How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy: 5 Tips That Actually Work
A solid digital marketing strategy is important for the success of any small business.
At the heart of it, digital marketing is about promoting your brand online through popular digital channels, like emails, videos, social media, and your company website.
Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing lets you target the customers most likely to be interested in your product or service, either by location or demographics. It also allows you to measure your marketing effort’s success and make any necessary changes to get the most out of your investment.
While it’s clear that digital marketing is important, it’s only really effective with a clear plan of action to inform and guide where you’re investing your money. So, you're probably wondering how to create a digital marketing strategy that gets you the best results for your business.
Below, we've outlined our top 5 tips for building a digital marketing strategy that actually works.
1. Set SMART GOALS
The first step towards building your digital marketing strategy is setting goals for what you hope to achieve with your digital marketing. If you don’t set digital marketing strategy goals, you're shooting in the dark.
One of the best ways to set goals is to use the SMART method.
SMART goals help you succeed by making your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.
Setting SMART goals offers you a clear sense of direction and puts you on the path to long-term success.
What exactly are SMART goals?
- Specific - what do you hope to do with your goal? For a goal to be SMART, you must ensure it contains one specific, clear metric.
- Measurable - how will you track the progress of your goal? You'll have to define what data you’ll use to measure the goal.
- Achievable - is your goal something your team can realistically achieve? You'll have to determine if your goal is reachable with your current resources and available time.
- Relevant - how does this goal align with businesses' broader goals? Ask yourself why reaching this goal is essential.
- Time-based - how long will it take to reach your goal? You're much more likely to achieve a goal if you set a deadline, as it gives you a clear target to work towards.
2. Identify Your Audience
Identifying your target audience is another essential part of digital marketing for small businesses. Your target audience is a group of people defined by the common characteristics they share, such as:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Hobbies
- Job
- Income
- Marital status
- Problems they’re looking to overcome
For example, your target audience might be women aged 25-35 in Great Falls who are interested in health and fitness. Targeting the right audience means your digital marketing efforts pay off.
If you're not reaching the right people with your marketing efforts, your message will get swallowed up online, and the customers you’re trying to win over will go to the competition.
How To Identify Your Target Audience
If you're unsure who precisely you should be targeting with your digital marketing strategy, then follow these helpful tips:
- Analyze your current customer base
- Look for trends in online customer feedback
- Carry out market research and identify industry trends
- See what your competitors are doing
- Create buyer personas
- Define who your target audience isn't
- Audit your social following
- Carry out customer surveys
3. Create High Quality Content
An incredible 60% of marketers create content daily to attract more business. Blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, and videos are being put out by companies at a staggering rate.
So, with so much content to compete with, how do you make your own stand out from the crowd? The answer is to create high-quality content that is of value to your customers.
When you offer users high-quality content, it keeps them engaged with you and encourages them to take action. Moreover, if users find your content valuable, they’re more likely to share it with others.
Tips For Creating High-Quality Content:
- Understand your target audience's search intent
- Use proper formatting based on the type of content
- Create original and unique content
- Stay up to date with online trends
- Review and edit before you publish
- Write for your readers, not yourself
- Make your content readable and engaging
- Keep your content up to date
- Keep up to date with online trends
4. Invest In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO (search engine optimization) is essential to your digital marketing strategy and the key to making your business more visible online.
Without good SEO, your target audience will struggle to find your business online. Instead, they’ll likely choose one of your competitors who rank higher on their search results page.
Along with making your business more visible to your target audience, strong SEO leads to:
- Increased website traffic
- Better quality traffic
- Improved user experience
- Increased brand awareness
- Improved digital marketing return on investment (ROI)
- Better long-term success
It's worth investing in SEO by hiring an expert who understands exactly what they are doing. Someone with the knowledge and resources to promote your website on search engines like Google.
An expert will also keep on top of Google's continuous updates to its algorithm and work to meet these changes.
5. Evaluate Your Strategy - Track Your Progress
Regardless of your digital marketing goals, monitoring and tracking your campaign's performance is vital. This is the only way to ensure you invest your time and resources in the right direction.
When you track the progress of your digital marketing strategies, you get insight into what's working in your strategy and what needs to change.
If you haven’t been evaluating and tracking the progress of your digital marketing efforts, then don't worry - it's easy to get started.
One of the simplest ways to track important analytics, such as how many visitors clicked on your website and how long they spent there, is to use Google Analytics.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer their own analytics, so you can see how your social posts perform. You'll be able to track what content users are interested in and post more of what they like in the future.
We hope you've found these 5 tips on creating a digital marketing strategy helpful. If you need more guidance, then the team at 406 marketing would love to help.
Our expert team has years of experience helping small businesses like yours increase their visibility and reach their goals online.