Nowadays, the majority of our content consumption takes place in the digital world. To keep up with our reliance on technology, marketing is also going digital. This change requires brands to be present in the digital world. A successful digital presence for your brand requires a solid digital marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy is a detailed, structured plan of a company’s promotional efforts across a wide range of platforms and channels. A marketing strategy typically includes objectives, target audience profiles, content creation steps, key performance indicators, and other components.
The term digital marketing strategy is often confused with other related concepts. Furthermore, a marketing strategy is actually a comprehensive game plan outlining how to reach your target audience and convert them into paying customers. It acts as a blueprint that guides you toward your company's unique marketing goals.
A marketing tactic is a specific action that you take to carry out your marketing strategy. This also includes
Marketing campaigns are closely related to marketing strategies, but it's important to understand the difference between the two. A marketing strategy with the big picture in mind.
It defines your overall business goals, and customer goals, and how to achieve both. Moreover, a marketing campaign is a promotion aimed at achieving a specific goal according to your strategy, rather than an overall business goal.
Marketing campaigns usually have specific start and end dates. You can launch campaigns to promote new products, increase traffic, or attract new customer demographic.
Inbound marketing refers to the entire ecosystem of strategies, tools, and tactics marketers use to convert website visitors into paying customers.
Furthermore, inbound marketing is a holistic approach to attracting, evaluating quality, nurturing, and delighting customers and prospects. This is not a one-off or something that is deployed immediately or temporarily. Instead, it is only focused on long-term relationships with its customers.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a powerful B2B marketing strategy that allows you to target and select specific accounts. Its purpose is to help sales and marketing teams move leads through the sales funnel faster. Also, ABM allows you to target your most important accounts.
Additionally, ABM does not follow a common marketing approach. Instead, generate a personalized message for your target account. With ABM, sales and marketing teams work together to identify key customers and design personalized campaigns for them. ABM fosters teamwork by focusing teams on moving account information through the sales pipeline. Similarly, you can accelerate your sales cycle with ABM as the key decision maker and nurture all other relevant prospects simultaneously with specially crafted content.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and its content to achieve higher search engine rankings and increase organic traffic to your website. It includes many different tactics, such as:
Ultimately, SEO aims to organically attract exemplary visitors to generate more leads and sales.
Content marketing is all about answering people's questions and helping them understand content rather than interrupting them with unsolicited ads. It includes content like blog posts, landing pages, videos, podcasts, infographics, white papers, ebooks, case studies, and more.
In most cases, content marketing has multiple goals. You can use it to:
Marketers create content that is ideal for a wide range of users at all stages of the sales funnel. For example, a user unfamiliar with your brand and who finds your site through organic search needs different content than a potential customer who is almost ready to buy. You'll need to understand the buyer's journey and come up with unique content that meets their needs every step of the way.
Videos used to promote products, services, and brands include product demos, interviews with industry thought leaders, customer testimonials, and how-to videos. Furthermore, adding videos to your website, PPC landing page, or social media drives more conversions and sales.
KPIs can include:
Social media marketing uses social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to:
Ongoing advertising costs are required and in most cases, the website landing page is designed specifically for that advertising budget user. No more advertising dollars means less website traffic, likes, and followers.
Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a strategy where you (the advertiser) pay each time a user clicks on one of your online ads. This is usually done through Google Ads, Bing Ads, or other search engines, and it can be an effective way to reach people who are searching for terms related to your business.
However, costs can range from relatively cheap to thousands of dollars per month, depending on the size and scope of your campaign. And, when a campaign is paused, the traffic generated by that campaign is also stopped.
When users click on a pay-per-click ad, they are taken to dedicated landing pages that encourage them to take a certain action:
If you're running a PPC campaign, your primary goal might be to increase sales or leads.
Short- and long-term goals should be set and documented before deciding on a digital marketing strategy. Once you have decided on your strategy, define and document your specific goals to see if your strategy is working. Make sure your goals and objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely).
Write down all your goals, strategies, and goals so you can refer to them when measuring your success.
Before you can reach your target audience, you need to know who your target audience is. So how do you know who your audience is?
Finally, buyer personas include important demographic and psychological information such as age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Buyer personas should be central to your marketing mix as you build your strategy.
Documenting your existing digital assets can give you insight into what your business already has, then examine each one and rank them from most effective to least effective. When you're done, you'll know what needs to be improved and what needs to be built from scratch.
Let's look at an example of an SEO-focused content audit. The main ingredients are:
Continuing with the content marketing campaign example. Once you decide what to build, you need to decide how it will be executed and delivered. This generally means considerations around:
With the above in mind and your personal goals and tests in mind, you can plan exactly what content you want to create and what additional resources you need.
Once the characters are finalized, content creation is underway, and resources are in place, the next step is deciding how to deliver the content. The main consideration is whether to consider the following as content:
Most digital marketing strategies use a combination of these methods. For example, use SEO-focused blog content on your own channel such as your website, gain relevance with social sharing and PR-focused content, and allocate a budget to paid influencer content.
During this phase, you develop specific marketing strategies for each customer acquisition channel. A strategy consists of a set of actions to achieve a specific goal. Also, with a specific timeline, actions can have measurable deadlines.
Some of these actions are:
At this point, planning and market research help envision how the strategy will be executed and by which groups. The final step is to put all this together and set the plan's actions. Create a document outlining the steps required to run your campaign. In other words, determine your strategy. Think long-term when creating this material. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured schedule is the basis for strategic marketing efforts.
Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn't something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to ensure you're reaching your ideal audience, whenever and wherever they want to be contacted.
If you need help creating a concrete digital marketing strategy, vBase has got your back. vBase provides the best digital marketing strategies and tactics tailored to your own needs, contact us for a personalized quote and a 1:1 consultation on Digital Marketing Strategy for small businesses today. At vBase, we provide: