Digital marketing is an inseparable part of many businesses’ marketing strategies. The fact that digital marketing is very measurable and affordable makes this approach to marketing very suitable for small and home businesses. Even the supporting digital marketing services, including SEO services, are now more accessible and affordable.
Every good digital marketing campaign starts with the formulation of a strategy. You need to have a clear vision of what to do and how you can reach your target audience more effectively. With a clear strategy in mind, monitoring the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign is also much easier to do. To formulate a good digital marketing strategy and venture further into the world of digital marketing, here are the steps you need to take.
Understand Your Objectives
Having clear objectives is a must. What are you trying to accomplish with your digital marketing campaign? Are you trying to raise awareness for your brand and products? Are you aiming for conversion and sales from the beginning? What is the amount of exposure you’re aiming for?
These details matter. Take your time and figure out the specific objectives you want to achieve through digital marketing. Knowing your objectives will influence a lot of things about the campaign, from the instruments you need to use, to the kind of campaigns to run.
Objectives are also handy as milestones. You can measure the success of your digital marketing campaign based on the milestones you achieve along the way. Followers growth, exposure amount, conversion rate, and even sales can be the metrics to track as a way to measure digital marketing success.
Know Your Audience
The next step, getting to know your audience, is no less important. You can’t formulate an effective marketing strategy without knowing your target audience. To get started, you only need to look at the target consumers for your products and services. They are the ones you need to reach through various digital marketing instruments.
Setting target audience segments is only the beginning. Once you figure out the target audience you want to reach, it is time to dig deeper and understand more things about them. Which social media sites do the target audience use the most? What kind of phrases (or even slang) do they use in everyday communications? How do they search for the products and services they need?
Understanding these insights isn’t easy, but it is not impossible. There are various ways you can get to know the target audience better. Facebook, for instance, allows you to learn more about your existing audience through the company’s analytics tools. The same can be said for Google and its Google Analytics and Search Console.
It is also important to understand the problems your audience face and how you – and your products and services – can solve those problems; it is one of the most important communications concepts. This a valuable insight nonetheless. With a good understanding of the audience’s problems, for instance, you can fine-tune the content you produce to deliver more value to your readers.
The Key Influencers
With a better understanding of the audience, there is one more thing you will be able to do, and that is identifying the people that influence a specific audience segment the most. Based on the emotional desires and aspirations of the audience, identifying key opinion leaders and influencers should not be difficult at all.
You can incorporate this knowledge into your digital marketing strategy. Let’s say you have identified several opinion leaders that are influential in your audience segment. You can begin the process of developing and maintaining good relationships with these industry leaders and influencers. When the time is right, it is much easier to get them to talk about your products and services and share the information with their followers.
Influencers are not only handy for influencer marketing. Maintaining genuine relationships with key influencers will also help you gain valuable product insights for future improvement. Instead of relying solely on the complaints of customers, you can tap into insights from influential people, incorporate their ideas, and get more exposure in return.
Identify Your Instruments
The details you have gathered so far should give you a clearer picture of how your digital marketing strategy should look like. The next part of the process is choosing the digital marketing instruments that suit the specific objectives and audience groups you have identified earlier.
If you’re targeting professionals and the B2B market, for instance, investing a lot in Twitter and Facebook isn’t the way to go. You want to use LinkedIn and a strong, feature-packed website to reach the right decision makers at top companies.
For connecting with retail customers, on the other hand, LinkedIn is certainly not the social media site to use. You can either use Twitter to reach a younger audience segment or optimize your use of Facebook and its tools to connect with the right potential buyers.
Other digital marketing instruments can be selected using this same approach. When choosing the best content marketing strategy to use, taking into account the target audience and their emotional desires is a must. For SEO, you want to use phrases that the target audience actually uses when searching for information online.
Set a Budget
Last but not least, set a budget for your digital marketing campaign. This too is something that’s easier to do with the insights and details you have gathered so far. You can start by looking at just how much you can afford to spend on digital marketing. Have a clear budget in mind and set it aside for a moment.
Next, begin comparing digital marketing instruments and the costs of using them. You should consider using ads as a way to gain traction at the beginning of your digital marketing campaign. The rest of the campaign can be completely organic, which means you can still achieve your goals without spending a lot of money in the process.
See if the budget you have and other details of your campaign match perfectly. Once you have the details figured out, you can begin formulating an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.
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