-gated content from your company on Twitter.
What to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
1. Create Buyer Personas
You need to understand the person you are marketing to before you can create a marketing strategy, digital or otherwise. You should create detailed buyer personas as the foundation of any digital marketing strategy.
The buyer persona represents your target customer and is created through research, surveys, and interviews. This information must be as accurate and honest as possible. Making assumptions about your target audience could lead to a marketing strategy that is not effective.
For a more complete picture, you should also include people who are not in your database of contacts but align themselves with your audience. What information do you need to gather about your buyer personas to develop your digital marketing strategies?
It depends on the type of business you have. For example, it may vary if you are B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer) or if you sell high-priced or low-priced products. You can start with these ideas and then fine-tune them to suit your business.
Demographic and Quantitative Information
- Location: Use Web analytics tools to identify the location of your website's traffic.
- Age: Depending upon your industry, you may find this information relevant or not. If this is the case, you can gather this data by looking at trends within your prospect database and contacts.
- Income: It's better to collect sensitive information such as personal income via personal research interviewing since people may not be willing to divulge these details through online forms.
- Job Title: You can find out a general idea from your customers, which is especially relevant to B2B businesses.
Qualitative Information
- Objectives: Depending upon the challenge that your service or product solves, it is likely you already know what your buyer persona's goals are. Speak to actual customers, as well as internal customer service and sales reps.
- Challenges: Speak with customers, customer service representatives, and other employees who deal directly with the public to understand what challenges they face.
- Interests/Hobbies: Ask your customers or those aligned with the target audience what their interests and hobbies are. For example, if you are a fashion company, knowing if a large segment of your target audience is also interested in health and fitness will help inform content and future partnerships.
- Priorities: Talk with customers or members of your target audience to determine what is most important for them. If you are a B2B company selling software, for example, it is essential to know that your target audience places more importance on customer service than a low price.
Combining all these details will allow you to develop buyer personas for your highly accurate company.
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2. Determine Your Marketing Goals, And Then Determine The Tools That You Will Need
Marketing goals must constantly relate to your company's fundamental objectives. If your company aims to boost online revenues by 20%, then your team's marketing goal could be to create 50% more leads on your website than last year.
You must measure your digital marketing strategy's success along the way, regardless of what your overall goal may be. The Reporting Dashboard, for example, gathers all your sales and marketing data in one location so that you can quickly determine what is working and what's not to improve your future strategy.
3. Assess Your Digital Assets And Channels
It's essential to consider the overall picture when evaluating your digital marketing assets and channels to decide what you should include in your strategy. This will help prevent feeling confused or overwhelmed. You can categorize your vehicles or assets in an Excel spreadsheet to get a better idea of what media you own, have earned and have paid for.
Media Framework for Owned Earned and Paid
Use the framework of owned, earned and paid media to classify the digital assets or channels that you already use and determine what fits best with your marketing strategy.
Owned Media
Owned channels are the assets that your business or brand owns, whether it's your blog, your social media profile, your website or your imagery. The channels that your company owns are those over which it has complete control. You can include off-site material that you have created but is not hosted on your site (e.g. A blog that you post on Medium).
Earned Media
The term earned media is used to describe the publicity you receive through marketing word of mouth. You can use content that you have distributed to other websites, such as Guest posts, PR efforts, or customer service are all examples of earned media. Media made is recognition that you get directly from your efforts. By getting positive press reviews and by having people share your content on their social media channels (e.g. social media channels).
Paid Media
This includes any channel or vehicle you use to attract your target audience. It includes Google AdWords and paid social media postings, as well as native advertising. Sponsored posts on websites or other media through which you can pay for more visibility. Let's take a look at an actual example now that you know what the framework includes.
Imagine you've created a -owned landing page for your website to generate leads. You need to include more than paid, owned or earned media.
