What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a collection of tactics that enable a company to more effectively communicate with its target audience. Think of a digital marketing strategy as a plan you can follow anytime your company interacts with someone on the internet. This includes any digital advertisements, social media posts, and marketing emails your company creates. Your digital marketing strategy will dictate your company’s online presence, so it’s important to craft it carefully and revisit it often.
Components of a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
- Understand Your Audience
Before you can begin communicating with the public, you need to decide what specific demographics you want to target. Deciding what sections of the market to focus your digital marketing efforts on is key to effective marketing. If you target too wide of an audience then your marketing will be ineffective. But if you target too niche of an audience, you won’t receive the full benefit of a well-made campaign. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. You want to cast a wide enough net that you get a good return on investment, but only to demographics who would be interested in your products.
Start by identifying the kind of people that would benefit from having your product. The exact demographics you should target depend on your industry. For instance, athletic wear companies would likely target young, active individuals. Once you have identified what individuals you would like to cater to, you can start researching what marketing style appeals most to them.
- SMART Goals
Every solid strategy begins with a good set of goals to work towards. In digital marketing, the goals you set for a campaign are meant to be SMART. SMART is an acronym that means specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you set will depend on the kind of digital marketing campaign being run. Let’s take the example of a social media campaign advertising a new product. A SMART goal for this situation might be for the social media posts to be shared 150 times in the next month.
You’ll also need to settle on key performance indicators (KPIs) for each of your goals. These will give you a method of measuring the success of your digital marketing campaign. Different KPIs are better suited for measuring different metrics. For example, likes are an incredible way to measure social media engagement, but awful at gauging the success of an email marketing campaign.
- Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is a process of gathering data about your competition to gain insights into their marketing strategies. This sort of data could be useful in a few different ways. This is because your company and the competition likely share the same target audience. Understanding how your competition is marketing to this audience might enable you to improve your own company’s strategy. Alternatively, you might be able to identify a niche in the market that your competition isn’t catering to. In this scenario, you might be able to grow your audience without many challenges. Take some time to analyze how your competition is interacting with its target audience to improve your own strategy.
Specific Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
- Focus on the User Experience
A customer’s experience shopping on a website is a deciding factor in their shopping behaviors. Online shoppers know that they have several online retailers at the tips of their fingers. This means that online shoppers will abandon a poorly-made website for a more user-friendly one. Build an intuitive shopping experience to ensure that consumers don’t abandon your website.
The checkout and delivery experience is arguably the most important part of any online shopper’s user experience. Your warehouse needs to run efficiently in order to keep up with consumer expectations. Consider implementing shipping APIs to effectively automate certain parts of the delivery process. For example, there is software available that can automatically generate shipping labels. This ensures that packages are delivered to the proper address and on time.
- Professional Corporate Training
You’ll need to work with top talent to be able to create the perfect digital marketing strategy. The most direct method of improving the skills of your team is through professional corporate training. There are several different online courses and training programs available, each with its own unique benefits. For instance, leadership development consulting can give your senior management the skills they need to effectively manage a team. There are even free courses available on digital marketing strategies that are made by reputable sources.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing is the creation of entertaining, informative, or interesting content with the intent of spurring engagement with your target audience. This includes blogging, video series, and free resources. Content marketing is a form of digital marketing that earns your website organic traffic or traffic that didn’t result from paid marketing. The most popular form of content marketing is blogging and for a good reason. A blog is easy to maintain and effective for earning shares and interactions. The most important factor in blogging is consistency. Without regular updates, many blogs will fail to pull in traffic.
