Facing an era where your brand’s communications need to be tailored and planned for an infinite amount of digital channels can seem daunting to say the least.
The growth of digital users over the past years has undoubtedly brought with it major opportunities for small businesses. This include connecting with potential customers and obtaining more accurate targeting data that can help you make better-informed decisions. However, with the proliferation of new marketing channels comes the need to create an integrated approach to effectively tackle them.
But how do I go about creating a Digital Marketing Strategy for my business that is focused on the needs of the new digital consumer? You can follow our 4 easy stages to implement a successful strategy.
Situation Analysis
No matter if you are planning for traditional or digital marketing, you should always start your marketing strategy with a market analysis that involves thorough research on your target customers, competitors, influences on purchase behaviour and, of course, the external and internal factors that can affect your digital marketing performance.
Objectives & Goals
Once you have a clear picture of your business setting you should define the long term and short term goals and objectives you aim to achieve with your digital marketing efforts. The objectives you set for your campaigns must establish a clear and specific direction to attain your commercial goals.
Your overall goal could be to expand the business and in order to do this you can set out the objectives to increase website transactions by a certain amount and final revenue. But how do you meet your objectives?
Action Plan
The action stage is the favourite amongst many digital marketers. It is when you get to use all the research you’ve done up to this point in order to carry out strategic steps that will lead you to achieve all your marketing goals. In the case of a business who wants to increase their website transactions, a potential action could be to encourage higher-end transactions by emphasising the value proposition or even by implementing discounts (that are still of a higher value to other products and ones that still offer a good profit margin). Or maybe, it could be to improve the user experience of the website so it ensures a smoother conversion path and avoids potential customers to drop out mid-purchase.
But, whatever you define as your plan of action you need to establish a way to be certain it has met your objectives.
Performance Measurement
When creating your strategy, the final thing to include is performance measurements. Ultimately, you’re defining what will be classed as success and what will be classed as failure. You’ll need to measure the performance of the campaign, at different points throughout the execution of the strategy, to see if you’re on track to hitting your targets. This will give you the flexibility to change, modify and re-evaluate the work your are carrying out, if you’re not getting the desired results.
When measuring performance, it’s important to set short, long and medium term objectives. For instance, a business owner may want to increase the amount of visits to his site over a 12 month period by 100 visitors a day. Rather than wait 6 months to find out if the campaign is successful, they can set a short term goal (3 months) of 25 more visitors a day, a medium term goal (6 – 9 months) of 50 to 75 visitors a day and a long term goal (12 months) of 100 visitors a day.
This is just an overview of how a digital marketing strategy is created. If you’d like to find out more about creating a digital marketing strategy for your business, please feel free to get in touch.
Posted in Marketing Mondays