Digital marketing or better known as digital marketing can help business people or companies achieve their goals. However, the process is not as easy as turning the palm of the hand. There are many things that need to be understood and well prepared.
So, make sure you have the right digital marketing strategy. If you want to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, this article is the right place to start. Why? Search together by reading the article until it's finished..!!
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Before looking for ways to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, there is one important thing, which is to find out what a digital marketing strategy actually is.
Digital marketing strategy refers to actions taken to achieve marketing goals through various media or online channels. This one marketing strategy can help businesses and companies get opportunities to grow and develop while increasing profits.
Online business people who carry out digital marketing strategies can use various digital channels, both those they already have and those that have just been created. Digital marketing can also be carried out using various paid channels.
So, it's not surprising that now more and more people are choosing paid advertising services such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. In other words, we can define a digital marketing strategy as a strategy to market products or services digitally by utilizing various digital media that are favored by the target audience.
Why is Digital Marketing Strategy important?
Having a strategy is as important as having a plan to achieve any goal. This completely optimizes workflow implementation, enabling high effectiveness while bypassing areas for reviewing data analytics and acting on them.
This paves the way for continuous improvements in various digital marketing strategies ranging from search marketing (SEO/SEM), conversion rate optimization (website user experience), email marketing & social media marketing to building your business goals, getting new customers, and building deeper connection with existing ones.
Your business also needs a competitive and sustainable content marketing strategy to reach and convert more customers by leveraging the power of online content, while integrating various digital marketing channels with traditional media.
As businesses continue to adopt digital transformation in their core operations and in new channels to reach customers, having a good digital marketing strategy is critical to this success.
What is Component of Digital Marketing?
A digital marketing strategy is different from a digital marketing campaign. When we talk about digital marketing strategy, we are referring to a master plan or blueprint for achieving long-term or macro goals.
Campaigns on the other hand are specific tactics used to achieve short-term micro-goals in a digital marketing strategy. Some of the main components of a digital marketing strategy include:
1. Determine the brand
Use brand guidelines to define your brand and consider your business's Unique Selling Point (USP).
2. Develop customer personas
Understand demographic information such as age, gender, location, and the motivations that drive people to choose products and services. Use Google Analytics to help in creating buyer personas and segmenting them according to keywords in organic traffic.
3. Defining S.M.A.R.T.
S.M.A.R.T is an abbreviation for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals. S.M.A.R.T goals will help you create better targets for your digital marketing action plan.
You will see more successful results with your campaigns when you set goals that you can measure and achieve. S.M.A.R.T goals will also help to set Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for your campaign.
4. Identify target market
Use market research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Facebook Audience Insights to conduct market research and identify potential target markets.
5. Conduct competitive analysis
Use web and social analytics tools like similarweb, Semrush, and SocialBakers to analyze your business competitors and conduct a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SWOT is a planning process that helps your business overcome challenges and determine what it should aim for overall.
6. Manage and allocate resources appropriately
Resources include manpower (in-house or outsourced team, external marketing agency) and budget.
7. Review and optimize campaign performance
Use digital marketing analysis tools such as Google Analytics to track, measure and report the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.
What are Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is certainly very beneficial for business. However, what kind of strategy is right and how? When you want to build a digital marketing strategy, there are several things you can do, including:
1. Determine business goals
The first step in creating a digital marketing strategy is determining your business goals. In other words, to determine what you want to achieve with digital marketing.
Every goal you set must be measurable and well defined. Everything in a digital marketing campaign can be measured (from start to finish) and you need to take advantage of this and form a digital marketing plan that has specific milestones and targets.
2. Know what products or services to market
As with marketing conventional or traditional products, marketing digital products also requires you to know what products or services will be marketed.
You can of course adjust the products or services that are marketed to the business or brand that you manage. That way, you can more easily determine the next steps as well as the right digital marketing strategy.
3. Identify Marketing Objectives
Furthermore, to be able to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, be sure to identify marketing goals. Every business or company certainly has goals to be achieved both when marketing products conventionally and digitally.
Setting goals is an important aspect of achieving success in business. That way, it will be easier to measure the level of achievement and success. So, make sure to understand the goals to be achieved. It also relates to the use of the right marketing tools that help achieve the goals that have been made.
4. Understand Who Your Audience Is
The next step that is no less important in building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is understanding who the target audience is. Do you know? The best way to start any kind of marketing strategy is to think about and understand the audience. How can you market your product or service if you don't know who your target market is?
Unfortunately, many still make the mistake of only thinking about how to reach more people but not the audience. Not everyone in this world is the right audience, right? Determining the audience must be adjusted to the product or service that you offer or market.
So, understand who exactly is the audience or target market that you have to reach. Try asking yourself some of these questions when defining your audience:
- What demographic information about your audience, including age, location, gender and more?
- What does the target audience do?
- What things do the audience pay attention to in their daily lives?
- What is the financial condition of your audience like?
