How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy that Resonates

In our digital era, having a robust digital marketing strategy is an absolute must for any company, regardless of size, industry, or budget. But why is a digital marketing strategy so vital to your success, and how do you go about creating one that resonates with both your brand’s goals and your customers’ expectations? Keep reading to find out.

The Importance of a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy

Before we jump into discussing how you can put together a winning digital marketing strategy, it’s worth briefly outlining some of the main benefits of having such a strategy in the first place:

• Reach: The right strategy will allow you to attract your ideal audience, thus growing your reach and engagement across different parts of the marketing funnel (more on this later).
• Value: With a great digital marketing strategy, you will be able to showcase your unique value proposition, which lets you stand out from your competitors and demonstrate your expertise, commitment, and leadership.
• Profits: Ultimately, the main aim of a digital marketing strategy is to promote your brand’s products or services. When done well, this translates into higher profits for your entire offering.

Five Steps to a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Now, we’ll guide you through five essential steps to build a stellar digital marketing strategy.

1.      Define Your Goals

Right, before you can actually sit down and start putting together your strategy, you have some homework to do. It all begins with identifying the goals that you are trying to achieve with your digital marketing strategy.

When we talk about goals, though, we don’t mean you should simply say stuff like “I want to get more customers”, or “I want to sell more products”. You need to be a lot more specific and accurate than that – and that’s where the SMART framework comes into play.

By using this famous approach to goal setting, you’ll be able to select goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound – in one word, “smart”. So, for example, instead of saying “I want to get more customers”, your SMART goal would sound something like: “I aim to win 10% more customers within the next six months, across my social media channels.”

2.      Get to Know Your Audience and Ideal Customers

The second part of your homework involves understanding who your audience is. After all, if you don’t know who your campaigns are going to talk to, how can you even create them in the first place? To better identify your audience, you can start by creating a customer persona – a symbolic representation of your ideal customer. Look for things like:

• Demographics: How old are they? What gender are they? What is their marital status?
• Psychographics: What are their purchase behaviors? What beliefs and interests do they display? What are their pain points, dreams, and expectations?
• Location: Where are they located? You can be as specific as you like, perhaps even narrowing it down to the neighborhood where your ideal customer lives.

3.      Understand the Marketing Funnel

Here’s the last part of your “homework”: getting familiar with the marketing funnel. Just like a real funnel, this process is divided into three different sections: a top, a middle, and a bottom. Each segment attracts leads and customers at diverse stages of the buying journey:

• Top of the funnel: This is the very beginning of your relationship with a potential customer. They have just found out about your brand’s products or services, and are starting to get familiar with your offering.
• Middle of the funnel: Some of the people from the top of the funnel moved down towards the middle because something about your brand was captivating enough to inch them closer toward a purchase.
• Bottom of the funnel: Bingo! A bunch of these prospects have actually bought something from you, thus reaching the bottom of the funnel.

Understanding the marketing funnel is vital, as it will help you create your content plan – as we are just about to find out.

4.      Design Your Content Plan

Now that you know what your goals are, who your target audience is, and which stages of the marketing funnel you want to tackle, you are all set to move on to designing your content plan. Remember, each stage of the funnel will require different types of content, as people traveling through them will have different needs and expectations from you.

Do the following:

• Work on a keyword strategy, to identify all the best keywords that will enable you to boost your SEO.
• Create a content calendar, which will help you keep track of the content you produce while also matching it with your overall goals.
• Start posting on social media, and remember to do so regularly and to interact with your followers by responding to comments, answering questions, and engaging with them in an authentic, relatable, and credible way.
• Get creative with your call to actions, as they will enable you to drive traffic and guide your leads toward specific actions, such as subscribing to your newsletter, reading your blog posts, checking out your newest products, and more.
• Implement the right technology, including email marketing automation tools, to save you time and effort when creating and sharing content.

5.      Analyze, Assess, Refine

Great, your digital marketing strategy is all ready! However, your work is far from done. Now, in fact, is the time to take stock of what you’ve achieved so far, and work out whether or not it has delivered the expected results.

For this reason, you’ll need to analyze a series of elements within your strategy, including:

• Conversion rates: Are all those visits to your website turning into actual, tangible purchases? Are leads moving smoothly and rapidly across the funnel?
• Engagement: Are your customers remaining engaged with your brand throughout, or do you seem to consistently lose them at some point of the process?
• Overall performance: How are your campaigns doing, in terms of bringing in more profits and lifting your sales?

Using specific analytics software can help you uncover these answers, and many others. If you spot something that isn’t working as well as you’d like, then be proactive and go back to that specific point of your strategy with an open mind, ready to reassess and refine it.

Key Takeaways

As we have discussed in this blog, the importance of a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy cannot be overstated. If you want to build a great strategy for your company, try following our five-step approach – or, if going it alone feels too daunting, get in touch with the expert and friendly digital marketing team at Basecamp Studios, and we’ll be thrilled to help!