Before launching any digital marketing strategy, you must understand the key components of what a digital marketing strategy is. To help you do this, you can organise these components into five “Cs”: company strategy, customer experience, content creation, channel promotions, and check-back analysis. Working with these can help you cover all your bases as you begin to create your marketing strategy and implement it!
Company Strategy
To create a digital marketing strategy, you need to start by looking at your company’s business goals. You need to ask yourself what you want to achieve and how to make it happen.
In order to do this, consider the following topics:
- Create a digital marketing strategy. A lot goes into a marketing strategy!
- Get your customers’ attention. Many are vying for your customer and audiences’ attention, ensure you cut through the crowd.
- Understand your business model and your brand. If you don’t understand your model or your brand, how can your customers? Ensure you know exactly what you stand for, and how to get that across.
- Decide which marketing campaign to create. After you understand your goals, you can choose the right digital marketing campaign for you and your business.
- Develop the strongest offers. Look at how to turn leads into customers by creating winning offers!
The Customer Experience
Understanding how your potential customers will think, feel, and act in response to your brand is a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. So, ask yourself who your customers are, and how your business will serve them – after all, in order to be successful, you shouldn’t be looking at how to sell, but how to solve problems.
To help you define your audience, try the following:
- Collect and analyse customer data. Before you define your audience, you need to evaluate the kind of data you will use.
- Create personas. Define the characteristics of your “perfect audience” – try creating a customer avatar to help you do so!
- Develop the buyer journey. You want to understand the journey your prospect takes from being interested in your product to sold on it.
Content Creation
The third component to address when developing your digital marketing strategy is content creation. You need to focus on creating quality content (based on your business’ ethos) that you know your customers want and need. The question to ask is, “How will we create quality content, who will do it, and what will that content be?” Remember, good content isn’t about sell, sell, sell. It should have something valuable to say.
Here are a few ways to make consistent content!
- Create a content strategy. You should have both a content plan and a content marketing strategy. This involves keeping track of awareness days, and your own news and announcements.
- Develop content types. You want to ensure that you take full advantage of all the types of content available to you, including long- and short-form original content, curated content, and visual content.
- Know what your customers want. Understanding what your customers want involves understanding their problems and how you can solve them.
- Write and tell stories. You have a story to tell that will connect with your audience. How do you incorporate it into your content?
- Create processes and systems. Without a documented workflow and procedures, your content marketing efforts will fail. Stay organised.
- Target content for each audience. Build a resource library that customers can access without contacting you. Such as FAQs, documents if required and simple answers to questions.
Channel Promotions
To have your content make the greatest impact, you want to decide where your content will be distributed and by who. Ask yourself: “How will my customers find my content so that they choose me?”
Make your content easy: easy to find and easy to share. You must know how to do this in order to effectively promote yourself and that content.
- Use paid, earned, shared, and owned media for maximum reach. Making the most of all types of media is the only way to ensure that your brand voice will be heard. Don’t shy away from video either!
- Use search marketing. Although search marketing is constantly changing, you can’t ignore its value. Making yourself searchable is vital for being discovered.
- Create sharable content. Sharing is key to any content plan. You should embrace shareability as a strategy! Sharing is key to reach, and reach is key to reaching new audiences.
- Add an email marketing campaign. Everyone loves and hates email. But email marketing is still a very important tactic to use to reach customers. Don’t neglect it.
Check-back analysis
The focus here is on the metrics you choose to determine successes or failure of your digital marketing strategy. The question to ask is, “Have we met our goals?”
If you need to, also be ready to reevaluate and revise your strategy!
- Reassess your business model and brand value. It’s important to frequently assess how things are doing.
- Reexamine your content marketing strategy. Obviously, a determination of how well your content marketing strategy is working is essential.
- Measure success. If you’re tracking key accounts, you need to reassess your goals for each one.
- Track metrics. It’s helpful to gauge potential new opportunities as you track your metrics. Which content is performing well? Which isn’t.
- Optimise campaigns for return on investment (ROI). Using split testing and analysing the speed of your pages is key to optimizing your campaigns.
If you do the hard work required to create and implement your plans, you’ll be on the road to content marketing success!