You can increase the amount of leads generated by your content by making it shareable. This allows users to distribute the material via social media. This will result in more traffic for your landing page. This is the Earned Media component. You can support the success of your content by posting it on your Facebook profile and paying for more people to see it.
It's important to note that this is not a requirement for success. If your earned and owned media is already working, then you may not have to spend money on paid media. Evaluate the solution that will help you achieve your goals, then integrate the channels which work best in your digital strategy. You can now start thinking about what you want to keep and what you would like to reduce.
4. Plan And Audit Your Own Media Campaigns
Owned media is at the core of digital marketing, and it almost comes as content. It's important to note that virtually any communication your brand sends out can be classified under content. This includes About Us pages, product descriptions and blog posts.
The content you create can help convert website visitors into customers and leads while also improving the online visibility of your brand. When this content has been optimized for search engines (SEO), you can increase your organic and search traffic.
Owned content is a must for any digital marketing campaign. Decide what type of content you need to reach your marketing goals. If you want to increase your website's lead generation by 50%, then you will most likely not be in your plan unless this page was a great source of leads in the past. This is a quick process that you can use to determine what -owned content will help you achieve your goals for digital marketing.
Review Your Current Content
Please list all of the content you own and rate it according to how well each piece has performed in comparison to your goals. If your objective is to generate leads, you can rank content based on which items generated the highest number of leaders in the past year. It's essential to determine what content is currently thriving and which ones are not. This will help you plan future content.
Find Gaps In The Content You Already Have
Identify any content gaps based on the buyer personas you created. Create some if, for example, you are a tutoring business that knows through research what a challenge it is to find effective study methods. You might discover that ebooks on specific landing pages convert better than others (such as webinars). If you are a math tutoring business, perhaps you plan to create a book on "how to study more effectively".
Create A Content Creation Plan
Create a plan for creating content based on the findings you made and any gaps that you identified. This will help you achieve your goals.
Included in this list is:
- Title
- You can also download the format of your choice.
- Goal
- Promoting channels
- What is the purpose of creating content?
- Priority of content
- It can also be a spreadsheet that includes budget and time estimates if the creation of content is being outsourced.
5. Plan And Audit Your Media Earned Campaigns
You can get a better idea of where you should spend your time by comparing your earned media with your goals. If you're looking to increase traffic or leads, look at the sources of your earned media and rate them from the most effective down.
A particular article that you wrote for the press in your industry may have driven a large amount of traffic and boosted conversions. You may find that LinkedIn is the place where most people share content. This increases traffic.
It is important to use historical data to create a clear picture of which types of earned media are most likely (and least likely) for you to achieve your goal. Don't be afraid to try something different, even if it hasn't been tried before.
6. Plan And Audit Your Media Campaign
The process is similar: you need to assess your current paid media on each platform. Google AdWords (e.g., Facebook, Twitter etc.). Figure out which of these options will help you achieve your goals.
You may want to consider re-evaluating your AdWords campaign if you do not see the desired results. Or, you can simply abandon it and move on to another advertising platform. You should know by the end of which platforms (if any) you would like to keep in your paid-media strategy and which you wish to eliminate.
7. Your Digital Marketing Campaign Will Be More Effective If You Work Together
After doing the necessary planning and research, you have an idea of what elements will be included in your digital marketing plan.
Here's a review of what you should be able to solidify so far.
- Your buyer personas should be clearly defined.
- You can set one or more specific goals for digital marketing.
- A list of all your owned, earned and paid media.
- Audit your current owned, earned and paid media.
- A plan for creating content or a wishlist.
- Check out this list of common marketing tactics used by teams in a variety of different industries to get a better idea of digital strategies.
Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Blogs Are Easy To Publish
Blogs are a great way to market your company digitally. Some people claim blogging is a "massive waste of time", but it can be a powerful tool for companies who want to reach customers that are interested in what they have to offer.
