Building a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy

There is no doubt that digital marketing has become so much more complicated, yet so much more important in the last couple of decades. But, there are a tonne of undeniable benefits when it comes to investing your time and money in to a solid digital marketing strategy. 

It can help you to:

• Connect with your target audience(s).
• Create and maintain good relationships.
• Create that all important trust and credibility.
• Well-managed interactive communications (comments, messages, reviews) show customers that you care and it gives you the opportunity to gather invaluable information that will help to grow your business and audience(s).
• It’s a lot more affordable and trackable that other marketing efforts.

So where do I begin, you ask?

Let’s discuss some tips to figure out how to master your own digital marketing strategy. 

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Conduct a Situational Analysis

Starting with an honest “SWOT” analysis will help will help you to analyse your business, focusing on internal strengths and weaknesses and external forces that are beyond your control. 

It can help you to answer questions like:

• Strengths

What are we doing well? 

What resources, knowledge and talent do we have?

What are your advantages do we have over our competition?

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• Weaknesses

Where can we improve?

What do we receive the most complaints or negative comments about?

What stops us from making sales?

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• Opportunities

What opportunities have we not addressed?

Are there any emerging trends that we can capitalise on?

Is there an under-served segment in our audience?

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• Threats

What external obstacles do we face that could block progress?

Are there potential financial or political issues that could impact our business?

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Define your Digital Marketing Goals

How do you truly know if you’re growing if you’ve set no goals?

Set some clear, specific and measurable goals.

Have you ever heard of SMART goals? 

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Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. 

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This is the best rule of thumb when you’re setting goals. That’s right, you need to know what you’re going to do, when, in what amount of time, but don’t go too crazy! Bigger goals take longer, so keep it achievable.

You might be looking to gain 30 new Facebook followers next month or are aiming to increase  your website traffic by 20% this year.

Only you know what is achievable.

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Define Target Audience and Buyer Persona

One of the absolute best things about digital marketing is that you can be so specific about WHO you want to target. Therefore, knowing who your target audience(s) is pretty important, well, actually, it’s critical.

If you’re a new business you would think about what problem your product(s) or services(s) solve and who you created them for. However, if you’re an established business you might take a look at who your current customers are and you might even think about looking outside of the box and think about who else might find them valuable.

Where are your customers located? How old are they? What are their interests and values? Why would they want to buy from me and not my competitor? These are questions that can help you to define your audience(s) in to segments using demographics, geographics, psychographics and behavioural characteristics.

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Do a competitor analysis

There’s always going to be competition, but, that’s not always a bad thing.

Find your competition, direct and indirect, and look at what they are doing. What do you do better? What do they do better? How can you improve or further distinguish your brand?

Analyse their products, services, pricing, location, marketing strategies and even their customer reviews.  

Use this knowledge to strengthen and improve your business.

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Decide Which Marketing Channels Will Work 

Deciding on what marketing channels to utilise is important.

The majority answer will come from who your target audience is and what your goals are.

Remember when we discussed defining your goals earlier? Are your goals about creating more brand recognition or creating a stronger brand loyalty? Focus on utilising appropriate social media platforms. Or, do you want to drive more traffic to your website and boost your conversion rate? In this case, you might focus on SEO and PPC. It’s not always a black and white decision, and different forms of digital marketing have a number of advantages.

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• Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing elements that you can (and should) utilise:

• Paid (targeted) advertisements.
• Creation of content that provides some kind of value for your audience(s). Value can come in the form of things like education or even humour. This includes written, visual and video content.
• Customer service and community management which in turn, creates a solid relationships sense of trust.
• If chosen correctly, the right influencers can boost your brand image and sales immensely. 

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• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertisements can be seen as a shortcut to the top of Google (or other search engine) results. The great thing about PPC is that it’s cost effective. You don’t have to pay until someone clicks on your ad, but impressions (brand recognition!) are free.  PPC is targeted, fast and you have the ability to retarget potential and likely customers.

Although PPC ads seem simple, you need to make important decisions in order to catch the attention of the right customers. What keywords will you target? What ad groups are you interested in? What’s the best way to get conversions, not just clicks?

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• Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great strategy for established businesses. Have you ever been offered a cheeky 20% off your first order? All you have to do is sign up! This is a great way to start or continue building that data base of customers that you desperately want to communicate with. 

It’s proven that email marketing improves sales (if you do it the right way). 

How can you do this?

• Segment your audience based on what they are interested in.
• Again, provide value for your audience even when they aren’t making a purchase. Are you a hair salon? You might provide an article on managing frizzy hair for those who purchase certain products.
• Send timely campaigns.

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• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Make sure that you are continually optimising your website so that it is found by the right searchers. SEO is crucial to your website visibility, and it is an on-going process that needs to be revisited regularly.

 To conduct SEO you need to focus on: 

• Conducting regular keyword research.
• On-page SEO - things you can control on your website to help search engines rank and understand your content better. This can include elements such as your site’s content, title tags, keyword usage, URLs, internal links, etc.
• Off-page SEO - actions taken off your website. Think backlinks and mentions on other sites.
• Technical SEO – this is how search engines index and crawl your site. Think site speed optimization, structured data, and more.

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Define a budget

We all have to work within our means, right? 

When creating a budget we have to consider a number of elements.

Who will be responsible for Digital Marketing tasks? Are there tasks that can be performed by current talent. Are there tasks that will need to be outsourced?

Consider the costs for:

• Design (Canva or Adobe Photoshop)
• Automation systems (Mailchimp)
• Content scheduling (Later)

Additionally you will need to decide on how much you would like to allocate to paid advertisements on social media and PPC.  Hint- it’s always a good idea to allocate some of the budget for experimentation with ad copy, styles and visuals.

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Create a Digital Marketing calendar

When planning your calendar, you always want to be planning at least a couple of months in advance. 

We all know that conjuring great ideas and executing them takes time! 

When it comes to social media platforms, they love consistency. In fact, people do too. In general, you also want to stay at the front of customer’s minds (but not so much that you’re just plain annoying).  

With this in mind, decide when you are going to schedule your communications and create a calendar with your ideas. From here, you need to ensure that you create the content well in advance so that they are scheduled and released on time.

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Evaluate the results and make adjustments

A lot of digital marketing is about learning your audience and constantly testing. 

There is always an opportunity to learn. How can we improve? 

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Analyse your results monthly. Learn what is isn’t working. Notice what your audience is responding to and what they have barely noticed. Think about where you need to spend more time. Every month won’t be the same. Some months will be crazy (think of the Christmas build up) and others will tick along.