Now it’s time to build a digital marketing strategy, you need to pull everything together. Regardless which of our 11 digital marketing strategies you have chosen, establishing goals, defining audiences and establishing what you need to create is vital.
1. Set goals and objectives.
Before you decide on a digital marketing strategy, establish and document your short- and long-term goals. After you decide on your strategy, outline and document specific objectives so you’ll know if your strategy is working. Make sure your goals and objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely).
- Goal. Increase awareness of our widgets among our target audience.
- Strategy (how you’ll achieve the goal). Use content marketing to persuade buyers that our widgets are the best in the market by creating content for at least two user personas in every step of the sales funnel.
- Objective (how you’ll know if the strategy is working). Achieve a 25% increase of downloads of our widget whitepapers and eBooks each quarter and boost email subscribers by 50% in 6 months.
Document all your goals, strategies, and objectives so that you can refer to them when it’s time to measure success.
2. Consider buyer personas.
It’s impossible to create an effective digital marketing strategy unless you understand the people you’re trying to target. That’s where buyer personas come in. Buyer personasare fictional people who represent the traits of those you’d like to buy your products or services.
Personas should be rooted in data and research. Using your own intuition to create personas with no data behind it can lead to the wrong focus. So that means you need to speak with your customers through in-person, app, or telephone interviews and surveys.
Things to feed into your personas:
- Location. You can use web analytics tools to see where your customers are shopping from.
- Income/occupation. Ask customers if they’re happy to disclose details of their income and occupation.
- Hobbies/interests. Online forms or focus group-style sessions could help to show what people are interested in. While you could also use search trends to explore popular hobbies for certain demographics.
- Goals/aspirations. What do your customers want? What drives them? Focus groups and surveys can help you to establish this. Existing consumer reports/data are another good source.
- Challenges/pain points. What is it that gets in the way of them achieving their goals? Speaking to customers as well as your own sales teams can help you to understand this.
Once you’ve created several personas, you’ll find it easier to market to different types of buyers and cater to their needs.
3. Audit your assets.
Gain a thorough understanding of what your business already has by documenting your current digital assets. Then, dive deep into each one and rank it from most-effective to least-effective. Once you do, you’ll know which assets need to be improved, and which ones need to be rebuilt from scratch.
Let’s look at the example of an SEO focused content audit. Key elements include:
- Crawl the site. Gather all the URLs across your blogs, category pages, and other relevant pages.
- Identify gaps. From the list of URLs, try to establish any clear content gaps based on your personas and campaign objectives.
- SEO insights. Work with an SEO to gauge performance of the existing URLs and also new opportunities from keyword research.
- Compile the data. Pull all this data into a spreadsheet so you can see all the key information presented side by side.
- Create tasks. Compile recommendations for improving existing pages and also a plan for the new pages you need to create.
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