Introduction
Creating a digital marketing strategy that gets results is easier than you might think. Here’s how to develop a high-performing digital marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals.
Target audience research
Understanding your target audience is the first step in creating a digital marketing strategy. You can’t make an effective strategy without knowing who you are trying to reach and what they need from you.
It’s essential to consider these questions:
- Who am I targeting? What age range, gender, location, and other demographics do they fit into?
- What are their needs and wants? Do they want information about something specific or entertaining to enjoy during their free time (or both)?
- How does this group behave online–what kind of websites do they visit regularly; where do they get their news from; what social media platforms do they use most often.
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is a key part of any digital marketing strategy. How can you expect to beat them if you don’t know who your competitors are and what they’re doing?
To start with, define your competitors. This may seem obvious, but it’s essential to make sure everyone on the team agrees on who these companies are–and how they’re different from each other.
Once that’s done, analyze their strengths and weaknesses: What do they do well? Where could they improve? How do those answers affect their target market or brand positioning (or both)?
Next up: understanding their marketing strategy, including content marketing strategies like blogs or social media posts. This includes understanding how often those channels should be used; what tone of voice should be used; where messages should be posted; etcetera ad infinitum ad nauseum until death do us part…
Brand positioning
The first step in creating a digital marketing strategy that gets results is to identify your target market. This can be tricky, but it is essential to know who you’re trying to reach and how they differ from your customer base. Your target market is the group of people with whom you want to communicate: the people who will buy or use your product or service if given the opportunity.
Your customer base encompasses all those who purchase from you anytime during their lifecycle as consumers (or potential consumers). For example, if I own an ice cream shop and have been open for three years, my customer base includes everyone who has ever bought ice cream from me–whether it was yesterday or three years ago when they were six years old!
Content marketing
Content marketing is creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience to drive profitable customer action.
The process of content marketing involves:
- Defining your target audience
- Creating relevant content that meets their needs or wants
- Distributing your content across multiple channels
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your website’s ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. There are many tactics that you can use to improve your site’s rankings; these include:
- Keyword research
- Creating content on topics relevant to those keywords
- Link building
The strategy behind all of these is simple: make sure that people who search for certain keywords will find your website at or near the top of their results page. This can be done through two main methods: creating high-quality content and increasing links from other sites pointing back at yours.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Once you’ve established your goals, set up a Google Adwords campaign. The first step to creating a successful PPC campaign is choosing the keywords that will lead users to your website. Once you have these keywords, use them in the title and meta description of the ad. This will help increase click-through rates (CTR), which means more traffic for your business!
Once the ads are live, monitor their performance regularly so that you can make adjustments as needed. If one ad isn’t performing well compared with others in its category or group, pause it until it improves its performance or remove it from rotation altogether if needed.”
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a great way to reach and build relationships with your audience. You can share content, build trust, and engage in meaningful conversations. Social media has become an essential part of the digital marketing strategy for most businesses today because it helps them build credibility and increase awareness of their products or services.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to reach your audience, build your brand, and create customer relationships. You can use email marketing to promote products and services by sending out relevant content to them–, and when they sign up for it, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) improves your website’s ability to convert visitors into customers. CRO involves identifying and fixing the problems preventing people from buying what you’re selling, whether a product or service.
It can be tempting to jump right into CRO without first defining your goals, but this won’t get you anywhere fast–you’ll end up spinning your wheels and wasting time. Instead, take some time upfront to figure out exactly what success looks like for your company: What do they want? How will they know when they’ve achieved it? If this seems overwhelming at first, don’t worry! We have some tips below on how to set SMART goals that will keep things clear throughout the process.
Landing page optimization
Landing pages are the digital equivalent of real estate. They’re the first impression you make on your target audience, and they need to be beautiful and inviting.
A landing page can be a standalone page or an element on your website (like an About Us section) that drives people toward a specific action or goal–such as signing up for your email list, downloading your ebook, or purchasing.
There are many different types of landing pages:
- Product/service pages – Use these if you’re selling something directly from the page itself (e-commerce). For example https://www.amazon.com/LandingPageExample1
- Lead generation – These are used when someone comes onto your site but isn’t ready yet; they want more information before making any decisions about what product/service might work best for them in their situation
Lead generation
Regarding lead generation, knowing who your target audience is and what they want to achieve is essential. You also need a plan for how you will reach them.
To do this effectively, you need an easy-to-navigate website that provides relevant content for your customers or clients.
Sales funnel optimization
When creating a digital marketing strategy, it’s essential to understand the sales funnel.
The sales funnel is a way to visualize the customer journey from awareness to purchase. It shows where your customers are in their buying process and what steps they need to take next. This can help you determine where to spend time, money, and energy on your marketing efforts.
For example: if someone has already made it through three steps of your sales funnel (like watching an online video about your product), they’re likely more interested in learning more than someone who hasn’t made it past step one (like searching for information). You might want to focus more on helping those who have already taken several steps through your sales funnel instead of spending too much time trying to convince those who haven’t progressed very far yet – this will save money while increasing conversions at each stage and improving overall ROI!
Customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping, or customer experience mapping, is understanding how customers interact with your brand.
The goal is to determine where they are in their journey and how you can improve their experience by providing them with the right information at each step. This includes content that educates or informs them about your product or service, builds trust in you as an expert or authority (if relevant), helps them solve problems and make decisions faster, etc.
Customer journey mapping can be used to plan out a content strategy–you’ll know what type of content should be created for each phase of the customer lifecycle so that it’s useful for everyone involved in making purchases from start to finish. It also helps identify information gaps; if someone doesn’t know how something works before going into detail on it later on, maybe we should add some basic info earlier.
Analytics and tracking
Analytics are the tools you use to track and measure your digital marketing efforts. They provide information about how people interact with your brand, which can help you make better decisions about where to focus your efforts.
Analytics tools can show you things like:
- How many people visited a specific page on your website?
- What pages did they visit before or after that one?
- How long they spent browsing around before leaving (or sticking around)?
These insights can help inform decisions like whether or not a particular piece of content is worth keeping on-site, which keywords would be best for an ad campaign, or whether it’s worth spending more time optimizing a certain landing page for conversions (converting visitors into customers).
Retargeting
Retargeting is a way to bring back visitors to your website who have already visited your site. Retargeted ads are displayed to users who have previously visited your site and displayed an interest in your products or services.
Retargeting can be done by using cookies, which are small text files stored on the user’s computer when they visit a website, to be recognized when they return later. This allows marketers and advertisers to create personalized content based on previous user activity.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategy that involves working with social media influencers to promote your brand, products, or services. Influencers have a large following on social media and can help you reach your target audience.
To create an effective influencer marketing strategy for your business, it’s essential to understand how the process works:
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a great way to communicate with your audience, build trust and credibility, and reach new audiences. It’s also an effective means of showing off products or services.
If you’re not already using video as part of your digital marketing strategy, now is the time to start!
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas about creating a digital marketing strategy for your business. If you’re unsure where to start or what tools to use, we encourage you to check out our list of resources at the end of this article. Many other online resources can help guide you through each step of the process–and remember: there’s no such thing as “too much research”!