Why? Well-written and well-researched blogs often meet an urgent customer need. Cyber Infrastructure Inc., for example, sells marketing-related software. Our users tend to be marketing professionals who develop plans, campaigns and editorial calendars on behalf of their employers. Our blog topics are geared towards these specific needs.
Blog with the intention to help your customers. Understanding your audience's pain points and target market is critical to achieving this. You can then write content that is highly relevant and helpful to your readers.
2. Advertising On Specific Platforms Is Possible (E.G., Google Ads, Facebook Ads Or Instagram Ads)
A blogging strategy that is organic only tells part of the story. The importance of non-organic strategies, like paid advertising, is just as great. This will not only help to increase brand awareness but also reach people who haven't found your company organically.
It's important to use this strategy when your blog is still in its early stages, and you aren't getting the traffic you desire. You should add the following types of digital advertising to your strategy:
- Advertising on Social Media marketing
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Google Ads
- Advertise Online
You can advertise on almost every platform, either by using a display network, such as Google, or its own built-in advertising systems, like Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Advertising is a great way to promote your business without having to worry about SEO or content. It's as simple as writing a few sentences of copy and choosing your imagery. Then, you can launch the advertising campaign. You'll need to develop an advertising strategy that will outline who your campaign is aimed at, what channels you intend to use, and the budget you have set aside.
3. Free Educational Materials Are Available
Digital marketing doesn't end when people visit your site or click your ads. In exchange for the email, you should also offer additional value. The gated content may be free, but users are "paid" by their email addresses. Lead generation is a practice that's crucial if you hope to convert visitors into customers.
You would then create a landing page that offered a single resource for free: an e-Book, guide, template or kit. Consider what your customers require to be successful in the workplace. Make a tool that helps them to do that.
Use best landing page practices to encourage visitors to free download your resource. Remove unnecessary information and buttons, limit the navigation menus and eliminate links and buttons that take the visitor away from the landing page. The only way to access the content should be by downloading it.
4. Search Engine Optimize Your Digital Content
It is important to include search engine optimization in your digital marketing strategy. This will allow you to rank higher for your product-related keywords and increase the number of people who view your blog posts, educational content and other offers.
SEO will help you get your pages to those people who are looking for your products or services. On-page SEO is important for ensuring that users are engaged and converted by your content.
5. Make An Online Contest Or Giveaway
Contests and giveaways can also help you boost your online strategy and increase brand recognition. You can get thousands of followers by offering a product for free. It is especially useful when you are selling a product to consumers or providing a service that includes physical deliverables.
A beauty brand may choose to offer beauty products, while a portrait photographer could choose to provide a complimentary session. This strategy is not suitable for B2B companies or manufacturers. However, you can tailor it to suit your own needs. For example, offer a free product box to the first customer who signs up to your mailing list. This is one example.
Digital Marketing Strategy Template
A spreadsheet is a good way to map out your digital strategy. However, it can become cluttered and confusing. You need to plan your long-term strategy - usually between 6 and 12 months in advance - with a solid digital marketing strategy. Where do you begin? Our free template for a digital marketing plan will help you get started.
The template helps you to build your market information and target audience, as well as your marketing plan, including budget, channels, metrics, and your specific targets.
This digital strategy template can be used to create your digital marketing tactics and strategy for the year. You can use these annual plans to overlay each action that you will execute with your team. You can, for example:
- You will start your blog in January. It'll be updated every week for an entire year.
- You'll be launching a brand new eBook in March. Paid promotion will accompany it.
- What will you have learned by the time you prepare your largest business month in July?
- You'll be focusing on PR and earned media to increase traffic in September.
The timeline will make it easier to communicate your plans with colleagues.
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Conclusion
It's nearly impossible to make a template that fits all digital marketing strategies. It would help if you never forgot that the goal of your digital system is to communicate the steps you will take to reach your dreams over time. If you can do this, you have nailed it. Check out the free content marketing templates we've provided below if you want to create a strategy that will help your business grow.
