How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is online marketing for websites. Simple, right? Turns out, there are at least seven main ways to market a website online. And that’s where digital marketing strategy comes into play.

These are the major players, such as search engine optimization (SEO), digital advertising, social media marketing, and so on.

And each category reflects a distinct specialty as well as a distinct set of skills and best practices. To put it another way, what happens in SEO is not the same as what happens in digital advertising.

As a result, developing a digital marketing plan is difficult. Because each website is unique, developing digital marketing tactics must be done on a case-by-case basis.

In this article, we’ll go over the many types of online marketing, explain how to create a digital marketing plan, and walk you through a 10-step process for covering the essentials.

The majority of our content consumption occurs in the digital realm these days. Marketing has gone digital to keep up with our dependency on technology.

This transformation necessitates your brand has a digital presence. You’ll need a great digital marketing strategy to develop a successful digital presence for your company.

What exactly is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a step-by-step, actionable process that works towards achieving the digital marketing goals of your company.

Digital marketing is accomplished through digital marketing channels. These channels include social media, digital publishing, and paid, earned, or owned media.

A digital marketing strategy involves a very deliberate decision-making process regarding your digital marketing goals and the most appropriate channels that will help you achieve them.

The 6 Pillars of Online Marketing

The world of online marketing has grown, and today there’s clearly more than one way to market your website on the internet.

The good news is that though these areas are separate marketing categories, they can all work together to achieve your goals and grow your business.

Online marketing can be categorized into 6 main disciplines:

Content marketing – The creation and publication of useful content designed to attract, educate, and maintain your target audience.
Native advertising Also called “advertorials,” native advertising is a type of online advertisement that resembles the editorial content of the website or publication they’re promoting.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising – PPC is a marketing strategy that involves online ads. Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – This is the practice of improving a website so that it becomes search engine friendly and brings organic traffic to the website.
Social media marketing – The practice of promoting a product or service on social media platforms. This is typically done through a social media management platform.
Email marketing – A marketing approach that uses email as a way of marketing to and nurturing potential and existing clients.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy in 10 Steps

Now that you know a little about the different types of online marketing tactics, it’s time to learn the basics of creating the strategy.

From personas to the right tools, there are plenty of big and little things that can help or hinder your digital marketing strategy’s success. Here’s the foundational work you need to make sure your strategy works well, including our favorite tools and software.

So, what is a digital marketing and why do you need a strategy for it? “Digital marketing strategy” is a term that encompasses a whole lot. It can be overwhelming to tackle it on your own. This is why we’ve created this practical guide to help you build a solid digital marketing strategy in 10 clear steps.

Step 1: Create a Customer Persona

Prior to this, digital marketers gathered qualitative and quantitative data on their target audience, such as age, gender, occupation, interests, and location.

With the rise of buyer personas, the notion of a potential consumer has been elevated to a new level. Without them, even the most effective marketing methods are ineffective.

Buyer personas are a term used to describe the ideal customer that can be defined by surveying and contacting the pre-defined target group. To define your own buyer persona, you can make use of online tools like MakeMyPersona and Persona Creator.

Step 2: Identify Your Goals and Tools

Every professional marketer knows how important this stage is. Without goals, the strategy simply will not work, so defining them is your main task. Make sure that the goals you developed are suitable, and make them measurable.

Example of a weak marketing goal:

Increase the conversions on the website next year and create two promotional offers.

What is wrong with this goal? Right, it is non-measurable! How one can measure progress using this goal?

Here is how it should have been formulated:

Increase the conversions on the website by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2020, and create two promotional offers: a free marketing report and a marketing book. Have them online by February and March respectively.

There, measuring the progress becomes possible now.

Step 3: Focus on Blogging

Any digital marketing strategy must include the creation of high-quality content. Blogging is one approach to add to your content marketing plan by producing high-quality content for your website.

This crucial component of the plan serves a variety of purposes, including increasing traffic to your website, bolstering your social media presence, placing yourself against competitors, and ranking all of those long-tail search queries and keywords.

If you have a regularly updated blog that the visitors find useful, it means that your website will be easily found through the search engines and can be used as a platform for your marketing campaign.

If you don’t have the capacity to tackle blogs in-house you can look into blog writing services for support.

Step 4: Evaluate Existing Digital Marketing Channels

Analyze your existing digital assets and channels, such as your website, blog posts, social network accounts, word-of-mouth, native advertising, Google Adwords, sponsored advertising, and so on. Consider the following questions: how effective were they, and how may they be improved for next year?

It’s fine if you don’t employ all of these features in your future digital marketing approach, but you should definitely use the ones that worked best last year.

If a landing page you recently designed was successful in generating leads, for example, utilize it again while improving it as much as feasible. Other assets and channels are in the same boat.

Step 5: Automate Marketing

Marketing automation is huge, and with new technology and tools, it’s just going to get better. Today’s major marketing automation solutions can help you automate tasks like content marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and more for your digital marketing strategy.

Furthermore, marketing automation tools that are coupled with your company’s sales CRM are easy to come by, enhancing the overall sales process.

If your company is still not on board with automated lead generation, make sure you add it to your strategy this year.

Step 6: Nail Mobile Optimization

It’s a mobile-first era, and there’s no excuse for not improving your site for a wonderful mobile experience.

Mobile optimization includes page speed, site design, and various other search engine optimization practices to ensure that people who come to your site using a mobile device have a good experience.

Review your mobile responsive design and email templates to ensure that you are using the latest methods and provide only relevant and latest data.

Step 7: Make it Easy for Customers to Reach You

Online business is all about connecting with potential customers, so traffic on your website should be high to ensure positive outcomes.

Your digital marketing strategy therefore should ensure that your leads and visitors are not exerting unnecessary effort to connect with you. Engaging with your customers is invaluable for your business.

“There’s a lot to be learned from your audience online. You’ll get honest feedback on campaigns and messaging, for one. Incorporating your fans’ interpretation and opinion of your brand can get you both fresh content and loyal fans.” –Adam Fridman

To eliminate the unnecessary effort, you should ensure that landing pages do not ask for irrelevant data. Make call-to-actions clearly visible on the landing page and other pages on the website.

You can also use tools like Target Everyone and Zenreach to make customer communication easier than ever.

Step 8: Use the Right Technology

A marketing effort is wasted if an ineffective or inappropriate technology is used.

You’ll need marketing automation software as well as industry tools like Vendasta’s Snapshot Report for a proper digital marketing plan.

There are tools that may assist you at every stage of the digital marketing process, from identifying your goals to track where your visitors are coming from.

Step 9: Confirm Your Differentiators

If your business isn’t distinguishable from its competitors, don’t expect to make a lot of money. Talk to your customers and ask them why they chose your firm to change (or reinforce) your differentiation from the competition.

Every business has a distinct selling proposition, a feature that distinguishes it from the competition. Find out what it is by doing research and hard work.

Then, if necessary, make adjustments to your current differentiators. This message should be incorporated into your content marketing strategies.

Step 10: Track Your Process

Constant monitoring should be provided to ensure that the strategy is working effectively. This is done by assigning teams that would deliver this task. Remember to learn from your mistakes and always find improvement opportunities!

There is a lot of work involved in designing a digital marketing strategy process, but an effective and well-thought-out plan will make it much easier.

Vendasta specializes in providing an end-to-end platform for enterprises selling digital products and services to small and medium-sized businesses. Our white-label marketing services, which you can resell under your own brand, are included.

We have the software and resources, as well as a team of in-house marketing strategists and content writers, to assist you in identifying and developing a successful digital marketing strategy.

Focus on your goals and the specific steps that will get you there.

You may have noticed that to create a solid foundation for a successful digital marketing campaign, there are two keywords you must live by goals and specifics.

Create clear goals and then outline the specific steps you need to take to get there—the more specific, the better!

And now that you’re armed with this guide, you can dive deeper and learn more about the different types of digital marketing and what each one can do for your brand.

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