(By Digital Marketing Blog Team at Pynez.com)
Introduction
Digital marketing strategy ensures the success of any business in today’s digital age. Businesses today know the importance of having a strong meaningful digital presence, but still many lack a plan, a clear roadmap, and a structure to support their online growth and reach their audiences effectively and engagingly.
This article aims to (a) discuss the importance of why you need a breakthrough digital marketing strategy, (b) guide you on how to create and implement a winning digital marketing strategy, and (c) share with you some tried and tested greatly helpful tools (we use for our digital marketing activities) that you will also need to effectively implement your digital marketing strategy. When you get a tools mentioned in this article, we are likely to receive some commissions.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a master game plan for establishing an online presence for your business using a strategic framework like PDCA or SOSTAC and tactics such as organic search, social media, paid advertisement, content marketing, video marketing, podcasting, and email marketing. All these methods are used to facilitate brand awareness, attract, and acquire new customers and retain old ones to grow your business. A good digital marketing strategy will help your business set and achieve SMART goals using the most effective and efficient methods.
Why having a digital marketing strategy is important?
There are many reasons why it is extremely important to have a digital marketing strategy in place:
(a) You will have direction – One of the first components of a digital marketing strategy is defining a goal. Having a clear goal will mean that you can track your progress toward the set goal. You are also able to plan out any resources that may be necessary to achieve your goal.
(b) You get a better understanding of your customers – While developing customer personas you will be able to better understand your customer’s needs and wants. You will also get an understanding of their digital behaviour as well as how your competition is serving their needs and wants.
(c) You can constantly improve your marketing activities – A major part of your strategy will be analytics. You will be actively recording stats related to how your online presence is affecting your business. A certain strategy might bring in more customers allowing you to focus more of your attention and resources on that strategy.
How to Create a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy?
To create and implement a winning digital marketing strategy, it is advisable to use a framework ranging from a simple like a Plan-Do-Check-Act framework to a more elaborate framework like SOSTAC – Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics & Actions, Control. However, the following seven steps are recommended for a breakthrough digital marketing strategy to ensure your business’ success.
Step 1: Define Your Goals – make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve with your online presence. The more specific your goals are the easier it will be to work towards them.
Step 2: Do Your Market Research – identify your market potential, the customers’ needs and wants, and growth potential. Identify your competition and dig out what they offer, why, and how.
Step 3: Create Customer Personas – develop a descriptive picture of your ideal customer and spend some time researching who your ideal customer is. You may try a great tool here (that we also use) to create your customer persona. This will help you know what type of content you need to create and what platforms will be best to reach your target audience
Step 4: Position Your Product or Service – Given its importance, you need to decide the positioning of your product or service against offers from your competition. It is a strategic exercise that defines where your product or service fits in the marketplace and why it is better than alternative solutions. This positioning could be based on a mix of aspects like quality, variety, performance, efficiency, aesthetic, reliability, sustainability, and Do-It-Yourself. The goal is to specify who includes your audience, what they need, and how your product can uniquely help. Product positioning forms the basis of your marketing story. Positioning will keep you focused sharply on the target audience for your product or service. The outcome of product positioning is an internal document that informs external messaging including how you will communicate your product or service benefits to customers. The positioning also helps you direct your product marketing efforts in the real value you provide beyond features and functionality.
Step 5: Choose Your Platform – If you already have existing platforms you can start by evaluating which platform you generate the most meaningful interactions on. If you are just starting, then you need to know how to reach your customer in the best way possible. For this, you must first know why the user of a certain platform is on that platform. You can then choose the one you feel caters to your business and customers the most. To start just focus on one or two platforms to keep things easy to manage.
Step 6: Create and Share Content – you can use different content types (printed, audio or video) to get a certain message across to your audience. Use various marketing tools to reach your customers. A tactical 4-stage framework of See-Think-Do-Care could be very useful to design and deliver relevant content and deploy certain approaches or initiatives to cover all stages of customer acquisition and retention.
Step 7: Monitor & Improve – Make sure you monitor your content and the engagement you get from it. This will help you figure out what works for you and what you can improve in your next campaign. Google Analytics and Social Blade are very useful tools in this respect.
