A solid digital marketing strategy should set clear goals for your business, measure your market share and progress, optimise your existing strategies and help you to remain competitive. Fortunately, no matter how much the industry changes, the basics of defining a digital marketing strategy are quite simple.
1. Evaluation (analyse the past)
You shouldn’t start any activities without looking into your past. Analysing your marketing efforts, both online and offline, successes and failures can help you focus on setting the best KPIs for your business.
When you analyse:
- determine the time period you would like to evaluate, e.g. decide on whether you are going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month
- review any past marketing activities, both offline and online and analyse it’s success – were you able to reach your target audience, did you get the ROI, did you get enough leads, did you have specific goals set-up, etc.
- assess your brand’s current presence in the digital/marketing world and compare it to your competitors
- don’t forget to analyse your competitor’s strategy too, e.g. are they doing any paid search activities, are they active on social media, are they updating content regularly, etc.
- review your Web Analytics data for this time period and understand how people behaved on your website, did they perform the required action, etc.
- try to figure out what makes you stand out from your competitors and what you could do differently – instead of following trends, start setting them
2. Identify Your Customers
Our customers should be the centre of our digital marketing strategy. If you’ve been running your business for a while, you should already know who your customers are. But when it comes to digital marketing, specifics are a necessity. For example, knowing that the target for your fashion market is simply “young females” is not sufficient.You need to know details such as age, interests, occupations, locations and marital status in order to successfully reach a potential customer. Also, don’t forget to find out what channels they are consuming, what type of content they like to read, engage with, when they are online, etc.
A ‘persona’ is a set of potential customers with similar demographics and interests. A company can have multiple personas and these can be used to personalise ads and campaigns. Give each category an appropriate name and treat your personas as if they are individual customers and communicate with them on a personal level –amend the content, messages, timing, etc. to make it more personalised.
With technologies available today and different techniques to collect data about users, marketing campaigns can be highly personalised, delivered with the right message, at the right time and on the right device.
So we as marketers should ensure that we deliver quality, customised campaigns for different personas and to ensure that they work for both customer and business benefits.
3. Set Goals
Did you know that not setting up goals and objectives for marketing campaigns is one of the most popular marketing mistakes? How you will know if your marketing strategy is successful if you don’t have a goal?
Setting goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) can help motivate and give purpose to the strategy itself. It will also help you to prioritise and focus on the important aspects of the strategy. You need to set-up SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound) in order to create a marketing strategy that gets results.
Remember:
- be realistic with your KPIs, don’t set your expectations too high
- measure each of the KPIs – identify a method to measure, e.g. via Google Analytics, CRM system, etc.
4. Fix a budget and choose the relevant channels
How much budget should be allocated to digital marketing? The answer depends on the type of business; its nature, target market, competition and how different types of target demographics behave through the buying funnel. When setting up the budget, you should take into account:
- Define your overall marketing budget and split it into offline and digital
- Look at the historical data of what has worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?)
- Decide whether you will use any paid media like paid search or social media advertising
- Allocate a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use
- Look at your current resources and decide whether all of your digital marketing activity will take place in house, or if you’ll need to outsource some elements to a third party agency
How to allocate your marketing budget between different channels?
We already know who our audience is and hopefully which channels they are using/consuming. We also have set clear objectives for our strategy in terms of reach, impressions, clicks, conversions, leads generated, etc. To help us decide which channels we should be present on, we need to evaluate all of them. With the tools available today, you can estimate what results each channel will bring in terms of clicks, impressions or conversions. With this information and set goals, you should have clarity on channels your brand should be present on.
Decide which channels will bring you the desired results and allocate the budget across them. Remember, each brand is different and it’s essential to pick channels that are appropriate for your company – not just the most popular ones.
5. Make the plan
With all the research and collected information, plan all your marketing activities for the coming months/year. Your plan is never going to be perfect from the beginning. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct. Although you’ve taken a lot of time, did a lot of research and you carefully constructed a plan, you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave. It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor your strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.
With digital you can get quick results and amend the strategy, budget split or channels you are investing in quite easily.
Review your strategy & identify changes needed regularly:
- Create a measurement and monitoring plan
- Check the success of the individual elements of your strategy at continuous intervals
- If something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try to identify what is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or the call to actions you’re using for your ads?)
- Revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation and try something new
- Create a clearly defined KPI for your new plan
6. Evaluate the Results
A vital part of any strategy is analysis. At the end of every campaign and towards the end of every fiscal year, the numbers should be reviewed and the campaign’s effectiveness should be measured. Your digital marketing strategy for the following year can then be revised with the information you’ve collected. This evaluation cycle will help you to continuously improve your future strategies, until you’ve perfected them.
There is no denying that digital marketing is here to stay. If your company does not have a digital marketing strategy in place, it’s time to get one. Or maybe if you do, it’s time to refresh it. The nature of our industry means that change is always just around the corner – and as marketers we need to keep up with the changes.
