6 minute read
How to Ignite Your Online Success
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Does your business have a digital marketing strategy? Because if it doesn’t, you might not be in business this time next year. Here’s why…
According to a recent study, there are 218.8 million online shoppers in the US in 2023 who spend an average of $5,381 per person. By 2026, that number is expected to grow to 230.6 million people, with the average spend per person expected to increase to $7,250.
Keep in mind that “shopping online” encompasses not just ordering, but researching what companies offer the best services and value for those services. If your business doesn’t have a digital marketing strategy, you are failing to capitalize on how consumers are most likely to find your business.
A well-crafted digital marketing strategy, whether it is for a B2B or a B2C, empowers businesses to better reach their target audience, build brand awareness, and foster customer engagement and loyalty, all of which results in sales.
Let’s take a look at the following:
- The definition of a digital marketing strategy
- How to create a digital marketing strategy
- The benefits of a marketing strategy
- How Tag Marketing can help you design and execute your strategy
Defining a Digital Marketing Strategy
It’s a plan for how a business can leverage various digital platforms and tools to achieve its marketing goals and business objectives. It serves as a roadmap for businesses to determine which online channels can best connect to their target audience and criteria to evaluate the success of using these channels and ROI achieved.
Examples include:
- Blogging and content creation around answering questions that your audience is searching for while increasing your search engine rankings
- Social media campaigns to raise brand awareness and extend the reach of your content
- Remarket your contacts by emailing them the new content you created to nurture them from a subscriber to a lead or lead to a sale
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Define your brand
Consider your unique selling points, value proposition, and the “voice” to communicate with potential customers. Take it a step further and write out a documented positioning statement. Review this “mission statement” from time to time. Make sure to convey this in your marketing especially.
Here’s a free worksheet and instructions from our friends at HubSpot to get you on your way:
2. Define your target audience
Understanding your target audience is fundamental. Conduct market research, gather demographic data, and analyze consumer behavior to gain insights into their preferences, pain points, and online habits. Defining your target audience dictates your messaging, channel selection, and content creation to effectively engage with that audience.
3. Perform market segmentation and create corresponding buyer personas
Segregate buyers into segments defined by unique needs and behaviors. Develop buyer personas for each of these segments to assess motivations for buying your products and services. Map your buyer personas to the buyer’s journey to uncover what tactics you will utilize in your marketing strategy. To help you create buyer personas.
We’ve created a worksheet for you to utilize:
4. Define SMART goals
Set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (S-M-A-R-T) goals. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, generating leads, boosting sales, or enhancing brand awareness, clearly defined SMART goals provide both direction for your digital marketing tactics (i.e., the digital channels to select and the content for those channels), as well as benchmark the effectiveness of those tactics.
To help you define your goals, we’ve created a free goal-setting worksheet to help:
5. Select the digital channel(s)
Identify the digital platforms that best align with your target audience, buyer personas, and marketing goals. Examples include any one or combination of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok), search engines (Google is king), email marketing (HubSpot, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo), content marketing (blogs, infographics, videos, eBooks, case studies, charts), influencer partnerships, or paid advertising (text, video, shopping, display ads).
Pick the appropriate channels in which your target audience goes for information and spends most of their time.
6. Create a content strategy
Content is key to any successful digital marketing strategy. Develop a content strategy that resonates with your target audience, addresses their needs, and reflects your brand’s voice.
Examples of content include any one or combination of blog posts, guest posts, video testimonials, webinars, guides, whitepages, comparison charts, instant articles, pulse articles, etc. Engaging content both attracts audience interest, but is also a tool to increase your search engine ranking, and thus become more visible to your target audience. Start off by auditing your current online footprint.
Use our free marketing audit tool to uncover lost potential:
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimizing your online presence for search engines increases visibility and organic traffic long-term. Implement on-page and off-site SEO techniques, conduct keyword research, optimize website structure, build internal and external links, and create high-quality content that satisfies search intent. SEO strategies improve your website’s ranking, driving targeted traffic to your digital assets. Start off with an audit of your current site and follow the instructions to fix or improve the errors or suggestions.
You can use our free SEO auditor:
8. Social media engagement
Social media platforms can supersede, and in some cases even replace, the importance of your website as a tool to connect to your target audience including using it for customer service. According to DataReportal, 4.62 billion people worldwide use social media.
You can also establish a strong social media presence by creating compelling profiles, posting interesting and relevant content, and utilizing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as on LinkedIn or Facebook to engage directly with your target audience.
A digital marketing strategy employs social media to build brand loyalty, develop customer relationships, and deliver marketing messages. Build a professional social media presence and start posting regularly on social media. Don’t make it too “salesy.” Make your posts helpful and engaging. Not everything in marketing is a hard sell.
Here’s a set of templates to help get you started:
Benefits of a Digital Marketing Strategy
A well-executed digital marketing strategy improves your brand’s online visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find you. In addition, a digital marketing strategy enables you to target specific customer demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring your message is addressing the right audience, maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts, and increasing the likelihood of conversions (sales).
Perhaps the biggest benefit of a marketing strategy is it is measurable. You can effectively gauge, often in real-time, whether your efforts are achieving expected results; and, if they are not, make changes and similarly evaluate the effectiveness of these changes.
Compare this to traditional marketing channels, such as print ads, where you can’t tell if someone has actually read the ad, or why someone has read the ad but taken no action, or if the ad is in any way registering with the target audience.
How Tag Marketing Helps Design and Execute Your Marketing Strategy
Tag Marketing has the experience and expertise to design, develop and execute a marketing strategy that reaches your digital customers and accomplishes your goals. Our approach is simple, transparent, effective, and adjustable — making it easier and faster to generate better-fit traffic, get more sales-qualified leads, and increase conversions/sales.
We are a digital marketing agency you can trust and grow with. Book a quick consultation with us to start the discussion on how we can help you with your strategy.