Do you know any examples of digital marketing strategies? Through this article, you will get important information about various digital marketing strategies that are popular this year. But before entering into the main discussion, let's first understand the meaning of a digital marketing strategy.
In a digital world that is constantly changing, it is increasingly important to understand the basics of digital marketing strategies and keep up with new trends. Without planning properly, your efforts will be vulnerable to failure. That's why I've put together this essential guide to building a successful digital strategy so that your efforts have maximum impact.
What is the digital strategy?
Digital strategies are several actions designed in advance to achieve business goals through the implementation of digital marketing initiatives. Digital marketing strategy focuses on using technology to improve business performance, either by creating new products or rearranging existing processes to keep up with technological developments for marketing purposes.
Well, in this way the company can determine the direction to be taken to create new competitive advantages through technology, as well as the tactics to be used to influence these changes.
Why is digital important in marketing?
The reason is really very simple, namely to adapt to technology in today's information age and to utilize digital resources to create an action plan to reach your audience and market so as to achieve business goals.
What are the steps of digital marketing strategy?
I'm sure both you and today's large corporations know that technology is critical to your business. However, it is also a shame that most of them do not have an integrated plan to grow and engage their audiences effectively. If your business doesn't have a plan, you will lose out to more digitally savvy competitors.
Without going into lengthy terms, I will try to summarize my basic knowledge of simple marketing science and combine it with current technological developments and include examples in some slightly technical sections so you don't get too confused. Here are 8 steps and examples for defining your own digital strategy.
1. Audit your current online presence
Have you ever wondered why your audience can't find you on a search engine like Google? Why doesn't your website have the traffic you want? Why do your competitors appear in search results for your coveted keywords? These are some good questions that you should answer.
You need to carry out the process of auditing your company's online presence to see where you are lacking success. If you know where you are not having success, you can create other strategies to increase your business' online presence.
Some important things that you should audit, for example, are your website, online marketing campaigns, social media profiles, local online directories, online news about your business, reviews of your business on review pages, to Google Business.
a. Website audits
You need to check whether your website has a mobile-friendly appearance? What does it mean? Can your website appearance be adjusted automatically for mobile phone users when accessed? Does the mobile display follow the size of the desktop? Then check your main page or homepage and your 'about' page to see if it has a title tag, image text and meta description?
b. Online campaign
Have you ever done or are you doing a marketing campaign or digital campaign? Digital marketing and campaigns should also be part of your audit. Once you know the goals or objectives of your previous campaign, you can check whether the campaign has achieved your goals and objectives or not.
If after checking that the campaign is not successful, you can think of other digital marketing strategies that you can do to achieve your goals.
c. Business profile on social media
If you have multiple social media channels, you should keep track of all your online profiles. You do this by checking a few things below:
- Is your username (username) for social media well chosen?
- What are your communication goals for each social media channel?
- How often do you post to support the cause?
- Has social media content performed well so far?
- Information about your audience or demographics. (Typically, social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram have features called 'insights' or 'analytics' that let you know your audience).
d. Local directory
There are usually local website directories that can write about your business on their website pages. Make sure they display your business description in accordance with your business profile and messages that truly reflect your business image.
e. Review sites or review sites
Indeed, you cannot really change the reviews or reviews that have been written by the audience, but always check each of these reviews (both positive and negative). Reviewing your audience's reviews on review platforms like Facebook, Tripadvisor, Google Reviews and others can help you understand what people are saying about your business.
If you have positive feedback, it means you're doing pretty well. But let's say someone left a bad review of your business, be sure to contact them and apologize.
Usually all online reviews, like Google Reviews, Tripadvisor, etc. give business owners the opportunity to respond to reviews. Prospects who read bad reviews about your business are more likely to trust you more and be more considerate of your business if you respond in the right tone and in a professional manner.
If you don't have reviews, it doesn't mean people don't like your business, but it could mean you aren't memorable enough in their eyes. Well, if so, you better start a WOM strategy. word of mouth marketing strategies that can help boost your business online and offline.
f. Google My Business
Have you registered on Google My Business for your business listing? If not, do it first. Google is by far the most popular search engine, which is why having a Google my business account is a good thing. This list contains all the important information about your business, such as hours of operation, contact details, and a link to your website, and provides an opportunity for customers to leave comments on your business listing.
2. Analyze Your Competitors
A competitor analysis is usually conducted to identify strengths and weaknesses, define your company's position, highlight gaps, and estimate your potential. Analyzing your competitors in the digital age is a little different from the traditional way of doing business.
To analyze your competitors in the digital age, make sure you know who your competitors are. Most companies only recognize their direct competitors, but do not recognize their indirect competitors.
Competitor analysis usually includes direct and indirect competitors. Indirect competitors are those that provide the same (or similar) solutions to identical audiences.
For example, if your business sells hair care products, your direct competitors will be similar brands of hair care products. But your real indirect competitors are industry websites, social media sites, e-commerce platforms and sometimes directory sites.
You are no longer competing with other brands that sell hair care products, you are competing with ALL SITES that cover hair care, DIY, product reviews that share the same target audience and whose goal is to get you to buy ad space on their website and platform to reach them. your target audience.
