Forty-six per cent of brands don’t actually have a defined digital marketing strategy. Whereas 16% might have a strategy, it isn’t yet integrated into their actual activity according to Smart Insights. Without a plan in place, you cannot expect to grow as a business, win honours like Inspire business awards, nor can you expect to be able to measure your current efforts or even learn from your mistakes in the past.
1. Know What You Are After
Figure out your mission. You can do this by defining your company’s mission and objectives first. After all, your digital marketing strategy needs to fit into the larger picture.
Answer the following question. What is the overriding objective that you are looking to have your digital marketing strategy help achieve? For instance, if you want your company positioned as the definitive online provider for computer parts in the Europe region, it would be your defined mission.
2. Set and Measure Your KPIs:
You want to get as specific as possible with your KPIs. Use them to identify the figures that you are going to be looking to achieve with your efforts. You need to be as realistic as possible with your KPIs by effectively looking at your previous efforts with digital marketing and using them to help avoid setting your goals and expectations too high.
3. Analyse Your History
You don’t want to simply go into the planning stages without looking at what you’ve done in the past. By looking at your previous digital marketing efforts and using the successes and failures of it to set the best KPIs and execute everything better, you will be able to achieve better results.
Try to choose a specific time period you want to look at. Ideally, you want to look at a specific time period that is the same length of time you are planning for your brand new marketing strategy. For instance, you want to decide whether you are analysing a previous year, quarter or even the past month.
How to Analyse:
First, you need to figure out the time in which you are looking to analyse. Set your calendar to match it within Google Analytics. You will also want to use Google’s Benchmarking reports in the Analytics account to see how you stack up with the competition.
You want to look at and analyse your competition’s strategy and marketing efforts, as well. You want to create a competitor analysis spreadsheet of all of their own marketing efforts. You can use SEMrush for this. It will help you identify the SEO strategy they are implementing including the keywords they are targeting and the keywords that are bringing them the most traffic.
4. Know and Remember Who You Are Speaking To
You don’t want the planning stages to make you forget who you are supposed to be reaching. You should already know your audience. A lot of times a digital marketer ends up forgetting who they are speaking to. Instead, you should put it at the forefront of your mind and your marketing strategy. Speak and cater to their emotional needs and look to satisfy whatever they desire. Create well thought out personas and cater to them.
5. Develop Useful Personas
You want to begin doing this by writing down all of the demographic information about your target consumer. This includes everything from their age to their location and even their gender. Then, you will want to figure out what problems you are looking to solve for them. Figure out your target consumer’s goals, objectives, stage of life and more. This will help you create the ultimate persona for your strategy.
