Digital Marketing Strategy: How To Build One That Works

How to build a digital marketing strategy from scratch, goal setting, channel selection, budget allocation, and measurement framework.

Keith Eneix on Uncategorized • May 03rd, 2021

Online channels like Google search and Facebook have become excellent ways to promote your products, but you need to have a comprehensive digital marketing plan in place to help you connect with your target audience.

When implemented properly, digital marketing strategies can drive traffic, improve engagement metrics, and get you more leads. But, implementing a pre-baked plan simply won’t cut it. To be successful, you need to have a solid strategy behind your digital marketing campaigns.

This short guide will cover everything you need to know about building robust digital marketing strategies for your business.

Why Is It Important to Have an Online Strategy to Grow Your Business?

Before going over the components of an online promotion plan, let’s go over the importance of having one of your company.

First off, what is a digital marketing plan? Simply put, it’s the blueprint or outline you need to follow in order to achieve your online marketing goals.

The internet has become the first place consumers turn to find products and services. This means that you can leverage tools like Facebook and search engines to boost your digital presence and achieve your business objectives.

For example, generate leads at a higher rate.

What Are the Different Components of an Online Plan?

So, what makes up a strategic digital marketing plan? Simply put, every single digital marketing plan/strategy is different.

These may have elements in common, but the combination required to make your company succeed is unique. So, make sure to create a flexible strategy that allows you to add components, remove elements, and retain flexibility.

Here are some of the components you may have to include in your digital strategies.

The Audience

Every digital marketing strategy is created for a specific audience or set of audiences. Therefore, you need to learn as much information as you can about the cohort you will try to attract.

Start by creating a buyer persona that represents each similar group. The persona will help you develop better materials for your target customers, including social media posts, paid campaigns, and even blog articles.

Objectives and Goals

Creating a list of business and marketing goals will help you stay on track and remember the main objective of your venture.

Make sure to set goals that are measurable through both quantitative and qualitative ratings. Not only this, but take the time to analyze year-over-year revenue to potentially identify trends or strategies that can boost your results.

Content Marketing

If you have a digital marketing agency business plan, you probably know about content marketing. In case you don’t, this is a great opportunity to learn how this strategy can help you attract new users and engage existing customers.

Content strategies focus on increasing website traffic through quality blogs, website pages, and similar types of publications. This also includes content for mobile devices as well as other marketing plans that help you connect with your ideal customer.

Email Marketing

Like all experienced digital marketing managers will tell you, emails are a great way to sell goods and services. Consumer behavior varies depending on location and age. But, generally-speaking, emails can help you connect with potential customers at a much higher rate than a traditional marketing plan.

The best part is that email campaigns are relatively affordable to create and manage, making them among the most effective marketing plans you can leverage.

Paid Advertising

You can run paid media campaigns on a wide range of networks. The most reliable and profitable one is Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords), although social media platforms also provide a great alternative.

Paid campaigns are great because they can help you connect with potential customers right away, so you can achieve your business goals in a much shorter timespan. That said, you need to install Google Analytics, create ads based on your buyer personas, and make sure that leads are sent directly to your marketing funnel.

Mobile Marketing

Did you know that mobile marketing makes up more than half of the world’s organic traffic? While this trend is unlikely to catch up in areas like the US, there is no denying that mobile marketing may lead to increased sales for ecommerce businesses and other types of company.

Mobile marketing requires a distinct plan. Thus, you need to create buyer personas for mobile, make sure that every blog post is available on these devices, and include

Social Media Marketing

Social media channels like Facebook can enhance the results you get from your digital marketing activities. But, it’s important to use these platforms for more than collecting positive online reviews. Social channels can become a great sales tool, so make sure to create relevant content for each platform you plan on using.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is among the most well-known digital marketing methods. This is because SEO can help you reach your target market, reach all relevant confines of the digital world, and boost all the aspects of your present strategy.

Additionally, SEO is compatible with video marketing, influencer marketing, native advertising, and all other approaches, making it a great fit for all industries.

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More Helpful Reading: Digital Marketing 101

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How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

Creating a solid strategy starts with a good digital marketing plan outline. Remember, you need to tailor your plan based on your requirements, goals, and resources. So, review each of the stages we detail and adjust each one to your business to get the results you want.

Here are general steps you should follow to create a strategy for your business. Alternatively, you can always partner with marketing agencies that specialize in promotion through online platforms.

Step 1 – Situational Analysis

First off, take the time to research your audience, budget, goals, and all other elements you need to understand to create a plan.

Step 2 – Define Your Audience

Next, you should focus your digital marketing efforts on defining the audience or audiences you want to target.

Step 3 – Establish Digital Marketing Goals

Now, you need to create a set of goals and objectives for your digital marketing campaign plan. Make sure that they’re measurable and that you have milestones to track your progress.

Step 4 – Calculate Your Digital Plan Budget

In this step, you have to define your digital marketing budget. Don’t be afraid to shift most of your resources towards digital as this method has become the new golden standard in many industries.

Step 5 – Define the Marketing Strategy

The following step is to build the base of your digital marketing business plan by outlining the customer journey and determining your overall approach.

Step 6 – Choose Your Strategies and Tactics

Once you have an idea of how you want your marketing to work (for example, portraying you as a subject matter expert) you should choose the digital marketing channels you’ll use.

Step 7 – Measuring Results & KPIs

After implementing your solutions, remember that you have to measure the digital marketing tactics key performance indicators (KPIs).

Step 8 – Create a Marketing Calendar

A successful advertising and promotion strategy requires regular maintenance, analysis, and optimization. Make sure to create a calendar that includes each one of these actions to help keep your team on point.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Have questions about creating a digital marketing plan? Check out our most common FAQs.

What is included in a marketing plan for digital channels?

