How To Create A Digital Marketing Strategy

If you want to increase your online sales or business leads now and realise the benefits of online marketing, then you need a digital marketing strategy to help guide your steps.
So here are my tips to help you create a winning digital marketing strategy:

1. Who are your customers?

Do some research into your target markets to identify segments that you can target with your offers. This is important because you can’t target everyone in the market and even the biggest companies don’t have the financial and people resources to do that.

So you should identify groups of people that have the financial means and the desire to purchase your products or use your services.

2. Customer Insight

Understand what your customers need by using tools like the Keyword Planner to research what they are searching for. This will also help you to determine the level of demand for your products or services and with that you can set more meaningful budgets. Also, create a survey with Google Consumer Surveys and post it to your website or email it to your prospects to gain greater insight into your customers.

3. Who are your competitors?

Identify your competitors and monitor their online strategy to see how you can differentiate your business. Also see what their traffic volumes are like using tools such as Compete and study their keywords to see if you can incorporate this into yours.

4. What do you want to achieve?

This is the part where you state your marketing objectives and specify when you want to achieve them by. Remember to make them specific and relevant to your goals and mission and they should be in line with meeting the needs of your customers.

5. Which markets should you focus on?

Although most of this has been covered above, you should also consider international markets that are similar to your domestic markets. The internet has made targeting overseas customers a lot easier and with the help of tools like Google Adwords, you can create country specific campaigns.

6. What are your products or services?

What is it you are selling? Promoting products and services differs, however, the main thing to remember is that you should promote benefits and not features because that is what your customers are interested in.

Try to identify a unique benefit that can’t be matched by competitors and add this in all your communications to create a competitive advantage.

7. How will you promote them?

The web has hundreds of marketing tools and channels that you can use to promote your business. You have branding and direct response tools and these include Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation, Email Marketing, Online Press Releases, Social Media, Sponsorship, Affiliate Marketing, Co-branding and many more

8. What skills do we need?

For some of the tools that you want to use to promote your website, you will need outside help. So you can hire a freelancer or work with a multi-skilled agency to get your website and products to the online world. PPC for example requires specialist experience and you should look for a Certified Google Adwords Expert to help.

9. What budget do we need to set?

Now that you’ve identified your customers and know what they need and you have greater insight into your competitors and how well resourced they are, and you have decided which promotional tools you will use, you now need to set a budget. Most importantly though, your objectives will dictate what budget you should set and when it might need revising

10. How will we check progress?

Monitoring your progress and reporting on your key metrics is important to help you discover if you are meeting your goals. You should create a spreadsheet dashboard that lists your objectives and the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will help you benchmark your progress. Google Analytics is a good resource to help you track your metrics and some of these will form your objectives.

Summary

Download my free digital marketing strategy template and start planning your online success today. It’s a simple template and you will reap the benefits of improved online campaigns and you will see a boost to your ROI.