Strategic digital marketing is a set of planned activities to achieve specific business objectives online. The complexity may vary depending on your business size and long-term goals. However, you can develop even the complicated strategies following a simple template that we are giving you here.
For your strategic digital marketing, you need to conduct research and define your goals first. Then you collect the necessary information about your audience to generate and nurture your leads. Finally, you will need to take care of your returning clients and automate the whole process.
Let’s elaborate on the process right below.
Strategic Digital Marketing
The goal of digital marketing is to increase revenue while improving the relationship with a business’s audience. These goals can only be achieved with consistent actions within the most profitable channel at the correct time.
When you build a proper strategy for your digital marketing, you can learn more about your business, get crucial data, build a structure for your actions, and overall increase the ROI of your business.
The Components of Strategic Digital Marketing
The Components of Strategic Digital Marketing are the foundation for success in today’s digital marketing landscape. A sound strategy must take into account the ever-changing landscape and the customer’s journey. The goal is to reach the customer at the right time, with the right message, through the right channel.
The Components of Strategic Digital Marketing are:
- A clear understanding of the customer’s journey
- The right mix of channels to reach the customer
- Relevant and targeted messaging
- Continuous optimization and measurement
So, Where Should You Start?
Every plan starts with thorough research and defining your goal according to your research. Next, you will need to collect data about your target audience. Once you have collected sufficient data, you can start building leads for your business.
After building leads, you need to nurture your leads to convert them into paying customers. Then you will need to build better relationships with your customers to make them come back and advocate for your products or services.
Once you have successfully gone through the whole process, you will need to automate the whole process to focus on other aspects of your business. Let’s discuss the whole process step by step:
Step 1: Thorough Research and Defining Goals
If you already have an existing business website, you first need to find out if there is a way to improve your SEO strategy. SEO strategies are crucial for bringing your website to the top place of the first page of search results. The higher your website places in the search results, the more traffic you can generate.
Secondly, conduct a competitor analysis to find out what your competitors are doing better than you and where they are not doing well. Find out the gaps in your competitors’ SEO strategies and build a solid SEO strategy for your website.
Additionally, you can ask your consumers about your brand and what changes they would like to see. You may not get a proper response 100% of the time; however, your responses will help you get valuable insights.
If you are just starting out or have gone through all the steps above, you will need to choose your business channel now. Start with the most suitable one and gradually expand to other channels.
Once you have conducted all those research, set your goals and time to achieve those goals.
Step 2: Gather Data About Your Audience
You will need an audience to conduct your business. Your digital marketing initiatives will connect those audiences with your business. Therefore, keeping those audiences in mind, you will need to fabricate your digital marketing strategies.
So, create a buyer persona or avatar to get a solid idea about your audience. Include appropriate data regarding your audience’s online behavior, preferences, and habits. Google Analytics can help you in this manner by giving you real data.
With this data, you can generate highly relevant campaigns, ads, and email marketing strategies.
Also Read: If you own a small business, you may consider outsourcing your marketing. Here are the benefits and drawbacks of small business marketing outsourcing.
Step 3: Lead Generation
Lead generation is an important part of digital marketing strategy, and you will need to find creative ways to generate leads constantly.
Google Ads can help you exceptionally in this manner. When you run ads on Google, audiences with relevant search histories will see your ads. If you execute your ads properly, it will convert a segment of website visitors into leads.
You can also utilize relevant social media websites to run your ads. You can ask your social media followers to subscribe to your website. You can encourage them to share their contact information.
Offering your audience something of value in exchange for their contact information has often shown the best results in generating leads. Free giveaways and shoutouts from influencers have also shown significant effectiveness in generating leads.
Learn to craft your first successful online ad campaign and generate more leads.
Step 4: Lead Nurturing
Once you have generated leads, you need to start them to lead through your sales funnel and turn them into paying customers. Those leads have already given them their contact information to communicate with them. So, you give them something of value to stay on their contact list.
Content marketing and email marketing are two effective ways to nurture your audience. You generate helpful content for your subscribers and send them via email. Also, you can ask your audience to take part in surveys to help gather more information.
Then you can utilize that information to personalize your campaign to engage and entertain your audience. However, if you are asking your audience to participate in a survey, ensure that it doesn’t take much time from them. The survey should be brief and specific to help you get better insights into your audience.
Tips: Learn how to reach a worldwide audience and provide your business with the stepping stones it requires to grow and expand.
Step 5: Building Better Relationships with Consumers
Once a consumer purchases products from you, you should take measures to build a relationship with them. Start with a thank you note and ask them for feedback.
The customer service experience can greatly impact your digital marketing strategies. With good customer service, you will be able to build long-term relationships with your customers and convert your business into a recognizable brand.
Also, ask your returning customers to become advocates for your brand. You can offer them discounts on your product or service whenever a new audience comes from their reference. This measure can help you generate better leads and help your business grow exponentially.
Step 6: Automating the Process
Once you have gone through all the above steps, you will learn what works for your business and what doesn’t. Now it’s time to automate the whole process.
Start by creating automated email workflows to send sequences of emails to your subscribers at various stages of your sales funnel. There are several automation tools to help you with this step.
You can also take advantage of this automation on the social media channels of your business. With these automation tools, you can schedule notifications, text messages, and social media posts.
When you automate those steps, you will get more time to plan for your next strategies while generating valuable leads and sales.
Tips: Are you a small or medium-sized business looking to improve your marketing? Discover effective bootstrap marketing tactics for SME success.
Common Mistakes Businesses Make When it Comes to Digital Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, businesses often make the mistake of thinking that they can handle it themselves. However, digital marketing is a complex and ever-changing field, and it takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with the latest trends and best practices.
As a result, many businesses end up hiring an agency or consultant to help them with their digital marketing, which can be expensive and time-consuming. The common mistakes businesses make when it comes to digital marketing are:
- Not having a clear strategy: Without a clear digital marketing strategy, businesses will struggle to achieve their desired results.
- Not allocating enough budget: Digital marketing can be expensive, and businesses need to be prepared to invest in order to see results.
- Not taking advantage of data: Data is key to understanding what customers want and need. Businesses that don’t leverage data will miss out on valuable insights.
- Not being mobile-friendly: With more and more people using mobile devices to access the internet, it’s crucial that businesses have mobile-friendly websites and digital content.
- Not being active on social media: Social media is a powerful tool that businesses should be using to connect with customers and promote their brand.
Bottom Line
Strategic digital marketing can help your business grow and thrive in the long run. When done well, your digital marketing initiatives can increase your conversion rate and establish your business as a brand.
There are several online courses available for you to learn about digital marketing. However, it is wise to learn about different portions of digital marketing to get an in-depth idea of each step. Try learning content marketing, designing online ad campaigns, researching and converting your ideal consumers for starters, and dive deep from there.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How effective is digital marketing?
Digital marketing can be very effective if it is done correctly. Many factors make a digital marketing campaign successful, including choosing the right platform, creating engaging content, and targeting the right audience.
How many digital marketing channels are there?
There are a variety of digital marketing channels that businesses can utilize to reach their target audience. These channels include email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.
What makes a good digital marketing strategy?
Factors contributing to a successful digital marketing strategy include a well-defined target audience, a clear value proposition, a focus on generating quality leads, and a consistent brand presence across all digital channels. Additionally, an effective digital marketing strategy should be continuously monitored and adjusted based on performance data to maximize results.