Mastering your digital marketing strategy is business critical in the current economy. Hours a day are spent online cruising the web, scrolling social media, connecting on a digital level, and consuming content. The sheer number of digital marketing opportunities can be overwhelming to tackle.
There’s social media, digital PR, search engine optimization, paid advertising, pay-per-click, and earned media. The process becomes focused and simplified by building a systematic, actionable digital marketing strategy that your team can execute one step at a time.
Here’s where to start and finish building a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing Strategy – Set Marketing Goals
The first thing you’ll need to do is define the specific goals of each marketing campaign. Don’t choose something that won’t help move the needle on your business. Stick to SMART rules and ensure the goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Here are a few examples of relevant marketing goals:
- Increase brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Increase sales or revenue
- Boost website traffic
- Build authority
- Increase engagement
Understand Buyer Avatars
Before any marketing tactics can take shape, it’s critical to know the target audience.
- What are their demographics?
- What’s their buying decision process?
- What are they searching for online?
- And where are they searching?
Get as specific as possible with age range, income level, values, challenges, and goals.
Develop A Content Plan
The goal is to target a specific customer at a specific time in their customer journey. To do that, the content within the marketing campaign must match that specific location to meet them where they are.
If they’re a cold audience, you may not ask for the sale without first engaging, educating, and entertaining them. Once they’ve warmed up and moved lower into the sales funnel, the message shifts to match.
Here are the top best practices for a solid content plan.
SEO
Search engine optimization is the process of modifying your website and content to increase the findability of your products and services on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have AI bots and crawlers that go digging for data that matches the intent of the search.
The ever-present and ever-changing algorithm determines what should be served and in what order. Optimizing website SEO to feed search engines what they want increases the chance of higher SERP rankings.
It’s more than simply using relevant keywords. Comprehensive SEO includes all three elements of optimization, including on-page (content, keywords, etc.), off-page (linking, social media, guest posts, etc.), and technical SEO (mobile optimization, site maps, etc.).
Blog Content
Blog articles are an incredibly powerful SEO tool. This practice enables the website to continually produce new and updated content on topics and solutions the target market cares about.
While keywords play into a blog content strategy, the better practice is ensuring the content’s theme matches search intent, relevant topics, helpful information, and valuable resources. Focus on the quality and intent of the content, not only the keywords.
Content Deployment
Armed with a solid content strategy, map out where it will be deployed. Where does the target audience spend their time? How will they come into contact with the content?
Remember that YouTube is a search engine more than a social platform. Searches use it to discover specific information such as tutorials or recipes.
Everything can be reformatted and recycled to fit other platforms. For example, a podcast episode can be filmed and also shared on YouTube. A blog article can be trimmed down for social media and dripped out over time. Work smarter, not harder, to spread out the content.
Paid Advertising Strategies
Organic content marketing and traffic are invaluable, but they are not fast. Leveraging paid advertising strategies in the mix of a marketing campaign can speed up the process of reaching campaign goals. The following tactics are proven and successful.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click advertising is online advertising that only costs money when viewers engage with the ad. Google and Microsoft are the top two contenders for PPC, and they will determine the cost per click based on perceived value, keyword relevance, and target audience.
This is a highly effective strategy to meet the target audience where they’re at. These ads appear in relation to search intent, as opposed to disrupting the scroll on social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing
Another highly effective digital marketing strategy is social media marketing. We already know that hours and hours a day are spent scrolling and consuming on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Organic social media marketing will play into the larger elements of a content strategy with engaging videos, carousels, and posts. This works best with a larger following, but content optimized for search engines can get more reach.
Advertising on social media is also highly effective for targeting and seeking out the intended audience. PPC advertising is discovered by potential customers searching for something specific. Social media advertising is served to the intended audience based on audience targeting, user data, and platform behavior.
Landing Pages
With both of these paid strategies, it costs to get clicks and entice people off their chosen platform or page. Where they land next should be highly targeted and remind them why they clicked in the first place.
It should reveal whatever was promised in the ad and be designed to get conversions. The “ask” should be simple and the call to action relevant and clear. Use strong headlines and a clean, uncluttered design. Conduct A/B testing with two landing pages and determine which is more successful.
Analytics
Google Analytics is a free and robust reporting tool that is easily installed on the website that will provide valuable insights into website performance, traffic data, visitor page interaction, and content statistics. Pair this tool with a PPC campaign and learn a high volume of data in a short period of time. Give the campaign a few days or weeks to get traction and make any necessary adjustments.
Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy SMART and Effective
Use this outline to plan and deploy a successful digital marketing campaign. Or better yet, contact a comprehensive digital marketing agency like Full Circle SEM to take care of everything for you.
