How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
The first step in developing a digital marketing strategy is defining your goals.
What are you trying to accomplish?
- Do you want to build brand awareness?
- Generate leads and close more deals?
- Build your email list?
Whatever your goal(s) are (we suggest starting with three), write them down and map out a plan, and reverse engineer your efforts to achieve them.
This involves researching your audience and understanding who they are (demographics), their pain points, interests, questions, and more.
Knowing who you’re talking to will help you create more powerful content that speaks directly to them. Think of a digital marketing strategy as a GPS.
Once you’ve set your destination (goals), you use the GPS (digital marketing strategy) to guide your journey from point A to point B.
Sure, there will be roadblocks and detours which cause you to reroute and change course, but the GPS helps you move in the right direction and get you to your destination.
3 Common Digital Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Impatience.
We all want success to happen overnight. It’s like doing a crunch and expecting six-pack abs immediately -- It just doesn’t happen and that’s OK.
To fully understand if a digital marketing strategy is working, you need to give it time.
Don't give up if you don't get the results you envisioned immediately.
Digital marketing requires patience.
A campaign’s success (or failure) can be a result of:
- Time and day of posting
- The campaign’s creative and messaging
- The channels the content was posted to
- How much money you’re putting into paid advertising efforts
Give your campaigns time to see if you’re on the right path or if you need to readjust your approach.
Disregarding data.
There’s more data out there than we know what to do with. Rather than spending countless hours sifting through it, start by pinpointing data that’s relevant to your overarching goals.
Examples of data points to consider include:
- Engagement
– Are people interacting with your social media content or is the sound of silence overwhelming?
- Website traffic & visit duration
– Are your digital marketing efforts driving more traffic back to your site? Have you seen an uptick in visits? Are people staying on your website longer?
- Click-through-rate
– Are your calls-to-action compelling enough that people are clicking?
Once you have a clear understanding of the data you should be paying attention to, it’s easier to see what aspects of your digital marketing strategy are working and which are not.
Doing too much.
Don’t spread yourself a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s a recipe for lackluster results and frustration.
Instead, prioritize the platforms that matter most to your target audience.
If you’re not sure what those platforms are, head to the native search function on each social network and type in relevant industry keywords.
Is your target audience talking about these topics? Are they engaging with your competitors’ content?
Their activity, whether it’s a lot or a little, is an indicator of whether you should build a presence on a platform or not.
Now, this is just a starting point, but it gives you a better understanding of where your audience spends their time so you can meet them where they are with the content they want to consume.
Overall, investing in the right resources to devise and implement a cohesive digital marketing strategy can help you build brand awareness, attract attention, and generate more sales.
