You already know that the use of digital devices is continuity increasing. According to survey report 2020, it was found that the average adult uses digital devices (computer, phone, and other devices with Internet access) about 6 hours a day.
Such an addiction can even look scary. But for companies, it provides a real opportunity to proactively convey information about their brand to customers who spend a lot of time online.
Let’s face it: creating your own digital marketing strategy is a very serious task. So what is its importance? We will share some examples that will definitely inspire you.
Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
Here is a short answer: as with any other business activity, you need an overall strategy that will help you plan and improve your performance. You can use it to make choices based on your ultimate goal.
It’s important in the digital marketing field, because this field includes many other fields. What types of digital marketing do we know? These may include:
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Contextual advertising
- Social media marketing
- Affiliate marketing
then what are the important goals of a digital marketing strategy? It combines all these elements into a single plan, allowing you to save time, money, and effort.
How to create a digital marketing strategy?
Do you like what you’ve just read? Well, now you have to solve the problem of creating your own digital marketing strategy. It may seem incredibly complex to you, but it’s not quite true.
Let’s start small and highlight five simple steps that will help you choose the right direction. Consider this a basic framework for your future strategy.
1. Study your audience
Before developing a set of marketing activities, you need to understand who you are reaching out to. Therefore, your first step should be to study your audience.
There are many ways to do this, but some of the most popular and effective ones include:
- Analytics (on your website, email marketing platform, and social networks)
- Surveys and feedback forms
- Discussions with sales and customer support staff
These three methods alone will give you valuable insight into who your customers are, what goals they are pursuing, what challenges they are facing, and how your company can help them.
Armed with this information, you can create various customer profiles so that you always remember who exactly you are contacting and target your messages accordingly.
2. Set goals
Your overall digital marketing strategy should be linked to some major goal — something more specific and inspiring than “promote the company” or” expand your audience.”
One of the best ways to set marketing goals is to use the SMART methodology. This abbreviation means that the goal should be::
- Specific — specific
- Measurable — measurable
- Attainable — reachable
- RElevator — comparable
- Type ime-bound — limited in time
By working through each letter, you can set goals that will really help you move in the right direction. For example, a SMART digital marketing goal might look something like this:
Increase our mailing list by 2,000 subscribers in the first quarter to get enough audience to promote our webinars.
3. Evaluate your past work
Developing a strategy is quite a complex task, and you may think that you are doing everything from scratch every time, but this is not entirely true. You’ve been involved in marketing before (even if it wasn’t very large-scale), which means that you already have some experience.
Analyze your past actions to understand when you have achieved the desired results and when you have not. This will help you understand where you need to put more effort.
In addition, you will get a good opportunity to collect content and various materials — from illustrations in social networks to important information — that can be reused so that you do not have to do unnecessary work. For example, you can use a quote from a previous blog article as an illustration on Instagram.
4. Think Carefully about all the main points
No matter how high the flight of your creative imagination, there are always many insurmountable circumstances to be reckoned with. Strategy development has nothing to do with dreams. Rather, it is an attempt to understand what you can achieve with the existing limitations.
And here you need to think about it. The Digital Marketing Institute uses the phrase “identifying your resources”, which means that you need to consider the following factors::
- Your budget. How much amount you can spend for digital marketing?
- Your staff. Who is responsible for the result? Will you have to assign some of your tasks or responsibilities to subcontractors?
- Your channels. What marketing channels will you use, and what purpose is associated with each channel?
These basic elements need to be clarified in advance so that you can develop a strategy that will be successful under any constraints.
5. Make a plan
When you have all the basic elements — your audience, your goals, and your resources-in place, it’s time to combine them into a single digital marketing strategy template.
Start with a simple calendar (created in a spreadsheet) where all these items will be collected. For example, you can plan a separate mailing list in your calendar, and then start adding other pieces to it.
