How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy defines your marketing goals and how you plan to accomplish them. With a clear strategy in place, you can measure and track results. You also gain control over your marketing tactics and can harness digital marketing to your advantage.

The best part? Creating a digital marketing strategy isn’t hard. Here’s how to get started.

Step 1 – Create Buyer Personas

Understanding your target audience is key to do effective digital marketing. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing your resources into the huge content and advertising whirlwind that the web has become.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customers. They sum up who you are trying to sell to. You should create a detailed buyer persona for each segment of your audience.

The information you gather for each buyer persona depends on your business and aims. For example, a B2C business will have different personas from a B2B business.

Use existing marketing data, web analytics, surveys, contact database analysis, and trend research to better understand your audience. For each buyer persona, include information such as:

• Location
• Income
• Age
• Goals
• Challenges
• Interests

Step 2 – Set SMART Goals

SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. When you’re creating a digital marketing strategy, you want goals that meet all these criteria. Why? Because that way you can get actual results and measure them every step of the way.

Goals like “increase brand visibility in search engines” or “boost social media engagement” are too generic. You want to get more specific with goals like:

• Climb to the top 5 results on Google for “financial planning waterloo” by December using organic SEO strategies.
• Increase Facebook shares by 23% and Likes by 39% using social media marketing and advertising by December.

The more specific your goals are, the better.

Step 3 – Evaluate Your Current Digital Marketing Assets

Your existing digital marketing assets include owned, earned, and paid media. In turn, these include websites, digital content, blogs, social media profiles, content distributed across other websites, social shares, customer reviews, as well as ads.

All these digital marketing assets can help you achieve your marketing strategy goals. So, it’s important to categorize them and see how you can use them to further your goals.

But note that there may be gaps in your digital marketing assets. If so, it’s important to identify them and address them.

Step 4 – Determine the Digital Marketing Tactics and Tools You’ll Use

There are many digital marketing tactics out there. But depending on your goal, some will prove more useful to you than others.

For example, if you want to boost social media engagement, social media marketing, and content marketing will prove more useful than pay per click (PPC) advertising. But then if you want to drive traffic fast to a product page, PPC can prove valuable.

In terms of tools, list all the free and paid digital marketing tools you plan to use. These may include advertising tools like Google Ads, keyword tools like Soovle, or social media management tools like HootSuite.

Step 5 – Plan Your Content Creation and Advertising

You’ve identified your assets as well as any gaps in them. Now you can use that insight to create content creation and advertising plans. You want to tailor these plans to your goals, so be as specific as you can. Include what you will be doing, on what channels, and how.

Set goals for each piece of content or ad you publish as well as overall goals. Prioritize content/ads and channels that you want to focus on. It’s also handy to break down cost at this point as in that way you can keep better track of expenses.

Step 6 –Keep Tracking

Once your digital marketing strategy is underway, go back to your SMART goals to monitor and measure results. Tracking progress every step of the way is crucial to tweaking and adjusting your digital marketing campaign and maximizing results. Good luck!

More Info – Digital Marketing Strategy

Ladical Digital Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario Canada. We locally service the “Tri-Cities” area of (Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge). If you would like more information on how we can help you create a “Digital Marketing Strategy”, please call us at 888-750-8860 or use our web contact form.