Every plan for online promotion should include a budget, strategy specific, KPIs, and an optimization calendar.

What are the steps to create a digital plan?

The steps to create a tailored plan vary from one business to the next. If you don’t have in-house experts, working with a digital agency can be a great alternative.

What are the 4 elements for a successful digital strategy?

This varies from one business to the next, but the main elements of a successful online plan are usually:

• SEO
• Paid channels
• Social marketing
• Email campaigns

Conclusion

Creating a tailored plan can help you increase sales and boost other KPIs. That said, you need to have an SEO strategy as well as a dedicated plan for each channel to successfully generate sales.

To learn more about improving your market share through online promotion channels, contact Fannit today.

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As the world becomes ever more connected, the spaces where we live, work, and play are increasingly moving online. This means the digital world is the perfect place to reach the public and gives brands the ability to be at every step of the customer journey, from initial interest right through to purchase. In this new world, having a digital marketing strategy is non-negotiable for many companies. Additionally, hiring reliable inbound marketing services can shorten the learning curve and help you hit the ground running.

At Fannit, we’ve spent the last decade providing tailored digital marketing services for businesses in all industries. We understand that modern consumers rely on the internet to find new products to buy or services to use.

So, our team works relentlessly to develop a plan that helps you connect with these potential customers.

Let’s take a look at the definition of a digital marketing strategy and go over the steps to help you build a tailored play for your business.

• https://www.fannit.com/blog/what-is-digital-marketing/

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Much like a traditional promotion strategy, a digital marketing strategy is a plan to achieve your marketing goals, whether that’s maximizing coverage, improving your brand awareness, or to generate more leads.

The difference is rather than using traditional channels such as print media or out of home, digital marketing strategies focus on the online channels now readily available.

Think search results, social media, banner ads, and much more. All these help make up a successful digital media strategy.

Each digital marketing strategy must be carefully thought out with the business in mind.

There’s no sense in just replicating what you have seen other brands attempt to do because all companies are different.

You have to think about what strategies will be relevant to your particular business goals and plan accordingly.

You should also try and ensure each part of your digital strategy plan assists another over time. A digital marketing strategy should be a multi-stage process, and not just focused on your immediate objectives.

Think about what your short, medium, and long term goals are, and how each stage of this can lead on to the other.

How Do I Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

So, how do you get started? The first step is identifying your target audience. These are the people who will be most interested in your brand.

There’s little use in spending your budget reaching those unlikely to purchase your products.

One way that a strategic digital marketing plan has an edge over a traditional marketing plan is the sheer amount of data available allows your campaigns to be hyper-targeted, therefore avoiding wasted spending.

Make sure the research for your digital marketing strategies includes details on your customers to learn more about them, their interests, hobbies, favored social platforms, the content they respond to, and more.

You’ll also need to take demographic factors into account. Think about age, location, average income, gender, etc.

All of these can inform your digital strategy about their spending habits and how to effectively reach them.

Once you know who you are targeting, you should then think about what exactly your digital marketing strategy aims to achieve.

Perhaps you want to increase visits to your landing page, increase your brand visibility, or just want to maximize conversions and sales.

Whatever goals you choose, whether it’s generating leads or increasing conversions, you then need to think about what your digital marketing plan can do to make them a reality.

• https://www.fannit.com/digital-marketing-services/

SMART

In brief, you should plan out what you are going to achieve, and when you want to achieve it, and how you will measure what you have achieved.

A useful acronym to get started with an online digital strategy that is often used for marketing is SMART. This stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Specific

A digital marketing guide for contractors should be specific. It shouldn’t just be ‘grow your business’, ‘reach new people’ or ‘generate more sales’.

Rather, it should be ‘create X amount of conversions’ or ‘increase website traffic by X%’. If you have a specific idea of what to achieve, it’ll be much easier to measure your success.

Measurable

If you’ve done the first step of ‘Specific’ correctly, measuring your results will be much simpler.

This way you can tell if what you’re doing is effective, and if not will give you insight into how to tweak your digital marketing strategy to place it back on track

Attainable

Make sure that you plan your goals to be possible. If you’re a small business don’t compare yourself to the digital marketing strategy of a huge corporation like Coca-Cola and try to replicate its numbers.

Take into account where you’re starting from and the available budget. Making a lot of small steps to boost your digital marketing strategy is more likely to be successful than one huge leap.

However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ambitious. Setting yourself a goal that you should be achieving anyway won’t help.

Stretch goals can be realistic and can help incentivize your different digital marketing strategies to work that bit much harder.

Relevant

Your goals should directly relate to your digital campaign strategy’s objective and your business as a whole.

For example, a digital marketing strategy shouldn’t be trying to increase your Twitter followers if your research shows that your target demographics are not frequent users of the platform.

If you’re a charity setting goals to increase leads to your donation page would be an excellent idea.

If you want to increase your brand reputation, then maybe try and utilize your digital marketing strategy to maximize the reach and coverage of your informative content.

Timely

One of the most important elements of devising a digital marketing plan is creating a timeframe.

You need to know when you want to hit all your goals. Set up regular deadlines for reaching certain benchmarks and try and stick to them.

If you’ve selected your measurable metrics carefully, you can see how many you should be hitter per month.

Not only will this help you to stay focused, but it will make it easier to tell if what you’re doing is working or not.

If you haven’t reached one stage of your goals by a certain week, then it may be time to re-evaluate your digital marketing methodology.

You’ll find it much easier to organize your online marketing strategy if you know exactly what you need to do each week, instead of just setting an overall goal and thinking ‘oh we’ll hit when we hit it’.

What Are the Best Digital Marketing Tactics?

So what are the best digital tactics for your digital marketing plan and how can they assist your business in generating leads and the sales it needs to achieve its business goals? It’s important to remember that every business is different, with va