Modern consumers and businesses are online most of the time. So if you want to reach them and expand your customer base, you need to market yourself on the online platforms they use.
However, effectively navigating today’s ever-changing digital landscape requires an extensive marketing background and knowledge of how various strategies work. Unfortunately, without digital marketing strategy consultants guiding their campaigns, businesses resort to one-size-fits-all techniques or end up chasing online trends blindly.
But marketing your brand without building a strategy first or conducting digital marketing strategy planning is a recipe for failure. As with any undertaking, jumping straight into execution without any digital marketing strategy consultation leads to an uncoordinated course of action, resulting in wasted resources and low return on investment (ROI).
To achieve long-term business success, you need to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy grounded on data and tailored to your company’s needs. But what is digital marketing strategy exactly? And what are the steps in the strategic marketing process? We answer these critical questions and more in the following sections.
What Is Digital Marketing Strategy in the First Place?
A digital marketing strategy is the foundation of any digital marketing campaign. It’s a series of executions meant to be performed on thoughtfully selected online channels to help organizations achieve their specific digital marketing goals.
With this definition, what is digital marketing strategy in the context of business growth?
To answer this question, it’s worth noting that digital marketing isn’t simply the act of marketing your brand online. Instead, digital marketing strategy planning involves analyzing what your business is doing right – and what it’s not – so you can target an audience and convert them into paying customers more effectively moving forward.
Neglecting the importance of strategic planning for marketing activities makes it difficult for you to:
• Find and fix your digital marketing mistakes
• Get the most out of your digital platforms
• Grow your sales pipeline and build your customer base
• Outperform your competitors
On the other hand, creating a digital marketing strategy first enables you to:
• Determine gaps in your executions
• Improve your audience targeting and expand your reach
• Increase traffic, leads and conversions
• Grow your brand and compete with industry giants
Learning how to create a digital marketing strategy also gives you some quick wins. Following a strategic marketing process helps you start on the right track and makes it easier for you to scale your efforts in the future.
How To Create a Digital Marketing Strategy: A Quick Guide
Whether you entrust your online marketing efforts to a digital marketing strategy agency or market your brand on your own, it’s essential to understand how digital marketing strategies are built.
Digital marketing strategy development is the process of creating action plans that guide you in achieving your brand objectives. This step is crucial to the overarching goal of hitting your business targets and securing your competitive edge in the online marketplace.
Ready to dive into a productive session of strategic planning for marketing? Here are the steps you’ll need to take with your digital marketing strategy consultants or internal team:
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Start With Setting SMART Goals
The first step in developing a marketing strategy is setting your goals. Goal setting is crucial because it gives you direction; it helps you understand where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. However, you can’t just pursue objectives that you think are good.
A digital marketing strategy example worth following is one founded on the SMART marketing goals:
• Specific: Your goals must be as clear and as detailed as possible. For example, a specific goal would be to increase your lead-to-customer conversion rate by 20 percent by the end of Q2 2022.
• Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable, allowing you to track your progress. Our specific goal earlier is also measurable because it lets you know when you’ll succeed – when you’ve reached the 20 percent increase in your conversion rate.
• Attainable: Your goals must be achievable depending on the skills, resources and time available to you.
• Relevant: Your marketing goals must also be relevant to your business. They should address your business needs and bring you closer to your goals as a company.
• Time-bound: Finally, your goals must have a deadline by which they should be accomplished. Having a time frame helps you prioritize your long-term objectives over your daily tasks.
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Study Your Audience and Create Your Buyer Personas
After understanding what the first step in developing a marketing strategy is, it’s time to move forward in the strategic marketing process by understanding who you’ll be marketing to. Creating detailed buyer personas after your digital marketing strategy consultation enables you to craft executions that genuinely speak to your audience.
But what are buyer personas? They are data- and research-based profiles of your ideal customers containing relevant information, including their age, location and purchasing power. These profiles also shed light on the challenges they face concerning your industry.
If you need help creating buyer personas for your marketing strategy, consulting your trusted digital marketing strategy agency allows you to develop solid profiles and lead your digital marketing efforts in the right direction.
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Evaluate Your Existing Digital Efforts
Before you proceed with new executions with your digital marketing strategy consultancy firm, you must first understand where you’re at right now. What is your current online presence like? Looking at your accomplishments helps you identify the best and most effective channels to focus on.
Not sure how or where to start? Have a look at your existing efforts in:
• Website audit or website design and development
• Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
• Content marketing strategy
• Pay-per-click (PPC) strategy
• Reputation management strategy
• eCommerce marketing plan
Identify your current marketing activities on these platforms and how much traffic and leads they give you. But if you aren’t sure how to audit your existing marketing strategy, consult with a digital marketing strategist to take that next step forward.
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Craft Your Digital Marketing Strategy Using Your Data
Now that you have goals to pursue, a buyer persona to target and an online presence to start from, all that’s left to do is put your marketing strategy together. This step involves crafting the general approach and specific tactics you will implement to achieve your marketing objectives. It may also include finding strategic marketing consulting firms to help you develop a data-driven game plan.
Proven Results From Strategy-First Digital Marketing Strategy Consultants
A thorough and growth-oriented digital marketing strategy planning enables businesses to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, reach their target audience and generate the sales they need to grow. This is why our marketing strategy consulting agency believes in building structured and data-driven strategies in any digital marketing project.
Some time ago, a multiple-location property restoration company tapped our digital marketing strategy consultancy to create and execute a digital marketing plan tailored to its goals. Following our strategy-first approach, our digital marketing strategy consultants implemented custom SEO, PPC, online reputation management (ORM) and content marketing strategies for each franchise’s local pages.
After a year, our marketing strategy consulting firm generated more than 89,000 leads across 180 locations, along with an average PPC conversion rate of 13.5 percent.
It’s Time To Build a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy
If you want to launch a successful digital marketing campaign, you must focus on strategy first.
Fleshing out your game plan before anything else helps you understand where you are now, where you want to be and how to get there. On the other hand, failing to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy or bypassing strategic planning for marketing sabotages your business’s growth potential.
Now that you’re equipped with these insights, it’s time to get to work! You can choose to get the ball rolling with your internal team, testing different strategies along the way or getting inspiration from digital marketing success stories.
Or you can partner with an experienced digital marketing strategy consultancy firm to launch data-driven strategies from the get-go and set a digital marketing strategy example for others to follow! Thrive can be that partner for you.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency has been providing strategy-focused digital marketing services to thousands of businesses since 2005. Our data-driven digital marketing strategy consultation sessions have enabled our clients to develop robust digital marketing strategies, leverage the right platforms and build a strong sales pipeline.
Ready to jumpstart your marketing strategy development with one of the best strategic marketing consulting firms out there? Get in touch today, and let’s start creating an online marketing plan that drives real results.