5. Create a List of the Best Channels or Media to Reach Your Audience
After knowing who you will choose as your audience, of course it will be easier to develop a digital marketing strategy. Thus, you can do the right way to reach and expand your target audience.
However, it also requires proper effort. Like choosing the right channel or media. In other words, to be able to reach your audience, you can start making a list of the best channels or media that can help maximize your goals.
What media is suitable for a digital marketing strategy? Is it a podcast, video or something else? Is your audience active on social media? How often do they watch various videos on YouTube?
6. Plan and Evaluate Paid Campaigns
Apart from marketing products digitally through various media including social media platforms, business people also usually take advantage of paid campaigns.
Have you ever seen an ad on Facebook? Or maybe you often get search results on Google marked with the words "Ads"? If so, that means the platform you are using is displaying paid campaigns from a company or business.
Talking about paid campaigns, as an online business person, you can also take advantage of these campaigns. The trick is to make a mature plan by considering various things, especially the budget and goals to be achieved.
7. Start with SEO as early as possible
A strategic decision to make that can have a positive impact on your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible. SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but it has a caveat. It takes time to work.
Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to get any results. This is a long time to wait so most marketers tend to focus on other digital channels first (like Facebook Ads, Google Ads) that are more immediate.
8. Use email marketing segmentation and automation
The ultimate goal of a digital marketing campaign is to generate more revenue for the business. But to achieve your ultimate goal, you must first consider micro conversions.
Micro conversions are actions taken by users that are part of the funnel that leads to a sale.
9. Take advantage of new traffic sources
A complete digital marketing strategy should not only take into account traditional online marketing channels but should also cater to new digital marketing strategies that are emerging to the surface.
There are several new channels that you can explore, such as: Google Shopping Ads, Tik-Tok, Google Keen, Optimizing your content for voice search, and so on. These channels are new and likely less competitive than established channels. This means you can get better results at lower costs.
10. Use retargeting and personalization
So far, all the strategies above are related to how you can reach more people, but it's equally important to follow up with users who already know your brand, but haven't yet become customers.
This is known as “retargeting” or ”remarketing”. With retargeting, you can show certain ads to users who visited your website (or social network page) but didn't convert.
11. Work on conversion optimization
What is conversion optimization? In simple terms, conversion optimization is the process to follow to optimize your website so that a higher percentage of visitors will take the desired action.
In short, a digital marketing strategy can do a lot for your business. There are many online channels to choose from. They all vary in price, range potential, usability, and purpose. What you need is a solid combination of channels that best suits your business.
What is the Best Strategy for Digital Marketing?
After knowing how to build a competitive digital marketing strategy, make sure you choose the right strategy. Here are some of the best digital marketing strategy choices to date:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SE0)
The term SEO must be familiar to those of you who are used to running a business online. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, namely efforts made to optimize search engines.
This means that the website that you manage can be ranked in the highest search engine rankings. So, when internet users search for information, products or services using certain keywords, Google will display related search results.
SEO is one of the best digital marketing strategies. With the right SEO techniques, your website can appear on the search results page or the top Search Engine Result Page (SERP). SEO will be very useful in increasing website traffic and brand visibility.
2. Email Marketing
Apart from SEO, email marketing is also known as one of the best digital marketing strategies. So, if you want to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, why not choose email as a marketing medium?
Who says email marketing is an old-fashioned way of marketing a brand or product? In fact, email marketing is very useful in retaining loyal customers.
Apart from that, there are many other advantages of email marketing that you can get when choosing this digital marketing strategy. Marketing via email can be in the form of special offers such as discounts and cashback, useful tips, information on new products or services, and so on.
In order to maximize the results of email marketing, find out more about the types of email marketing from now on.
3. Social Media Marketing
Who doesn't know what social media is or social media? Currently there are many social media platforms that have a large number of active users, such as Instagram. Even TikTok is now a platform that is increasingly popular with people.
Apart from offering entertainment content, TikTok and Instagram allow their users to be creative in creating interesting content. Both also make it easier for users to shop and get the products they need. Lower prices, free shipping and other special offers will further complement the shopping experience of social media users.
So, currently social media marketing is the right choice for business people to be able to reach a wider audience and potential customers which will affect sales and income levels. It's no wonder that until now social media marketing is still the best digital marketing strategy choice.
If you want to maximize digital marketing results through social media, you should find out what are the social media marketing trends for 2024.
4. Content Marketing
Furthermore, you also have to remember how important content marketing is in digital marketing. Content marketing or marketing through content is the right strategy to be able to reach, involve, and connect businesses with customers or clients. Of course through a variety of unique and interesting content.
Some examples of content that you can use to market your products or services digitally are blogs or websites, videos, social media, podcasts, infographics, and others.
The goal of this one digital marketing strategy is to use keywords that will always be remembered by the audience or potential customers. So, they will be affected and interested in considering or even directly choosing the product or service that you offer.
Conclusion
In order to achieve your goals and maximize the expected results, you must know how to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. In addition to having careful planning, the selection of media or channels is also very important to note.