11 October 2018
Let’s begin with what a digital marketing strategy is exactly. Like any strategy, an effective digital marketing strategy is a plan of action to achieve a desired, well-thought-out goal using online marketing. Depending on the size of your business and what products or services you offer, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals with many moving parts. Frequently reflecting on these strategies can help you stay focussed on meeting the objectives you have set for your business.
What’s the Difference Between a Digital Marketing Strategy and a Digital Marketing Campaign?
While it might be easy to confuse the two, don’t be mistaken, a digital marketing campaign is not the same as a digital strategy. Instead, your digital marketing campaign is the road map that will guide you through your strategy and will move you towards reaching your goals.
In your campaign, you will utilise different marketing channels and social media sites to drive potential customers to engage with your strategy. Digital marketing campaigns can use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to drive engagement, conversations and traffic to your website, while tying together the overall goals already set in place.
Let’s Get Organised
In order to create an effective marketing plan, it’s important to not get ahead of yourself. Every decision you make along the way in creating an effective plan is very important, so it’s crucial to not skip a step. Organising all the ideas you have and prioritising the ones you want to implement into your marketing strategy is a good first step.
Content mapping, timelines and editorial calendars are just a few tools that can help you organise part of your marketing activities in a way that makes sense. You should keep the process as simple as possible and establish a clear timeframe so everyone on your team can stay focussed on the end goal.
Set Your Goals and Objectives
Do you want to increase online sales by 20%? Do you want to gain 10 new customers in the next month? Whatever your marketing goals might be, the important part is that you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of these goals. Being able to keep track of these metrics will help you adjust your strategy in the future, should you need to do so.
In setting up your goals and objectives, you will also need to identify what and who makes up your target audience. In building a ‘buyer persona,’ you should research what your ideal customer likes, wants and needs. Although it might be easy to pick and choose a few customers and base the research off of them, it’s important you try to conduct surveys, interviews or case studies to gather real data, in order to get a well-rounded, non-bias view of your average persona.
How to Implement Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The time has come now to launch your digital marketing strategy, but you’re still not sure where to start. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.
Before you spend all your time trying to reach customers through the latest social media sites, take a step back and start with one of the oldest ways to get ahold of someone via the Internet: email. Email marketing can help you connect with your audience to promote your brand and increase sales. Research shows that 85% of people who use the Internet, check their email daily. Implementing an email marketing plan can be one of the best ways to grab the attention of potential customers, because for every $1 spent, there is the potential to see a $40 return on investment.
Another key feature to add as part of your content marketing plan should be blog posts. Reports show that companies who regularly blog receive 67% more leads every month than those who do not, while 57% of marketers believe they have gained customers simply through effective blogging. Blog posts gives your business the opportunity to create a specific voice and online personality that customers can relate to. Blogs are a great way to add a variety of content to your site and gives current and potential customers the ability to get to know your business on a personal level.
In the same breath, targeted content is also a great way to hook customers. Much like a blog is written to be personal, well-written targeted content has the ability to really make your customers feel like you are taking the time to get to know them. Targeted content allows you to bypass the walls of existing content by creating videos or blog posts that are specifically for your audience.
Create an SEO Strategy
If you really want your digital marketing strategy to take off, think about creating an SEO strategy while you’re at it. By organising your websites content by topics and keywords, Google’s search engines will better understand how to read your site. If you create a landing page around your main topics first, you will rank well for keywords related to that topic when a potential customer types it in their search engine.
When creating an SEO strategy, you should start by making a list of about 10-15 short words (or short-tail) associated with your product or service. These keywords are like stepping stones that serve as the primary support for long-tail keywords that will really push visitors to your landing page over the competitions. Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase. So the more specific your keywords, the better your SEO chances are of gaining that customers 'click'.
Refuel Creative is here to help
We know this is a lot to take in and we certainly don’t want you to struggle alone. If you find yourself unable to execute all of these tasks, we are here to help! Refuel Creative aims to be an extension of your management team, providing you with strategic marketing and technology advice, and a top notch creative team to boot. We pride ourselves on delivering the best customer service paired with marketing and technology expertise to ensure they run cohesively so you can grow, without the pain.
Refuel Creative can help implement your digital marketing strategy by auditing your existing website(s) and content. By making a list and ranking your existing content on how well it performed, you’ll be able to see what worked best in relation to your current goals. The purpose of this process is to narrow down what’s currently working for your site, and what’s not, so that you can set yourself up for success when discussing a future content plan.
Another way we can help you become more successful would be to identify any gaps your plan or website currently have. If you’ve found in your research that a large portion of your customers are suffering from the same issues or pains, but you are lacking content that addresses those concerns, you might want to create some content targeted towards those issues.
If you still feel overwhelmed and would like like some more information on services we offer and how we can best help you, visit Refuel Creative online today!
Or if you prefer a call, book one in today.
