THE DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY THAT WORKS

There is no doubt that in the modern world a large part of your marketing strategy has to be digital. Consumers and businesses are increasingly connected, and you want to be able to reach them where they spend the most time.

But when you are growing a business, this ever-changing digital landscape can quickly become complicated, if not incomprehensible. And then, there is already enough to do on a daily basis! How can you also create, refine, and maintain an effective digital marketing strategy?

What is a digital strategy?

Since Wikipedia doesn't know what it is, we'll explain it to you. In summary: your strategy is the series of actions that will help you achieve your goals using online marketing. The term “strategy” may sound intimidating, but building a digital strategy that is truly effective doesn't have to be complicated.

Simply put, a strategy is just a plan of action to achieve the desired goal or multiple goals. For example, your main goal might be to generate 25% more leads through your website this year, compared to last year.

Depending on the size of your business, your internet marketing strategy may involve several main objectives and many secondary goals, but going back to this simple way of thinking about your strategy can help you stay focused on achieving those objectives.

Despite this simplification of the term “strategy”, it is true that it can be difficult to start building one. Let's first see what a web marketing campaign looks like, and then we'll take a look at the seven design steps to help you create an effective marketing strategy to lead your business to success.

What is a digital marketing campaign?

It's easy to confuse you're a digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here's how to tell the two apart.

As we have already pointed out, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you reach your overall goal. Your marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions of your strategy that will help you achieve this goal.

For example, you may decide to launch a campaign by sharing some of your most interesting content on Twitter, in order to generate more leads through that channel. This campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.

It's important to note that even though a campaign spans multiple years, that doesn't make it a strategy. It is always a tactic among other campaigns to shape your overall strategy.

Now that we've learned the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let's take a look at how to build your strategy. You are ready?

How to build a digital strategy?

1) Define your target customers.

For any marketing strategy (offline or online), you need to know which target customer you are dealing with. The best marketing strategies are based on detailed buyer profiles, called a buyer persona, and your first step is to create them.

Buyer Profiles represent your ideal customers and can be created by doing research, conducting surveys, and interviewing your business' target audience. It's important to note that this information should be based on real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can lead to the wrong focus of your marketing strategy.

To get a big picture of your buyer persona, your research panel should include a mix of customers, prospects, and people outside of your contact database who come close to your target audience.

But what kind of information should you collect for your target customer profiles in order to fuel your digital marketing strategy? It depends on your business and is likely to vary depending on whether you are in B2B or B2C, or whether your product is expensive or inexpensive. Here are some good practices, but you will need to refine them according to the specifics of your industry.

2) Identify your goals and the tools you will need

Your marketing goals should always be linked to the core business goals. For example, if your business goal is to increase your online income by 20%, your marketing goal might be to generate 50% more leads from the website compared to last year to contribute. to this success.

Whatever your overall goal is, you need to know how to measure it and, more importantly, be able to measure it (for example, having the right marketing tools in place to do it). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and will depend on your goals, but it is essential to make sure that you are able to do so, as these are the metrics that will help you adjust your strategy. in the future.

3) Analyze your existing marketing and media channels.

When assessing the available marketing channels or media to use in your strategy, it helps to consider the big picture first to avoid getting overwhelmed. The POEM (Owned, Earned, and Paid) media classification is widely used by marketers and allows you to categorize the media and digital channels you already use into three categories.

Media owned

This refers to the digital assets that your brand or business owns, whether it's your website, your social media profiles, your content, or your images. These media belong to your company. This may include offsite content that you own, but that is not hosted on your website, such as a blog posted on Le Monde, for example.

Media won

Quite simply, Earned Media refers to the exposure you have gained through word of mouth. Whether it's the content you've posted on other websites, the PR work you've done, or the customer relationship you've created, media earned is the recognition you receive. You can gain media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and other people sharing your content on social media, for example.

Paid media

Paid media is a bit more self-explanatory and refers to any medium or channel that you pay to grab the attention of your buyers. This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other medium for which you pay directly in exchange for visibility.

Gather what you own and categorize each sales channel or digital communication medium in order to have a clear picture of your existing acquired and paid media.

4) Plan your owned media.

At the heart of digital marketing is your own media, which almost always takes the form of content. Every post your brand delivers can generally be categorized as content, whether it's your "About" page, product descriptions, blog posts, PDFs, infographics, or social media posts. Even the newsletter you send by email to your subscribers is marketing content! This strategy is called Inbound Marketing is about attracting visitors to your site through engaging content rather than conventional and boring advertising.

Content helps convert your website visitors into prospects and customers, and helps improve your brand image online. Once optimized, it can also boost any efforts you put into natural referencing (SEO). Whatever your goal, you will need to use the content in line with your digital marketing strategy.

To develop your web marketing strategy, you need to decide on the content that will help you achieve your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads through the website compared to last year, your "About" page is unlikely to be included in your strategy unless this page is already a generator. of turnover.

5) Analyze your earned media.

Analyzing your old earned media against your current goals can help you get a sense of where to focus your efforts. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.

You might find that a particular article that talks about you on a news site has driven a lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn converts very well. Or, you might find that LinkedIn is where most of the people relaying your content are, which in turn brings in a lot of traffic. The idea here is to map the media gained that will help you achieve your goals and those that will not, based on historical data. However, if there is something new that you want to try, don't rule it out just because it hasn't been tried yet. Test and innovate!

6) Audit your paid media.

This step involves much of the same process: You should assess your existing paid media on each platform (Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to determine what can help you meet your current goals.

If you've spent a lot of money on AdWords and haven't seen your ROI, it may be time to fine-tune your campaign or pause it to focus on optimizing another platform. which gives better results.

 

At the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of ​​which paid media platforms you want to continue using and, if so, which ones you want to remove from your strategy.

Your digital marketing strategy is unique

Your strategy document will be very specific based on your business, which is why it is almost impossible for us to create a unique digital marketing strategy template.

Remember that the purpose of your strategy document is to define the actions you are going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time. As long as it allows you to do that, then you have the basics of creating a digital strategy.

Now, it's your turn to play!