The significance of digital marketing continues to increase. As people increasingly devote their time to the online realm, marketing budgets are being directed more toward digital platforms. Given the multitude of possibilities in digital marketing, it’s tempting to dive straight into the action and begin implementing tactics.

Nevertheless, allocating resources toward developing a well-defined strategy proves to be one of the most effective means of enhancing your digital return on investment. A coherent strategy minimizes wastefulness, brings clarity to your endeavors, and capitalizes on existing successful practices.

Let’s dive into some steps to establish a robust digital marketing strategy:

Examine The Digital Marketing Landscape and Evaluate Your Outcomes

Establishing a strong strategy involves analyzing and evaluating key aspects. This process provides a clear understanding of your current position, competitive landscape, and customer dynamics.

• Assess your performance: Begin by scrutinizing your performance from the past year. Delve into analytics to identify successful and unsuccessful initiatives, and ascertain the reasons behind their outcomes.
• Evaluate your competitors: Dedicate time to examine the digital presence of your competitors. Fortunately, digital marketing allows easy access to public information regarding their strategies. Utilize competitive research tools such as SpyFu to obtain a complimentary analysis of their tactics.
• Familiarize yourself with your customers: Leverage Facebook Audience Insights, a free tool provided by Facebook, to unearth valuable insights about your audience’s size, demographics, behaviors, and interests. Another helpful tool is Google Trends, which allows you to explore popular topics and search trends over time.

Outline Your Strategy in Detail

Construct a well-defined strategy that aligns with your desired objectives and outlines the necessary steps to achieve them. Utilize the GSOT strategy framework, which stands for Goals, Strategies, Objectives, and Tactics, to effectively structure and align your plan.

• Define your goals at a high level, indicating what you aim to achieve. This could involve targets such as increasing sales by 5% or generating 200 event signups.
• Your strategy encompasses the approach you will adopt to attain your goals. Typically, it is based on the stages of the marketing funnel, allowing you to concentrate on aspects like awareness, interest, desire, and action.
• Objectives serve as quantifiable metrics that directly relate to your goals. For instance, if your goal is to achieve a 5% sales growth, an objective could involve generating 200 leads or reaching out to 400 individuals.

• Tactics are the specific actions aligned with your objectives. For instance, if your objective is to acquire 200 leads, you might employ a landing page featuring a webinar and leverage social media platforms to attract potential clients.
• By establishing a clear strategy, you can concentrate your efforts on the areas that have the highest potential for driving business growth. Digital marketing offers countless possibilities, but the real challenge lies in determining which actions are the most beneficial to undertake.

Define Your Target Audience with Precision

In digital marketing, you have the advantage of executing campaigns with highly specific targeting capabilities. Move beyond conventional demographic targeting and strive to be as detailed as possible. Develop buyer personas that paint a vivid picture of your ideal customers to truly understand who they are.

Build A Comprehensive Content Strategy

Based on your marketing objectives and your target audience, chart out a plan for your content. This plan should identify the main topics or content categories to be included in your execution.

Consider the following five approaches to gain inspiration for your content:

• Refer back to step one and draw ideas from your analysis of competitors and customers.
• Utilize Answer the Public, a platform that reveals the questions people are asking in search engines.
• Explore trending hashtags on Instagram. This visually-rich platform is an excellent source of inspirational content.
• Take note of Google Search suggestions, which indicate what people are searching for within your industry or category.
• Explore Pinterest, a platform brimming with visually appealing and widely shared content that often goes viral.

Select The Channels and Tactics

After identifying the content that resonates with your audience, proceed to select the channels that are most likely to yield optimal results.

Take into account the wide range of digital channels, tools, and tactics at your disposal. Evaluate each option and prioritize them based on the strategy outlined in step two. Consider how each channel can contribute to meeting your objectives and goals. By doing so, you can make informed decisions about which channels to prioritize in order to maximize your success.

Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) And Benchmarks to Measure Your Progress

Many businesses dive into execution without being able to determine if they are truly achieving results. To avoid this, ensure that each activity you invest in has a defined KPI, which serves as your measure of success. Additionally, set benchmarks to indicate what you aim to achieve. For instance, in email marketing, your KPI could be the email open rate, and your benchmark could be reaching 25% or higher. These KPIs and benchmarks provide valuable metrics to assess the effectiveness of your efforts.

Author Bio:

Sachin Agrawal is an Enterprise Architect and heads up Business & Technology at Seven Magnets. He carries expertise and a flair for writing on Management Consulting, Software & Analytics and Digital Media. Apart from distilling his technical ideas into creating innovative solutions, he is a practitioner of Haidong Gumdo and at his leisure, taps the Cajon and strums his Guitar!