5 Useful Tips For Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy
In the digital world, purchasing decisions are made completely differently than in the analogue world. Today even B2B buyers form 60% of their opinion about a purchase by researching the Internet before contacting a company. Source: Corporate Executive Board. In the B2C area, the Internet influences the purchase decision of customers up to 90%. To survive, you need to forge a marketing strategy for digital customers.
In this article, we provide guidance on how to create a digital marketing strategy and give tips on which tools you need to implement it.
The Customer Journey is digital and not analogue
Google processes more than 40,000 search queries per second. That’s almost 4 billion queries per day. 10 years ago there were about 230 million queries per day.
Another 2 billion search queries are made on Facebook. On Facebook, 2.5 trillion postings are posted per day. Google and Facebook are the 2 largest social media platforms and there are many more.
The fact is that for most customers the customer journey today begins on the Internet and often ends. Your customers have long since arrived in the digital age. Of course, they book their holidays online, look for solutions to their problems online, and communicate online.
It is astonishing that in Austria 46.5% of advertising expenditure still goes into the analogue print sector and only 16.9% is spent online. Source: But online advertising planning is growing. But online is growing (online by 14%).
If the Customer Journey is digital, then it is high time that your marketing and sales also become digital.
What is a marketing strategy in general?
The word strategy is completely overused today. Usually, it is thrown in when someone wants to say that something is important. But the strategy is something very simple: a plan with actions to achieve a goal.
A digital marketing strategy is therefore a series of actions to achieve an economic goal. Of course, several goals can also be achieved. It is clear that a digital marketing strategy is a series of actions that are primarily implemented online.
What distinguishes a digital marketing strategy from a traditional one?
Traditional marketing strategies aim to attract attention to a product or company with advertising media. Usually, these advertising media are used in such a way that they interrupt a potential customer or at least force the attention by obtrusiveness.
In the digital world, this is becoming more and more difficult. The digital customer has learned to hide advertising. More and more people are using advertising blockers or non-linear TV programs and prefer offers such as Netflix.
A digital marketing strategy turns marketing upside down. In principle, it is about creating benefits for the potential customer with every campaign. Every content, every posting, every mail has a benefit for the user that helps him to move forward.
The advertising media, if you can call them that at all, are searched and found by potential customers and not thrown at them. This means that your digital marketing strategy is designed in such a way that you and your products are primarily found by customers and not by you looking for them.
How to develop a digital marketing strategy
1. Define one or more realistic and measurable goals
Unclear goals can never be achieved, they do not motivate and ultimately they do not benefit anyone. We increase awareness and the image, is a very bad goal. Better: We increase the number of qualified leads by 20% within 12 months.
Goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and have a deadline. That’s why we talk about SMART goals. In digital marketing, almost everything revolves around these 5 key figures:
- Website traffic
- Leads
- Qualified Leads
- Final installment leads
- Revenue Customer Lifetime Value (revenue over the life cycle)
Each of your goals should contain one of these indicators. Surely there are also goals that do not contribute so directly to economic success, but which are just as important. Brand awareness or customer satisfaction could be such goals.
But attention: If you define only indirect goals and none of these 5 then it will be difficult to evaluate also the indirect goals.
Start with the lowest target. The new turnover over the life cycle will be derived directly from your company’s business plan. Your sales team will be able to contribute to the final installment. This will result in the qualified leads you need. You can use benchmarks for leads and visits. You can find out more about these 5 key figures in this article: Online Marketing: It all depends on these 5 figures.
2. Get a clear picture of your target audience
Now that you have clear goals, the next step is to find your potential customers. You need to segment the market and find your segment. The more precisely you serve a niche, the better your digital marketing strategy will work.
As I said before, digital customers are all about finding you. Of course, this works best if you offer a clear benefit for a clear problem. This simply works better in a niche than with an all-round offer.
Once you’ve chosen a segment and found your niche, you need to start understanding your potential customers. They need to know which problem they are solving with their product and how the customer journey of your customers works.
The Buyer Persona method is best suited for this. With the help of questions, you describe the profile of your buyers and with interviews, you explore all the questions that arise along with the Buyers Journey.
You need the buyer personas for your marketing strategy. In addition, however, also for the design of the website, for the content, for social media – actually for everything.
We have created a detailed article on the creation of buyer personas. Buyer Persona: The practical guide.
3. Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels
Now it’s the channels through which you reach your potential customers. Better said, through which you can be found by potential customers. You need to know how these channels perform before you make a plan. This is relatively easy with appropriate tools.
Your most important channel should be your own website. You should use social media to attract as many visitors to your website as possible. Make sure that your website is your home base and not social media. Social media is “rented ground”.
You can use Google Analytics to evaluate the performance of your website. Pay attention to these performance indicators:
- Traffic: History of the last 12 months
- Traffic sources: Organic, Social, Referral, Direct, Paid
- Performance of individual pages
- Bounce rates
- Dwell time
- Conversions
- Sources of conversions
The performance of keywords is also important. Ahrefs is an excellent way to do this. Make a list of keywords with which you already make it to the first page of the search results and a list of keywords with which you want to make it to the first page.
Social media are an essential part of a digital marketing strategy to increase reach and to promote content beyond your own website. Tools to help you evaluate social media performance: Buzzsumo or HootSuite or the individual social media channels already have integrated analysis tools.
The last channel you should evaluate is your email marketing. All good marketing programs have tools for analysis.
This whole evaluation is made easier with marketing automation software. We use HubSpot and therefore have all this data available with a mouse click.
4. Planning of digital marketing campaigns
Now that you know your target audience and the performance of your digital channels, it’s time to plan digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns differ significantly from conventional advertising campaigns. Digital campaigns have no expiration date.
Content pieces that you publish on your website will work for the next few years. Conventional ads, on the other hand, only work as long as you pay for the ad. Often that’s just one day.
The content for a digital campaign is derived from your involvement with the buyer personas and your solutions. It is important to make sure that you plan the content along with the Buyers Journey.
5. Tools to implement a digital marketing strategy
I have already listed some tools for the evaluation. You also need tools for implementing and controlling the campaigns and, of course, for reporting. I’m sure you’ll find the right tool for every need.
However, if you value efficiency, then you should choose a marketing automation solution in which you have all the tools you need to implement your strategy on one platform.
Conclusion marketing strategy for digital customers
Today and obviously also in the next years, the Customer Journey digital begins and ends for a large part of the customers. Traditional marketing must be thoroughly turned upside down in such an environment. Start with a digital marketing strategy that focuses on the goals, buyer personas, useful content, and performance of the digital channels.
Today, marketing automation helps us to implement and control campaigns more efficiently. Marketing automation is only at the beginning of the digital development of tools for marketing and sales. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will soon create new possibilities for how we implement marketing strategies.
To know more about digital marketing strategies and want to commence digital marketing services for your company. We at Crux are the No. 1 online marketing company in India that provides digital marketing services for the clients according to the market. Call us on 9810671230, 9990483343, 8476980269 or contact us here.