Digital Marketing Strategy Implementation Guidance
To successfully implement digital marketing activities, every business these days needs basic tools such as a website creator, page builder, sales funnel maker, membership site platform, email autoresponder, blog tool, shopping cart system, etc. Fortunately, to start a new digital marketing project now you can have an all-in-one lifetime free platform that includes many needed tools to implement your digital marketing strategy.
This all-in-one marketing software suite is also a stand-alone substitute for many well-known software and tools currently used in online businesses. This platform caters to more than 95% of all your marketing software needs and is designed to help you run a successful online business. Moreover, the great thing about this platform is its all-in-one lifetime Free plan that is sufficient for a new online business.
When implementing the various digital marketing strategies as stated above, make sure your goal is to help people solve their problems rather than cold selling your products.
ACTION STEPS
Helping people with free and valuable content
Produce content that solves people’s problems while being relevant to your business, reaches a larger audience, and helps build trust in your business. An advised ratio is 80% solving customers’ problems and 20% selling your product.
Blogging with SEO
Blogging is a great way to address customer problems while also recommending solutions. Use keyword research to find what things (related to your business) people are actively searching for. Addressing such issues will mean your blog post will get meaningful traffic and will increase your chance of reaching people who might be interested in your product or service. In your post make sure you make it clear to the reader that your knowledge and intentions go beyond making a sale.
Video Content on YouTube
YouTube is the second most used search engine and so it provides you with a huge variety of audiences and topics to address. Most people use the platform to either be entertained or find solutions to their problems in video form to get the best results – you, therefore, may try to address both aspects if possible. If need any help in video marketing, you may contact our team by leaving your comments below; we will be more than happy to provide you with the necessary guidance.
Social Media Marketing
When using social media marketing it is very easy to try and take on multiple platforms. A recommended approach is to start with one platform and expand as you go along. Your main goal should be to get a loyal following – a following that engages with you and is truly interested in what you offer. Our general recommendation is that you use a combination of written and video content to maximise your results.
Paid Advertisement
Google AdWords and PPC Ads – when using paid ads consider the following:
A) Target audience – be where your audience is. Make sure before you decide to spend your money on paid ads you know exactly what platform your customers are on. Do your research to understand which platform your audience is most likely to use and for what reason.
B) Budget – Usually platforms will have you bid for keywords searched on their platform – the more ad budget you have the higher you appear in the search list. If your ad budget isn’t high look for keywords that have a lower cost per click rate. The benefit of this is you can get more clicks from your ad budget, and it also narrows down the search meaning someone will be looking for something very closely related to what product or service you are offering.
C) ROI – Make sure you can justify the return on your investment. If you have spent a significant amount of your budget but still haven’t seen positive results, then your current strategy isn’t the best for you, and you need to adjust it to meet your needs.
Podcasts
There are two ways to implement this strategy. The first is to start a podcast yourself where you address and discuss relevant issues. This is great for creating brand awareness and building an audience. The quality of podcasts is always a great challenge. Currently, we are using amazing software to record our podcasts. The beauty of this innovative hi-tech software is that you can produce good-quality audio or video podcasts simply by using your laptop or mobile phone. You will be surprised to see its great quality. You can try this software for free. We are also using a great platform to publish and distribute our podcasts. This is also a lifetime free podcast publishing and distribution platform.
Alternatively, you can be interviewed on someone else’s podcast. Podcasters always want new and interesting people to interview. Pitch to a host on why they should interview you and the value you could bring. If the host thinks you will bring good value to their podcast, they will invite you. In return for your interview podcasters will almost always leave links to refer people to your site or product increasing traffic on your platform.
Email marketing
It is a great way to keep your customers up to date with new products and services. You can also share any special offers you have for your email list audience. Start collecting emails from the very beginning as anyone who signs up for your email list will likely be interested in what you are offering. This is a great way to build connections with your audience and even sell your high-ticket items. A free tool you can use to build your list and launch your first email marketing campaign is included in the all-in-one lifetime FREE digital marketing platform. Alternatively, Get Response is also a very good option. We are currently, using both platforms for our digital marketing activities. We are very happy with their service quality.
Free Educational Webinars
People like to do business with experts. To display your expertise in your niche and win your audience’s trust, you can periodically organize a free 30 min 1 hour online educational webinar that will highlight the problems your audience generally faces and possible solutions to address the problem. You offer a solution that addresses the problem better in comparison with your competition. Here also you can use your all-in-one lifetime free digital marketing platform to register, organize and conduct your webinars.