You already have loyal customers who love your products, but you’re struggling to find a new audience of potential buyers. If this sounds like you, it’s time to design a new digital marketing strategy.
Standing out on social media or on search engines can be tricky, especially in a crowded market. But this guide to creating a digital marketing strategy has all the essentials to help you reel in new customers.
What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is your plan for promoting your business online. This plan will typically cover how you use different digital channels and tools to connect with customers. The plan will include elements such as social media and email marketing, content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
If you’re a marketer, you may already know how a digital marketing strategy works. But if you’re from a customer service or tech background and you’re more familiar with call center management processes, don’t worry. The following steps will help your brand reach new customers.
Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
1. Set Clear Objectives
It may sound obvious, but your digital marketing strategy won’t get off the ground without clear objectives. First, you need to establish what you want to achieve through your digital marketing efforts.
It’s time to set some SMART goals (ones that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Not sure how to do this? Here are some examples.
- Specific: Instead of ‘grow website traffic,’ choose a more specific goal like ‘increase organic website traffic by 30%.’
- Measurable: Your goals will need the right metrics to track your progress, whether it’s measuring increased website visits or a more successful social media presence. This might include tracking the following.
- Unique visits
- Page views
- Click-through rates
- Bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Follower growth
- Achievable: Your goals must be realistic — that means you should base them on your current resources and market conditions. For example, if you’re a new site, aiming for a 50% increase in traffic within a month might be too ambitious.
- Relevant: Make sure your goals are relevant to your wider business objectives. If your main goal is to improve your brand awareness, you should focus on metrics like social media engagement or website impressions.
- Time-bound: Define a clear timeframe. So instead of running with ‘sometime this year,’ you should provide a clear timeframe like ‘by the end of Q2.’
Next, you’ll need to break these goals down into smaller milestones. Let’s say one of your goals is to increase email sign-ups by 40% in six months. To do this, your mini milestones could be setting monthly targets to monitor your progress as you approach that six month deadline.
2. Dive Deep into Audience Analytics
Now it’s time to really get to know your customers. There’s no single best way to do this, and you may want to combine the following methods.
- Quantitative research: Start by collecting data through Google Analytics and your customer relationship management (CRM) systems and focus on metrics like demographics and behavior. For example, you could analyze which age group visits your site most frequently and which pages they spend the most time on.
- Qualitative research: Interviews and focus groups are a great way to discover more about your audience’s preferences. In this way, you can find out whether they want to contact you via a toll free number or email, as well as what they want from your product. You should also try using social listening tools to keep an ear on online discussions about your brand or industry.
- Create buyer personas: Once you’ve collected quantitative and qualitative data, you can now create profiles of your ideal customers. You should include information like age, occupation, interests, and pain points. For example, if you’re marketing a new tech gadget, your personas might include ‘Tech-Savvy Tom,’ who values cutting-edge features, and ‘Budget-Conscious Betty,’ who looks for cost-effective solutions.
3. Select the Most Impactful Channels
Image sourced from Influencer Marketing Hub
There are so many channels that could help you reach new customers, but how do you choose the right one for the best digital marketing strategy? Consider the following.
- Audience analysis: Find out where your target audience spends their time online. Younger audiences might be more active on TikTok or Instagram, while professionals may spend their time on LinkedIn.
- Channel strengths: Evaluate the unique advantages of each channel. Social media platforms are great for brand awareness, while email marketing is best for direct communication and nurturing leads.
- Budget allocation: Don’t forget about your budget when you choose channels. While expensive, high-cost options like paid search ads can drive instant results; content marketing and SEO may yield less immediate results but offer long-term benefits.
- Integration: Finally, use a multi-channel approach to maximize reach. For example, your campaign could include social media ads to drive traffic, plus a blog for in-depth content or email follow-ups to nurture leads. Remember, consistency in messaging across all channels is key.
4. Craft Engaging and Relevant Content
Image sourced from Content Marketing Institute
Creating resonant content is easier said than done. Always keep the following content marketing components in mind.
- Content strategy: Plan your content around themes that are relevant to your target audience. You should also develop an editorial calendar that sets out what content you’re going to publish and when so you can stay consistently on track.
- Content types: Vary your content. For example, you can create blog posts for in-depth information, but you should also offer audio-visual content such as how-to videos and infographics for easy-to-digest facts.
- Value proposition: Your content should address your audience’s needs or solve its problems. Let’s say your audience is interested in sustainable living. In that case, you could produce content about eco-friendly products and living.
- Engagement: Why not use interactive elements like polls or user-generated content to encourage your audience to participate? The best content not only keeps your audience’s attention but also nurtures a sense of community.
- Optimization: Finally, you must optimize all of your content for SEO. That means including relevant keywords and internal links. This will improve your search engine visibility and attract organic traffic, which is essential if you want a bigger audience.
5. Use Advanced Analytics and Tracking
Image sourced from HubSpot
You know you need to track performance. And no digital marketing strategy is complete without the relevant metrics. But you need to put the right system and analytics tools in place.
You’ll need to start by setting up tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console along with social media analytics. Then make use of the following tips.
- Analyze the right metrics: You need to focus on metrics that are relevant to your goals. For example, if your goal is increasing website traffic, monitor metrics like page views and bounce rates. Whereas if generating leads is your goal, track conversion rates and the source of leads.
- Use customer feedback: Incorporate feedback from reviews and surveys or contact center analytics to understand your customer satisfaction levels and discover any areas you can improve. You can then use this data to refine your customer service approach and content strategy.
- Run regular reports: Create regular reports to review performance trends. You can then use these to adjust your strategy. For example, if you notice a drop in engagement levels on your social media channels, it’s time to update your content style or posting schedule.
6. Integrate Technology to Streamline Your Operations
Image sourced from Salesforce
Your business may well be familiar with the latest technology. If not, there’s no better time to invest in tech that can improve your digital marketing strategy. Here are some technological tools you should consider.
- Automation tools: Marketing automation platforms are useful for any digital marketing strategy. They can handle tasks like email campaigns and social media schedules, and they can generate and nurture leads.
- Communication tools: A virtual call center can transform your digital marketing strategy. You can use it to contact leads directly from your online campaigns. You can also unify your call center with tools like AI chatbots and social media messaging so you can talk with customers on their favorite platform.
- CRM systems: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are also essential. They can help your sales teams track interactions and manage leads while also drawing on all the info they need to analyze customer data.
Final Thoughts: What Makes a Good Digital Marketing Strategy?
A good digital marketing strategy is both well-structured and adaptable. Your digital marketing strategy should combine clear objectives with plenty of flexibility so you can adjust once you learn what works best.
It’s also all about understanding who your customers are. A strong digital marketing strategy should combine your business’s creativity with relevant customer data so you can always deliver the right message at the right time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the top three digital marketing strategies?
The following are the three top digital marketing strategies.
- SEO: This will improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
- Content marketing: This focuses on creating content (such as blogs or videos) that will bring in new audiences.
- Social media marketing: This covers promoting your brand and products on social media platforms.
What is PPC in digital marketing?
PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an online advertising tactic where you pay a fee each time someone clicks on one of your ads. It’s a popular way to bring immediate traffic to your website. PPC ads usually appear on search engines or social media platforms and are a great tool for getting quick results (but are not always worthwhile in the long run).
How do you reach new audiences in marketing?
First, you need to understand who your customers are and where they spend their time online. Once you have this info, you can then use the channels they’re most likely to see you on and target them with the advertising that will appeal to them most.
Originally published Sep 05, 2024
