It is difficult to do anything without a strategy. Running a business or promoting a brand online is digital marketing. For this to be successful, you must define your digital marketing strategy.
What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?
It is an actionable plan toward achieving a specific goal for your business or brand online. The steps within this plan are your tactics.
Why Do You Need To Define Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
As an online business or brand, a digital marketing strategy helps you narrow down the most profitable digital channels and tools for your promotions and growth.
Such channels may include:
1 – Email marketing
2 – Paid ads
3 – A blog
4 – Doing a podcast
5 – Organizing a webinar
6 – Optimizing your content for search engines
7 – Producing free educational resources specific to your niche, among others.
It is always good to combine a selection of these channels for maximum results. Sticking to a channel often leads to wasted funds and missed opportunities. You wouldn’t want that.
Where To Start
Like every strategy, your digital marketing strategy must be divided into these 3 parts:
1 – A diagnosis of the problem. Failure to diagnose or identify a challenge would lead to repeating the same mistake.
2 – A method, a policy or an approach for dealing with this challenge.
3 – Byte-sized steps for implementing this method
Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Once you identify the problem your business or brand is facing online, now is the time to create a plan, a strategy. Here’s how to develop an actionable digital marketing strategy for your business or brand.
Review Your Goals—Short-Term and Long-Term
You had a goal before you set out to build a business or a brand. What was it?
Generally, a goal defines where you want to go. If your current goal is all muddled up, it is time for you to take another look at it. With this done, redefine your goal.
As an online business or brand, your digital marketing strategy is only as good as your defined goal. Your strategy cannot outperform your goal.
Review Your Target Audience
Businesses and brands often set out with a target audience in mind. Usually, this helps them craft the message they want to put out.
However, audiences shift from time to time because of changing interests, demography, locations, etc. For instance, we have seen Facebook redefine its primary audience several times.
When Facebook first launched on February 4, 2004, the Harvard students were the target audience. You’d agree with me this is no longer the case.
Twitter took off in 2016 as an SMS-based communication system used between a group of friends to share their status updates. Initial users accumulated more SMS bills. The entire outlook of Twitter has changed.
Goals and audiences can be reviewed and redefined.
Define Your Ideal Customer
Let’s say your business or brand caters to the youth. There is no generally acceptable age range for this group. In Nigeria, it is 18 – 35. The United Nations fixes it at 15 – 24.
You should, however, identify the range that works for you. Which gender in this range is more likely to want your products or services?
What level of education do you need to address in your promotions?
Is location a factor?
Sorting these and other factors out is referred to as building a customer avatar or persona. In essence, you are trying to define the qualities of those who are the best fit for the product or service you offer.
There is a market or audience for every product and service. Not everybody in this audience is your ideal customer.
Review Your Marketing Channels
Digital marketing provides your business with several digital media for promoting your brand or business.
A digital marketing strategy helps you pinpoint the channels, and platforms, best-suited for your product or service.
Social media is a channel. TikTok, Twitter and Facebook are platforms.
Native advertising is a channel. Adcash, Propeller Ads and MGID are platforms.
Identifying your target audience and the ideal customer makes it easy for you to know where to find your customers or clients. Ultimately, this simplifies pinpointing the best channels and platforms to reach your customers or clients.
Review Your Message
The whole essence of going through steps 1 – 4 is to get you here. You could get all the above right and still misfire on the message you are putting out.
The message you’d send to an old customer or client should be different from what you send to new ones.
Similarly, some are just hearing about your product or service for the first time.
These days, even one size does not fit all. Your message should be able to address your audience or ideal customer at their current stage in the customer journey.
Unfortunately, even the best plans fail. The best digital marketing strategy can still fail if not reviewed periodically. Also, keep an eye on your tactics.
As stated earlier, your strategy must include tactics for it to succeed. Your tactics must be actionable or practical and measurable.
Some Digital Marketing Tactics You May Want To Pay Attention To
Email Marketing
Most marketers are hamstrung into their current situation by their undoing. For example, what are you doing with your list of buyers/customers or clients?
For example, you have a list of 200 people who have ordered and paid for high ticket products that cost as high as $500 per unit and above. What can you do with such a list?
First, you can remarket to them. Every time you have a similar or related product or service, send an email with the update. A 10% conversion from this broadcast equals 20 sales or subscriptions without running ads. That’s something!
Imagine what you could do with a list of over 1000 actual buyers!
Second, upload the list to generate custom and lookalike audiences. A custom audience allows you to run retargeting ads to people who have seen your ad or bought from you in the past.
A lookalike audience is an audience that closely resembles those in your custom audience.
My emphasis is on email marketing. A funny business could happen to your advertising account. You could be left on the fringe for some time before you start running campaigns again. In the long run, your digital marketing strategy gains more from email marketing.
Copywriting
Another thing most online marketers and business owners have lazily avoided is copywriting. It’s a grave error.
You need copywriting skills for practically everything you do online as a brand or business owner. Mastering the art and science of selling with words can spell the difference between a successful business and a dying brand.
A well-written email, blog or sales copy can revive your business or brand.
Here are a few statements on the importance of copywriting to any business or brand –
“There’s no greater skill in Business, than being able to assemble a compelling sales argument in writing or on Camera. If you’re Good at Copywriting, You’re going to do a lot better than if you weren’t good at Copywriting. It’s the shortest path to Financial Freedom.” – Frank Kern, Direct Response Internet Marketing Consultant & Copywriter.
Emmanuel Johnson, the Founder of Havanzer said,
“Copywriting is the #1 reason people buy something. Nothing happens in business without great Copywriting. If I had to choose one skill, It would be Copywriting”
Neil Patel is a popular British Entrepreneur and digital marketer. In his view,
“So you need to be fluent in copywriting. Why? Everything in business revolves around it. Most companies report that content marketing (and copywriting) increased both the quantity and quality of leads.”
Explore Other Advertising Platforms
Then, there is the matter of overreliance on one advertising platform like Facebook. All must not start and end with Facebook ads. What happened to Google ads, Microsoft ads, Twitter ads, YouTube ads, etc.?
Are you afraid of the learning curves? There isn’t much you can do about them. There are learning curves in everything we do. The key to mastery is to keep learning and implementing your discoveries.
You can review some of the best advertising platforms to try here.
Set Up a Blog
Most of us, myself included, think blogging is a burden. So, we burn cash on advertising. A grave mistake.
One of the best validations of blogging I have seen online is from a 2014 post from HuffPost. See a screenshot of the highlights.
Most people who are against blogging do so because of the writing involved. If that’s your challenge, you can outsource it to our team at PaidTraffik.
Don’t Stop Learning. Keep Testing. Don’t Get Stuck
This could be the most important thing you should pay attention to. Most marketers and business owners max out too early. They get comfortable with the little knowledge they have gathered and are quick to dismiss opportunities for further learning.
Facebook algorithm changes almost from quarter to quarter. Significant changes happen from year to year. What you knew last year will barely hold its own against the current environment. Changes happen!
Ecommerce has experienced significant evolutions since the pandemic. An increasing number of merchants are now sourcing locally than from the international market. They look for big-time importers and retail from them. What is your approach? Must your goods come from China or Turkey? Then, you have got another thing coming!
Test your offers.
Review your copies.
Explore new audiences.
Lastly…
If you need help creating or reviewing your digital marketing strategy, simply book a free 30 – 45 minutes strategy call with us. You’d be glad you made this call.