Strategy How to Create Your Digital Marketing Strategy—The Wunder Method Elizabeth Holloway Strategy 7 mins read Sep 16, 2024 Marketing your brand is no small feat. It takes a lot of careful planning and attention to detail to execute campaigns that get results. There are a lot of decisions to make: Which channels should you be on? Do you need to be on every channel? How do you keep brand voice consistent and recognizable in every context? It’s all too easy to get lost if you don’t have some kind of plan in place. That’s where a digital marketing strategy comes in. This is your secret weapon for maximizing your ad spend and hitting your KPIs. Today, we’re going to explore everything that makes up a rock-solid digital strategy that’ll hit sales targets while giving you room to maneuver and grow. What is a digital marketing strategy? A digital strategy is the high-level plan for using online channels to establish your brand’s digital presence and achieve specific goals and objectives relating to your marketing efforts. These channels can include: Search engine marketing (SEM) Social media Display ads Video ads Email marketing Content marketing Websites and landing pages Your digital marketing strategy is going to outline your short- and long-term goals, as well as the tactics you intend to employ to achieve them. Why do you need one? Having a holistic digital strategy ensures that your marketing efforts are aligned with your business goals. It will provide a clear direction for your marketing campaigns and allow you to allocate resources more efficiently to maximize impact. Your digital strategy will also facilitate more effective performance measurement and analytics. The Anatomy of a digital marketing strategy Your digital marketing strategy is going to have several components that each serve a valuable purpose. From SWOT analysis, to buyer’s journeys and content creation, a comprehensive strategy will cover all bases and simplify the process of planning and launching all of your marketing efforts. Competition Before you can start laying out your digital strategy, you’ll need to do some market research. Understanding who your competitors are, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, will help you determine the best way to position your brand. You’ll want to conduct something called a SWOT for each of your competitors. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It’s a strategic planning tool that is used to help an organization identify and understand key factors that can influence their success or failure. It can be helpful to do a SWOT for your brand, as well. Audience Conducting audience research is an essential component of your digital strategy. Before you can start creating content and designing campaigns, you need to understand who exactly you intend to target with your marketing initiatives. Audience research typically includes the following: Demographics: the characteristics of population segments used to identify consumer markets. Psychographics: the psychological attributes of population segments used to understand the behaviours of consumers. Geographics: the practice of dividing a market into smaller, more manageable segments based on geographic location. With this research, you can create personas, which will put a face on the different segments of your audience. Each persona should include demographics like age, gender, and profession. It should also identify primary pain points, needs and wants. For each persona, you can create messaging designed to move them through every stage of the buyer’s journey. Channels Every channel has its benefits, and the more channels your brand appears in, the more visibility you garner for your brand. That said, some channels will be better suited to your brand mission and goals. If you have limited resources, it’s a good idea to single out the channels where you are the most likely to be successful. Your audience research can help you narrow down the areas you’ll want to focus on. Story Marketers love to talk about storytelling. That’s because in a very real sense, the human brain is wired for story. It’s one of the most effective ways to communicate information in a way that is both memorable and resonates with your audience. Marketing stories can seek to inspire an audience, to educate them or even to convince them of a marketing message. Before you get your marketing machine up and running, take the time to outline the stories you want to tell your audience about your brand, as well as your offerings. These stories are the vehicle through which you move your audience into each phase of the buyer journey. Content & creation process Content is where you put all your research and planning into action. It’s how you express your brand to your target audience. Within a digital marketing strategy, there should be a content strategy that outlines the kind of content that will help you achieve your marketing goals, as well as the steps and people involved in production. Having a framework for your content creation process will streamline production and avoid unnecessary time spent planning every piece of content. Measurement If you’re familiar with SMART goals, then you know that measurement is a key component to success. This means defining KPIs and deciding on the metrics you’re going to use to measure the performance of your campaigns. You should also take care in choosing the right channels for your marketing efforts. You’re better off focusing on improving your performance on a few key channels than to overextend your resources trying to be present on every channel. The metrics you use to measure performance are going to be determined by the specific goals you lay out. That said, here are some of the most standard metrics that track performance: Return on Investment (ROI) Website traffic Conversion rate Click-through rate Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Bounce Rate Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Taken together, these metrics will give you a comprehensive view of campaign performance, which will empower you to make data-driven decisions about future marketing efforts. Build in scalability and flexibility As they say, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. You should assume that you will have to deal with changes, whether they’re due to market shifts or the growth of your business. The best strategy is flexible and responsive to your needs. And, if implemented well, should lead to a level of growth that has you scaling up your operations and marketing efforts. What’s the takeaway? Your digital marketing strategy is the master plan to align your marketing efforts with your business goals. Effective marketing takes a lot of work by teams of people. It can be easy to get lost in the details, but with a digital strategy in place, you can ensure that all your work gets the results you’re striving for. If you’re at a loss for what your digital marketing strategy should be, take this as your sign to reach out. Share This Article Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email
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