Be prepared for your initial ideas to turn into something completely unexpected over time, but sometimes you just need to start moving forward to find the best possible path for yourself. As in any process, you will proceed by trial and error!
Digital marketing strategies Examples that can inspire you
Do you know what first steps you need to take to get started, but feel insecure? Sometimes you need some little inspiration.
The following are examples of well-known brands that have focused their marketing efforts on three different areas: content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Which area of digital marketing brings the best results? These brands have proven that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It all depends on how you implement your plans.
Content Marketing:
When it comes to content marketing, it’s hard not to remember the most popular social media post Planner-Buffer. The company that created this service is often cited as an example of the “correct” use of content marketing.
At the very beginning, company executives relied primarily on guest posts. The content they created was placed on many different sites because they wanted to make it recognizable. One of the co-founders of Buffer claims that this strategy allowed them to attract the first 100 thousand customers.
However, they were unhappy that they were neglecting their own website. But in the following years, the company gained credibility in the industry by publishing high-quality content on its blogs.
Did you notice that the previous paragraph mentions “blogs” and not “blog”? That’s right — they had two different blogs aimed at different audiences:
- Buffer blog: all about social media, marketing, and Buffer features and updates.
- Open blog: all about remote work, corporate culture and company development.
- And while content marketing is usually focused on creating e-books and blog posts, Buffer has proven that its marketing strategy is not limited to the printed word. They launched a podcast called “Science of social networks“, where people share ideas and valuable information about social networks.
Social Media Marketing:
You can name many factors that have contributed to the undeniable success of the brand of decorative cosmetics Glossier. And a significant role in this success was played by publications in social networks.
Instagram executives have prioritized social media advertising from the very beginning, and they even managed to attract 13,000 followers on Instagram before the first product was released.
But how? Part of this impressive success was due to the fact that the company’s employees understood their audience very well and were able to create publications that resonated with readers.
This is the image that they reflect in their publications. The images don’t look overly stylized or flawless and usually show us real people in realistic environments (with children, animals, in the cabin of an airplane, etc.).
While other brands are trying to reach thousands of people to promote their products, Glossier takes a different approach, relying on its loyal female customers and fans.
During one of the new product launches, the company’s management came up with the idea to present product samples to five hundred of the most loyal fans who constantly bought their products or actively interacted with the brand on the Internet. These girls advertised the product on their own pages in social networks. And what is the result? A very original social media campaign that was incredibly successful.
Email marketing:
Buzz Feed’s employees are so successful in digital marketing that they seem to have conquered the entire Internet. But of all the areas of their marketing activities, email marketing stands out in particular.
Now that our mailboxes are flooded with emails, email marketing is becoming a real problem. How do I make sure that people open and read your emails instead of deleting them without looking at them (or, even worse, don’t unsubscribe from the mailing list)?
Buzz Feed employees prove by example that the most important thing is personalization. They know that in order for users to open incoming emails, they must contain the content that these users would like to receive. However, it is very difficult to send out targeted content if you are addressing the entire audience.
That’s why Buzz Feed specialists have segmented their newsletter to take into account very specific interests (for example, you can subscribe to receive one photo with a cute dog once a day).
They have dozens of different newsletters that you can subscribe to, and subscribers always know what they can expect from the sent content and how often they will receive new messages. In addition, users are offered various challenges that you can subscribe to take small steps towards achieving your goal.
And what is the result? High-quality targeted content that users are waiting for.
How you can create your own digital marketing strategy?
These days, digital marketing has become an urgent necessity for companies that are looking to create a recognizable brand and attract an audience. But this does not change the fact that forming your own strategy can be a very difficult task.
But you can break this task down into simple steps:
- Study your audience.
- Set goals.
- Evaluate your previous work.
- Think carefully about all the key elements of your digital marketing strategy.
- Make a plan.
Do this by being inspired by these examples, and your digital marketing efforts will begin to produce more significant results. With a solid digital marketing strategy in place, you can start implementing your plans and achieve their goals.
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