What is it?
In simple terms, a Digital Marketing Strategy is a series of actions taken to help you achieve your long-term marketing goal.
Digital Marketing: The promotion of a business and it’s products and/or services through online marketing activities. These can include, but aren’t limited to social media, email, SEO, content marketing and Pay per Click.
Strategy: A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term aim.
Why do you need one?
A Digital Marketing Strategy will allow you to create a focused campaign. Through having a series of actions, you won’t feel overwhelmed nor confused about what you need to do to reach your long-term goal.
Moreover, it will enable you to track the campaigns progress; calculate the cost involved with the campaign (thus calculating your “Return on Investment” – ROI); as well as send out a cohesive message throughout the duration of the campaign.
Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
1.Identify your long-term marketing goal
Examples of long-term goals can include (but aren’t limited to):
- Increase brand awareness
- Encourage more website visits
- Reach a greater audience base
- Increase your conversion rates (i.e. convert your audience into buyers).
2. Select your digital marketing channel(s)
Now you’ve got your goal in mind, which channel(s) is most likely to work for you.
For example: if your goal is to increase conversion rates you could choose Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), PPC Pay Per Clicks (PPC), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Email Marketing as your digital marketing channels.
Both SEO and PPC are focused on increasing visitors to a website, which in turn encourages more sales. SEO can increase your websites visibility in searches through the use and introduction of key words. PPC on the other hand can instantly boost the number of visitors to your site as your website will appear on the top of searches (ads).
Social Media Marketing differs from the above two, as the focus is on building and fostering trusted customer relationships which will convert into sales. Similarly, email marketing helps to further strengthen your customer relationships and entices subscribers to buy from you, as you share any exciting news and discounts with them.
3. Choosing the right marketing activity
Mainly associated with Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing due to the variety of activities available.
Content marketing activities could include blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, article writing and personalized GIFs etc. Whist, when considering marketing activities associated with social media marketing, you could utilise TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, Collaboration posts, Facebook Lives, Boosted Posts and much more.
When deciding which marketing activity to use it’s best to keep both your long-term goal and target audience in mind, and don’t be afraid to experiment.
No two businesses are the same, so why would one approach work for all?
4. Measure Progress
Measuring progress and performance will help you evaluate your marketing efforts, and gauge what works best for you and your business.
How to measure?
There’s an abundance of information and analytics available – from Google Analytics to Insights – just a few taps away! These analytics are specific to your business and can give insight into Bounce Rate (the time people spend on specific pages / website), Website Traffic (how many people visited your website), Reach (how many people saw your posts on social media) and Engagement (audience interaction on content shared).
The type of information that will be valuable to you will depend on your long-term goal.
Summary
Here’s a summary of the key questions you should be asking yourself when creating your digital marketing strategy.
- Who are you?
- What do you want to achieve? | What’s your long-term goal?
- Who are they? | Who’s your audience?
- How will we connect with them? | What channel(s) should you use?
- How do they want to be communicated with? | What marketing activity to use?
- How are we doing? | Measure Progress!
As always, don’t be afraid to experiment to see what works best for you and your business. If you ever had any questions or queries, you can contact Kerry or Catrin on info@cambrianweb.com, we’re always happy to help where we can.