Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Structure A Plan?

How to Develop a Digital Marketing Plan:

When it comes to selling products and services to a geographically dispersed market. Digital marketing can be the most effective and appropriate approach to do so. Whether you own a brick and mortar business, a service, an eCommerce store, or an affiliate marketing website. Your digital marketing strategy will determine the performance of your business. 

In today’s competitive marketplace, you will find yourself surrounded by worthy competitors who won’t stop “harassing” your position in the marketplace. Digital marketing is a zero-sum game, if you want to win at it you have to take business from your competitors. 

To do great business, you must know how to capture the interest and nurture the trust of your prospects. But before that, you’ll need to find those prospects. 

In today’s post, I’m sharing several insightful tips on how to structure and implement your digital marketing strategy. The plan comes first, the execution after. 

Both elements are equally important for the equation to be valid. A great plan and rigorous implementation equals online success. Add consistency and persistence and you’re on!

Create Specific Objectives and Restore KPI’s

A digital marketing strategy requires specific goals. The goals act like destinations on a roadmap. The journey itself is the collection of decisions and actions you make as you travel from point A to point B. Let’s say your digital marketing strategy’s goal is to make your brand popular in the national market. More specifically, you want 1,000,000 views in six months, out of which 5% should become your subscribers. That would mean 50,000 email subscribers, probably 100,000 social media followers, and perhaps over a few thousand customers. As the owner or manager, you’re responsible to identify a realistic goal and put it on paper. After you decide exactly what you want (preferably in numbers, with a deadline attached). Start planning it by establishing the KPIs. In the previous example, website views, email leads, and sales are key performance indicators (KPI). They will tell you whether your campaign is succeeding or failing. As you perform your campaign, you should keep improving your actions according to the direct and indirect feedback you receive. That is if you want to grow the performance of your KPIs.

Understand Your Audience 

Once you have successfully identified and committed to your campaign’s objectives. It’s time to dig deeper into a very sensitive topic: your target audience.

Business as a concept is the exchange of value between two peers. You are the seller, while your prospects are the buyers. 

First, you need to grab their attention, then you need to nurture it. Win their trust, remove the barriers to purchase, and finalize the sale process. 

For all of this to happen, your products and marketing activity must be relevant, interesting, and/or useful to your ideal customers. It’s easier to create a target persona. It will serve as a guideline (the ideal customer) in all your marketing approaches.  Know the mindset, habits, attitude, needs, problems, characteristics, fears, and struggles of your audience. So you can successfully craft a tempting and effective marketing campaign.

Develop A Content Marketing Plan 

In today’s digital marketing sphere, content is everything. The text, images, videos, audio podcasts, everything is. We could affirm that content is the primary way of communicating with your customers, so nobody can go beyond this aspect.

Your content is your homepage text, and also your product’s copy. It is your email newsletter and your social media posts.

Therefore, you need to organize your content’s strategy, which means you need to develop a content marketing plan. First, strive to create valuable content that wasn’t regurgitated a hundred times by other platforms. Create unique articles, videos, infographics, or whatever you believe is suitable, just improve what others did and don’t be irrelevant.

As for promoting, you have multiple marketing approaches:

• Guest posting (write and publish your own articles on other websites/blogs in exchange for backlinks)
• Forum marketing (contribute with value and make your brand’s name popular in niche forums)
• Q&A marketing (use Quora and Yahoo Answers to gain organic and targeted traffic by answering questions)
• Influencer marketing (use influential people who are followed by many people to expose your brand)

For a more in-depth explanation on how to create an effective content marketing strategy, check out comprehensive guide.

Create An Email List 

A digital marketing strategy cannot be successful unless it is backed up by an effective email marketing strategy.

Basically, the digital marketing strategy is everything you do to promote your brand online. The email strategy is part of it but acts as a road between point A and point B, where point B is the end result (the end benefit) that your customers expect to get from your brand. Your email marketing strategy helps you connect and bond with your prospects. It allows you to create a smooth transition in which leads become buyers, and they become loyal brand advocates. Here’s a totally specific email marketing guide that’ll help you leverage all the traffic you receive.

Outsource Professionals 

You may be a good marketer and writer, yet you might be an awful designer. Or, you might be an exceptional entrepreneur but an extremely bad writer.

In those cases, it’s quite important to manage your resources and strategy properly. I’m a firm believer that investing the right amounts of money into professional help is the most effective way of delivering a quality marketing campaign. In my past experiences, I’ve always outsourced premium academic writers from unknown places, mostly due to their experience, enthusiasm, and fair expectations. Be careful to use writers that have a proven track record as quality is worth paying for. You can find premium writers on sites such as Essay Writing Lab and Scholar Advisor.

As for your tools, you should get accustomed to the digital tools that’ll turn your marketing campaign into a pleasurable experience.

Digital marketing allows for a lot of optimization, personalization, and automatization. There are tools that schedule your social media posts, tools that provide you with important feedback, tools that track your performance while you sleep.

I’d suggest you have a look at this list of useful digital marketing tools and see which ones could be of help.

Follow the Trends and Update Your Strategy 

Don’t fall behind the trends! This is important advice that you shouldn’t forget. When the marketplace is moving in a direction, it is best to align to its course.

If a great software shows up on the niche marketplace, be the first to test it. If a technological breakthrough is happening, get informed. Stay up to speed with your surroundings to ensure that you’re leaving your competitors one foot behind.

Takeaways

Follow today’s post advice and add your own twists. Your online strategy will be unique in the end because your business and target audience is unique in the first place. As you promote your brand, you’ll soon find out what methods work best for you and what methods are worth dropping.

Featured image by Carlos Muza on Unsplash