Understanding all the elements that go into digital marketing and deciding which ones will have the most effect for your company.

What is Digital Marketing?

Any advertising or marketing to your audience delivered through digital channels. This includes, not only your website, but search engine optimization, pay per click campaigns, email marketing and social media.

Having a marketing strategy in place is important now more than ever. A single, clearly defined campaign, across all digital channels, will be most effective and produce the highest ROI. This will also help you stay focused on meeting objectives.

The Marketing Strategy Process

Establish Goals

This is the most meaningful step in the process and will effect each of the following steps. This is where you define your goals as a company, your brand and more specifically, products or services. An example of a goal might be to increase sales via the website by 20%. Another would be to increase sales leads through your CRM by 50%.

Define Your Audience

You have to know who you are selling to and where they can be found. This involves defining your Buyer Persona. A Buyer Persona represents your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business’s target audience.

It’s important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

Demographics such as age, income level and interests will determine if they are using mobile devices more often than desktop. This will also determine which social media platforms they are on. Is this sector of the population more likely to be disabled? What languages do they speak and read?

Craft Messaging

Using the goals you established in step 1 and the audience data, you can now craft a message that clearly states who you are, what you stand for and why you are different than your competitors. This messaging will carry over into your “Owned Media”. Owned media is any outlet where you have control over the content, such as your website, social media channels, blog posts, images, etc.

Define User Tasks and Functions

What do you want your audience to do? These could be things like buy a product, complete the request quote form, sign up for a seminar.

Based on the audience and user tasks defined above you can now determine if your site needs to be ADA compliant, or language translation. Does your site need ecommerce or a product catalog? Other functions can include: document management, advanced search functions, user management, CRM integration, etc.

Create a Schedule of Tasks and Goals

The schedule will map out the series of actions you’re going to take to achieve the goals listed above and will include a structured timeline for your activity.