HOW TO WRITE A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Stakeholders might not know the ins and outs of the work you’re involved with, but one thing’s for sure: they have an undeniable sway within your business. Getting them on your side is going to be absolutely crucial. With stakeholder buy-in, your website redesign stands a greater chance of success, ensuring that senior staff are clued up on the project’s benefits and aims from the very beginning. It lets them connect to the project in a more emotional way, giving you a chance to target not just their heads, but their hearts too.

A better understanding of your market share

A clear, effective strategy lets you work out how much demand there is for your digital services, and clues you into crucial factors such as customer behaviours, competitors, and customer profiles.

A more effective value proposition

When things are so competitive, differentiating your business so you can stand out is vital. With a digital marketing strategy, you can work out what makes you so different.

A better understanding of your customers

A strategy can show the parts of your business your customers interact with and what they don’t. With this kind of feedback, you can get more of a grasp on what makes them tick, and tailor your activities to this behaviour.

Less wasted time and resources

Your digital marketing strategy gives you laser focus. Once you know what you want (and need) to do, you’ll spend far less time throwing ideas at the wall to see if they stick – a mistake that costs you time and money in the short and long term.

Greater integration between departments

Likewise, once everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and with who, then there’s less chance of silos forming, which means less chance of miscommunication, repeated work and the lower productivity that comes with working in a bubble.

Before you start working on your digital marketing strategy, you’ll want to work out what the end results should be. Ask yourself these key questions...

What do you want the digital marketing strategy to achieve?

Without goals, your strategy will struggle to get into first gear, so it’s essential that you know what you want to work towards. Maybe you want to generate more leads through your site. Or perhaps you want to grow your sales.

Whatever you decide on, don’t forget the one key thing about your goals: they need to be measurable.

It’s not simply enough to say: “I want to increase the number of visits to the business’ website”. Phrased this way, there’s no way to measure how you’re progressing. Instead, your goal should be: “I want to reach 20,000 visits to my website each month”. This goal is measurable, achievable, and timely.

What are the wider business goals?

Always link your goals back to the key goals of the business. Let’s say your business’ overarching goal is to increase online revenue by a certain amount. Your strategy’s goal might then be to generate leads by an increase of 25% through the website.

What are your timeframes?

You stand a better chance of achieving your goals when you’re working towards deadlines and timeframes. When you’re identifying your goals, make sure you’re assigning them a realistic time frame so you can stay focused – and stop yourself from being distracted by short-term tasks.  

What channels do you currently use?

Ahead of creating your digital marketing strategy, identify your existing digital marketing channels, whether it’s your website, blog, social channels, paid ads – or any number of other channels you use. You could also categorise these channels using the owned, earned, and paid media framework; doing this lets you decide what you want to use for the strategy going forward. The elements of this framework consist of:

Owned media: These are the digital assets your brand or company owns: things like your website, social media profiles, blog content or imagery. Basically, they’re channels your business has total control over.

Earned media: Whether it’s guest posts on other websites, press coverage or your customer experience, earned media covers any exposure and recognition you’ve earned.

Paid media: Anything that you’ve spent money on to attract buyers to your business – Google AdWords, paid social media posts, sponsored posts on other websites – that’s paid media.

What works well and doesn’t work well with your current strategy?

With that said, your strategy may not need to incorporate all these elements. By identifying and categorising these channels, you’ll get a handle on which were effective, and which you may decide to use less of. Ask yourself which channels have proven to be effective – and investigate whether they can be refined in any way.

Conversely, if you found yourself dedicating a lot of time to channels that weren’t providing much in the way of results, and were too much of a time sink too, then it may be worth dropping them from the strategy.

Analysing your data

Working out what did and didn’t work will involve looking over data from the past year. Take a look at any analytics you have, so you know what you need to build on – this will also help you to understand why certain things might not have worked out the way you thought they would.

Who is your target customer?

If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, then your strategy may well become more of a shot in the dark. And if you don’t have detailed customer personas, then your digital marketing strategy is pretty much incomplete.

By creating customer personas that detail things such as their likes, dislikes, and needs, you’ll be able to pinpoint your key customers – and start to tailor your marketing around the insights and information on them that you’ve unlocked.