3. Define your target and persona
Next, you need to define your target audience. Your target audience is the ideal customer that you want to direct your product or service to through your marketing efforts. Meanwhile, a persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. These personas are not your customer's real identity, but rather a fictitious persona that embodies the characteristics of your business' best potential customer.
Big companies usually give their personas a name, demographics, interests, and behavioral traits for more detail. Having a target audience to a persona in detail can help you to understand the real goals, weaknesses, and habits of your customers.
But what if you are already running your business and you don't really know who your target audience is. It's easy, just create a survey and send it to your database. The contents of the survey should ask for information in the form of demographics, interests and behavioral traits of your existing customers.
The results of the survey will later explain who your target audience is. Knowing the nature, behavior and many things about your audience can keep you one step ahead in planning your digital strategy.
4. Set your goal
It's important to set goals for your business. But, in practice, we tend to generalize our goals. For example, the goal might be to “increase sales.” But then, the question that arises is how much sales should be increased? And when should sales increase? My advice, to set goals, try to make goals more specific, nominally if necessary. For example “increase sales by 10% at the end of January”.
To create your digital strategy goals, there are SMART concepts you can sample. Let's get straight to it:
- Specific: Make goals specific, clear and detailed. If necessary, there are exact numbers so that you and your team can understand and have clear benchmarks. For example increasing sales by 10% at the end of November 2020.
- Measurable: Set goals that can be measured during evaluation. In the example of "increasing sales by 10% at the end of November 2021", the 10% figure will certainly be the benchmark later.
- Achievable: It's important to set reasonable goals! The point of a goal is to challenge and motivate yourself to do something. If you set goals that are too high and tend to fly away, it can cause stress. For example, if you own a lodging business, you have the goal of “increasing sales by 10% by the end of November 2020” which can actually be achieved despite the current economic crisis.
- Realistic: Similar to the achievable concept, your goals should be realistic. For example “My business will grow to be a billion-euro business in the first quarter of 2020!” It may sound too ambitious, especially during the Covid-19 outbreak this time, don't get me wrong, ambitious is a characteristic of a leader, but maybe it would be better to start with something more realistic, remember that not all businessmen succeed overnight.
- Time-based: Yes, your goals must be time-based and have clear deadlines. When running campaigns or other marketing efforts, it is best to set a deadline for each activity. Especially when you are leading a large project, deadlines should be something that is important to plan in advance before activities begin. For an example of the goal “increase sales by 10% by the end of November 2020” make November 2020 as the milestone for achieving it. At the end of November 2020, sales have increased by 10% or not?
5. Determine your budget or budget
Making a budget or budgeting activities can be quite difficult and, frankly, sometimes a little tricky. Many businesses in practice only estimate or base their budget on expenses from the previous year. But having an 'estimate' of those expenses is actually better than nothing.
Apart from referring to the previous year's expenses, you can also use the ROI (return on investment) benchmark to determine the appropriate total budget for your digital marketing strategy.
6. Choose your digital marketing channels
Remember to always look for relevant communication channels. You don't have to have all platforms to be your digital marketing channel. Choose a digital platform where your audience resides. In order to choose the right and perfect channel to reach your target audience and persona, you should find out what platforms they are using to ‘hang out’ online, what types of content are of interest and what online activities are of interest to them.
Here is a list of digital marketing channels that are currently working properly:
- Social media marketing (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.)
- Video marketing (Youtube, Vimeo)
- SEO / content marketing
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Podcasts
- Marketing via instant messaging (SMS / Chat application)
7. Develop your content strategy and have an editorial calendar
Content strategy refers to the process of planning and managing content (visual, audio, written) for all your digital marketing channels. Content strategy is the part of your digital strategy that continually defines who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.
If you don't have enough content, you can try to do topic and keyword research first, then establish a plan about who will write articles on that topic, when to publish, and where the content should be published. You can plan your content strategy using the editorial calendar I've prepared here.
8. Measure your performance on the website
Some of you may have invested a lot of time and money into creating your own website and developing it for the “online presence” aspect of your business. Some of you may even have hired a team to design websites and even regularly write great content. All of these steps are essential to getting the most out of your website, so if you've done all of the above, you've actually invested wisely.
The next step in maximizing your website's ROI (return on investment) is to measure and analyze its key performance indicators, or KPIs. Well, this KPI depends on your own industry and type of business.
For example, there are two things you need to check, namely content and analytics. For content, make sure you have content around issues that address your industry matters and have CTAs (calls to action) to help direct your target audience to direct conversions. For content, you should have at least 300 to 400 words on your homepage for SEO purposes. These words will later be indexed by Google.
For analytics, make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console which are useful for checking your website's traffic sources, visitors, bounce back rate, average session time spent visiting the website, conversion rate, to ROI.
Conclusion
So, that's a digital marketing strategy that can be an idea for marketing your business. Make various promotional activities in your digital marketing strategy.
Promotional activities through digital can help you increase sales quickly and significantly. However, you certainly need additional capital to carry out promotional activities in digital marketing.
How? Easy enough right? Those are the 8 steps you should take when planning a digital marketing strategy for your business. If you have any suggestions for creating a better digital strategy, please share them in the comments section below.