How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

I’m not going to start this article by writing old marketing was difficult, new marketing is easy. It is true audiences are more accessible today than they were 10 or 20 years ago. 10 or 20 years ago, you have to use TV, Radio ads, Billboards. And today, you can simply jump online, create a social media account, and then you have access to your audience. But despite what people will tell you that old marketing was difficult and new marketing is easy, it’s not. It’s not easy. You just need to know how to use it. You need to understand the tools that are out there and how to make the most of those tools. That’s what I want to go through in this article and show you how you can create your digital marketing strategy.

When most business owners do start their business and they think of going out there and marketing, they pick different bits and pieces up, and on the face of it, it seems quite easy that you can just jump online and create all of these accounts. But again, you can’t just create a few social posts and expect your customers to come knocking on your door. And a lot of business owners do kind of have that perception when they go into the marketplace that they set up their logo, their website, they can create a few social media accounts and start posting out some posts. Then all of a sudden they’re going to have the customers knocking on the door, it’s not that easy. You do need a strategy to make your marketing work for you.

Now, the cold hard reality of it is that most business owners don’t have a marketing strategy. Most business owners will have some tactics, whether it’s Google ads, Facebook ads, Social media marketing, Content marketing, and what tends to happen is that they’ll try something on and see if it fits, and when they don’t get results, they move on to the next trend or the next best thing. If you don’t have a marketing strategy or if you don’t have a collection of tactics all working together and pulling in the same direction, then you don’t have a strategy. You need a cohesive strategy with tactics all working together for your brand to get any kind of results. That’s what I want you to know in this article. I want you to know how you can create your digital marketing strategy so you can get results for your brand.

Define the Method behind Your Message

This is not just about messaging, it’s not just about communication, and the reality of it is that you need a brand that you can market. Your brand needs to know who it is, who it’s for, why it’s different, and how it’s going to communicate that difference. If you don’t have that in place before you go ahead and define a marketing strategy, then your efforts won’t have the same effectiveness. They won’t have any substance behind them. You need to define your brand so that you can have a solid foundation that you can build on within your marketing strategy. Make sure you have a method behind your messaging to know who you are, know who you’re for, know why you’re different, and how you’re going to communicate that difference.

Define Your Objective

If you ask most entrepreneurs what their marketing objective is, you’re going to get a similar answer along the lines of getting more sales. Look that is the overarching goal of any kind of marketing efforts but you need to be a lot more specific with your objectives when it comes to marketing. Do you want to grow your brand awareness? Do you want to generate leads? Do you want to build your email list? What is it that you want to do because when you know what your objective is from marketing strategy, then you can craft messages that will be a lot more specific and a lot more relevant in making those objectives happen? Know what your objectives are in a bit more detail than just to make more sales.

Map Out Your Funnel

This step is important in defining your digital marketing strategy because it gives your strategy some structure and the structure looks something like this. Attention, Traffic, Micro commitment, Nurture, Conversion, and Advocacy. This step is important because it gives you that structure, it gives you that visualization, and allows you to picture your audience on a journey and how they might first come into contact with your brand and the progressive steps that they need to take on route to becoming a customer. You need to understand those steps. You need to map the match and have clarity in the journey that your customers on and that will allow you to be a lot more specific with your messaging.

Define the Channel and the Tactics for the Funnel Stages

Each stage of the funnel represents a step that your audience will take and for each step, you can have different channels and different tactics that you can use to engage them and if you know the steps that they’re taking and you know where they are at each step, then you can use a strategy to define what channels and what tactics you’re going to use at every step. It’s important here to visualize that journey and then to define the tactics, and the channels that you’re going to use at every step of that funnel.

Execute and Optimize

It’s great that you’ve mapped out a plan for this but chances are there’s going to be quite a bit of workload here in terms of executing the strategy and this is where many business owners fall short. They map out a plan and they have many different parts of the puzzle and they spread themselves too thin, they try to do too many things. They don’t think far enough into the future and they burn out quite quickly. If you have all the pieces of the puzzle of your digital marketing strategy in terms of what you’re going to do, then you can break that down. You can categorize that and you can allocate different work to different people. Are you going to be using Facebook ads? If so, who’s going to be doing the creative, the copywriting, audience insights, managing the campaigns, managing each one of those ads, and optimizing those? What about content creation? Are you going to be writing articles? Are you going to be creating YouTube videos? If so, who’s going to be editing them? Who’s going to be uploading those to your website, and who’s going to be sending them out to into the marketplace and posting those? You need to understand every step and every tactic that you’re going to use then make sure you manage that workload effectively because planning is great, your strategy is great but if you don’t have the means to execute that then it’s all for nothing. Make sure you take the time to identify and define exactly how you’re going to execute the strategy and make it happen.

There are a lot of articles and a lot of videos on how to create a digital marketing strategy and what I found are that most don’t take the time to focus on the importance of the brand. You must have a brand to market before you go ahead and start marketing anything. Most business owners don’t have that. They look towards marketing strategies or digital marketing strategies without having all of their ducks in a row in terms of their brand and their marketing efforts fall short. You need to know what your brand is before you go out and market it. You need to know who it is for and why it is different, and how you’re going to communicate that difference because it’s only through this clarity of knowing who your audience is and knowing why you’re different and how you’re going to communicate that message when you resonate with whom your audience is. Take the time to make sure that is crystal clear before defining any kind of digital marketing strategy.