A marketing strategy is a detailed plan for a company to achieve its online goals. If your business has one, you know how many posts and on what topics to publish this month, what topic to write the next article for the site about, or when and how to inform customers about discounts.
Without a detailed plan, any actions turn into chaos and lack of system, and this directly affects sales, engagement and market positions. To prevent this from happening, we have created material for you on developing a digital strategy. Below, we will figure out who needs it and why, how to think through a plan correctly and choose the appropriate promotion format.
Who needs a marketing strategy and why?
A digital strategy is your detailed plan for online promotion. It defines how your company will use digital channels and tools to attract, retain and engage with your target audience in the online world.
A well-thought-out strategy in the digital sphere brings many benefits to a business:
Your company becomes visible on the Internet – more people will know about you and may become your clients.
You can precisely define the audience to which you want to show your ads, thus optimizing your advertising costs.
The Internet allows you to freely communicate with customers , answer their questions, collect feedback and learn about them. Improving your product or service becomes easier, because you get round-the-clock access to your target audience.
You can track which advertising campaigns worked better or worse. Analyzing and adjusting promotional actions becomes much easier.
Online marketing is often cheaper and more effective than traditional methods – you can achieve huge reach for less money.
Digital marketing helps your business grow, save money, and better understand your customers online. At the same time, a strategy helps you think through and organize all the components of this comprehensive plan. If you are going to scale your business and focus on online marketing, you cannot do without a strategy.
Who doesn’t need a digital strategy?
However, a marketing strategy is not a magic wand or a panacea for every business. It will only be needed if you want to enter new markets, scale up, optimize customer acquisition channels and, most importantly, spend a significant budget on promotion.
The development of a strategy can be postponed for those businesses that:
- Use only 1-2 tools for promotion;
- Operate in a local market with low competition;
- Have a small marketing budget.
If your company fits these criteria, you can limit yourself to a basic analysis of competitors and determine your key advantages. Convey them to your audience through advertising and gradually develop the channels through which you promote yourself.
Developing a Strategy: 5 First Steps
Creating a full-fledged digital strategy involves a large volume of tasks. To make it easier to understand, it is worth breaking down large tasks into small stages. The first will be preparatory. Before forming the strategy itself, you need to make sure that you understand your goals and the psychology of the client, know your competitors well, have an idea of how exactly you will advance and what you want to achieve at first.
Define your goals
The path is impossible without understanding what to go to. Before you think about how you will advance on the Internet, you need to determine what result you expect. It is important not just to make a wish but to study your goal up and down, voicing the task as specifically as possible.
There are many goal-setting techniques. For example, SMART. Using it, you need to formulate your goal to correspond to each word in the abbreviation.
Your SMART goal should be:
Specific– Don’t limit yourself to general wishes. Write down the final result in the smallest details.
Measurable– Use more numbers and other precise data so that you can quickly determine whether you have achieved your goal or not.
Achievable– Set goals that are within your capabilities. Don’t overdo it, but don’t underestimate your capabilities, either.
Relevant– The goal should be related to the overall business strategy. Ask yourself how achieving this bar will help you in the future. After an honest conversation with yourself at this stage, it may turn out that the task should be changed altogether.
Time-bound– Set a specific deadline for achieving the goal. This will help you avoid scattering and relaxing.
The clearer, more specific and honest you formulate your goals, the closer you get to them – this is banal psychology. It is always easier to move towards something that is well studied. Therefore, any work on strategy should begin with setting goals: first you determine what you want to achieve, and only then you plan the path itself.
Segment your target audience
In the world of digital marketing, the success of your strategy directly depends on how accurately and deeply you know your target audience. You can develop a brilliant product, create amazing content, and implement an ideal service – but if you do not direct it at your client, the spark between you will not ignite, and all your efforts will be wasted.
A detailed study of the target audience allows you to understand what needs your client has. With this knowledge, it will be easy for you to create relevant content and stand out from the competition, because you will already know how to “hook” your customers. Conversion improves, advertising becomes cheaper, and sales grow.
Here’s what you need to know about your customers to successfully segment your audience:
Demographic characteristics – age, gender, geography, education and income.
Psychographics – interests, values, lifestyle.
Problems and pains – what prevents your clients from being happy and achieving their goals.
Based on the collected data, divide the audience into segments: for example, by income level, interests, consumer habits, etc. For each segment, create a character that would personify it. Write down their image in detail to fix the figure in your mind.
