It goes without saying that different businesses should have different digital marketing strategies.
With variations in target audience, product or service offerings, marketing budgets, and more, it only makes sense that marketing plans should show variation as well.
That being said, there are some common denominators across all effective marketing strategies.
Identifying these common denominators can actually help you put together your own digital marketing strategy.
Here, we've distilled those commonalities into 4 straightforward steps that any business owner or novice marketer can follow.
Survey the field and form a basic roadmap
One of the most important things to figure out from the start is your context. That means answering questions like these:
Basically, you have to establish the environment in which you'll be sending out your messages. Doing so will help you figure out how best to make yourself heard as well as understood.
Once you know this, you can craft a general roadmap.
What are your goals? What do you want to achieve?
Where do you want your business to be following the campaign?
These are the fundamentals that you need to determine from the start, not least so that everyone on your marketing team is more or less aligned.
You can bounce ideas off each other at this stage, debate the value of aiming for a particular goal, and so on.
Once you’ve settled the basic points, you can move on to detailing your plan further with the next step.
Identify your target audience and core tools and channels
Now that you know what you’re aiming for and what your message is, you can more closely narrow down the people you want to reach with that message.
Defining your target audience means just that: specifying what makes up your target demographic as well as where to find its constituents.
Now it's best to be as specific as possible. To that end, you can do things like make buyer personas.
We've talked about these before: they're fictional representations (or generalisations) of your target audience.
Using these lets you get closer to identifying and understanding the people you want to market to.
And as mentioned before, it lets you figure out where to reach them.
Part of the description for a buyer persona could be that he tends to frequent Facebook, for instance.
In that case, you then know that Facebook is one of the marketing channels you should use for your strategy.
The description for your buyer persona can also include notes on content buckets or topics that interest him.
Again, that gives you further ideas on how best to reach him, with what type of marketing content, and how.
Quantify and concretise the plan, then implement it
Now it's time to actually render your marketing strategy in quantifiable and concrete terms.
Why? Two reasons.
First, it lets you actually convert intentions and ideas into executable plans.
Second, it lets you monitor and assess your results in a way that tells you whether or not you're succeeding while giving you insight into how to achieve improvements.
If you've read our previous articles, then you already know that we're big fans of data-driven marketing.
That means marketing where decisions aren't just rolls of the dice - they're based on as much hard data as possible to minimise risk and maximise return.
That's why it's important to concretise your marketing strategies.
You say you want to let people know your product is superior to rivals? How exactly would you phrase that in your material?
You say you want to achieve higher visibility for your website? How would you try to measure that - through SERP ranking and unique visitors per month?
Figure all of this out and you'll be able to put together a feasible marketing plan. From there, you can simply execute it... though that's far from the end.
Monitor, analyse, and adjust as necessary
Here's what the best marketing plans always have in common: they don't end at implementation.
Marketing is best seen as a cyclical process, with results and data from previous cycles improving the next marketing attempts through a feedback loop.
That's why we said earlier that you need to monitor your progress and results.
It gives you ideas about what to tweak, how to tweak, and which tweaks worked.
As you analyse your data, you may discover new marketing ideas or paths you wouldn't have thought of before.
Or you may realise a need to adjust a message on a particular channel for added efficacy.
Need more specific guidance on developing a marketing plan?
As you can see, creating an effective digital marketing strategy takes quite a bit of planning and organisation. You may find it a challenge, especially if you already have limited time and resources due to the other needs of your business.
If you find that you need this sort of help, feel free to contact us. We can set aside some time to chat with you, no obligations, and discuss what you might need in a marketing plan and whether or not we can help you.
Reach out to us at any time - you can also browse some of our other articles here, which can give you more insight into how to do digital marketing effectively!
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