The Best Step by Step Guideline to Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The New Year is here and this means one thing for marketers. No, it does not mean that it is time to go on vacation and rest (although it sounds like a good idea). It means that the time to think about the next year has arrived.

What we mean by thinking about this new year is, of course, the marketing strategy. Your business (or business of your customer) will depend on the ever-changing digital landscape, so if you do not develop a comprehensive marketing strategy, things might get ugly.

Depending on the size of the business, the digital marketing strategy might have several goals or a lot of them. A unified and comprehensive strategy that helps to remain focused on these goals is certainly needed this year if one wishes to be productive and successful.

All right, let’s get to it. Let’s review the fundamentals of your digital marketing strategy.

1. Target Audience

Not only you have to identify the people that could be your potential customers but also outline their personas to ensure that your marketing plan is legitimate.

Earlier, marketers defined quantitative (demographic) and qualitative (psychographic) information about the customers that involve their location, age, income, job title, goals, challenges, hobbies and interests, and priorities.

However, you will need to outline their personas that include possible names, character traits, tools they use during work, their supervisors, job responsibilities, social networks, and other information.

We recommend using MakeMyPersona from Hubspot to help you automate this task.

2. The Buying Cycle

Every company knows the sales cycle, but what about the buying cycle? It includes three main stages such as awareness, consideration, and purchase, and it’s very important to improve your sales.

This cycle allows to get into buyer’s shoes and understand when and why they make the decision to purchase.

There are also many other aspects to consider at this stage:

• Where are customers dropping out of the funnel?
• What are the effective strategies to drive top-funnel traffic?
• Are there any ways to drive more low-funnel traffic?
• How our pipeline can be nurtured better?

3. Tools

Having the right tools pays off in any job. Without proper tools, marketers cannot really engage customers and achieve goals as well.

For example, tools are needed to measure a marketing goal and break it down into smaller goals to make sure that everything gets completed. It is vital to use the right tools for the job as well.

Have a look at this list of digital marketing tools gathered by Sprout and define which ones can work for you.

4. Competitors

To uncover opportunities and develop better solutions the next year, you need to analyze the competition on the market and study other companies.

“In this situation, it is critically important to be unbiased about the capabilities of your company and competitors and make realistic decisions,” says Matt Whittaker, a senior marketer.

“For marketing strategy for our essay writing service, we visited hundreds of competitors’ sites to make sure everything is covered.” Here are the most important things you need to consider in your digital marketing strategy:

• What are my competitors doing that I do not?
• What are my competitors doing differently than I am?
• Are they doing better?
• In what areas I am doing better than my competitors?
• How do the competitors address the value proposition?
• How can I be different?

5. Goals

One of the most important rules in digital marketing says that the goals of marketers should always be connected with the goals of the business.

For example, if the business needs to increase online conversion by 10 percent, your goal as a marketer should increase it by 30 percent or even more.

Also remember that marketing goals should be measurable and realistic in order for you to track the progress and delivery.

6. Conversion rate and landing page

These two areas ensure high conversion and more opportunities for your business, so they need to be reviewed and improved.

Even if their performance was great last year, it does not mean that they will perform equally the next year, so review them and look for improvement opportunities.

7. Promotions

As a marketer, you certainly know that promotional offers are great for getting leads. Does your company offer them? Does it have a promotional calendar developed? If the promotions are not thought out well in advance, they will fail. Consider this in your strategy.

8. Marketing Channels

When considering channels, it is recommended to consider a big picture first rather than going into details. This way, you will avoid getting overwhelmed by the volume of information.

9. Resources

For everything we have described above, sufficient resources are needed. Identify them to make sure that the plan will be implemented successfully.

Over to you!

If you need to know more about digital marketing techniques and their trends, feel free to review this report from SmartInsights.

Tags: Digital Marketing Strategy Step by Step Guideline