Market and competitor analysis is one of the modules of our free mini-course “Internet Marketer Profession”, which is taught by Genius co-founder Oles Timofeev. Register via the link and take part in a five-day course to start your career in digital.
Analyze your competitors
By analysing who you compete with, you will gain access to an unlimited source of valuable information. You will understand everything from the market size and demand patterns to the main trends and best practices in your industry. All of this can be adapted to your business to make your digital strategy even more powerful.
What does a classic competitor analysis include:
Content research– Visit your competitors’ pages or sites and carefully evaluate their design, functionality, and content. See what photos, videos, articles, and other types of content they create.
Monitor social media activity– Analyze content publishing frequency and audience engagement, as well as customer feedback.
Pricing policy analysis– Evaluate the prices of different products or services of competitors and compare them with yours. Pay attention to promotions, discounts and other marketing activities.
Advertising analysis– Review competitors’ advertising campaigns across various channels. Analyze keywords and strategies.
Comprehensive study– Make a SWOT analysis of each competitor.
The above steps are basic, surface-level analysis that applies to almost any industry. Depending on your niche, you may need to delve deeper into certain aspects. It is also important to regularly update your competitor data to adapt your strategy to market changes.
Identify communication channels with your audience
One of the key steps in developing an effective strategy is choosing the right channels to communicate with your audience. Every business has its own unique characteristics, so to have the maximum impact on your target customer, you need to understand where they hang out most often.
Many brands choose to promote themselves on social media. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are ideal for brand development and interaction with a wide audience. Social media is beneficial for most businesses, but it is especially effective for B2C companies, restaurants, stores, and beauty and health services.
Another key point for online presence is a website. With its help, you can sell your products and services, provide information about the company and collect customer contacts. You can also blog on the site, which will help prove your expertise and attract organic traffic. This option is useful for all types of businesses, especially for companies that provide services or sell information products.
Companies often use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and other messengers to establish informal relationships with customers and inform them about innovations.
When choosing communication channels, it is important to consider the specifics of your business, target audience and, of course, the main objectives of your marketing strategy. Combining different channels is possible and even necessary – this way you can maximize the effectiveness of your digital strategy and make a louder statement about yourself.
Create KPIs
You have already defined your immediate goals. Now it is important to translate them into specific numbers and adapt them to your business tasks.
You need to regularly monitor your progress indicators to keep your finger on the pulse and analyze and adjust your strategy if necessary. Creating key performance indicators (KPI) is a very individual thing, so we cannot give universal instructions. However, there are a couple of general recommendations:
Let go of vanity – don’t pay attention to numbers that aren’t critical to long-term success (likes on Facebook, for example);
- Use KPIs to track growth and success, but don’t focus on them;
- Establish clear intervals for regular analysis, measurement and reporting;
- Think about how you will eliminate critical indicators if you see that something is not working.
- Think systematically, conduct quality analytics to formulate your strategy as accurately as possible, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Even the most unforeseen circumstances can be partially incorporated into your digital strategy, thereby making your development process more manageable.
How to Advance in Digital Marketing: Key Strategies
There are simply a gigantic number of promotion methods that companies around the world use to form their digital strategy. We will focus on the most popular ones: those chosen by most large companies around the world. These strategies have proven their effectiveness over the past few years and have every chance of surprising us in the future.
Content Marketing on Social Media
Today, almost every business, from small to large, is actively present on social networks. Brands generate and post content on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms every day to be closer to the target client.
Let’s figure out who this strategy is suitable for:
Small and medium businesses– For small companies, content marketing on social networks provides a unique opportunity to compete with large players in the market. If you still find it difficult to allocate a large budget for advertising, content marketing will allow you to advance with minimal costs.
For E-commerce and retail companies– For businesses that are related to online sales, content marketing on social networks is a mandatory element of the strategy. Aesthetic photos, video reviews, success stories and regular promotions help to penetrate deeper into the consumer’s mind and bring your product closer to them.
Brands targeting a younger audience– If you want to attract the attention of younger consumers, you should regularly create creative, inspiring, and diverse content for various platforms.
Social media content marketing is a powerful tool that works for many brands and companies across a variety of industries. This strategy can help achieve several major goals for companies large and small, from building long-term relationships with your audience to increasing sales.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques that enable a website to appear higher in search results on search engines such as Google. This digital marketing strategy is aimed at attracting an organic audience to your website.
What does SEO include?
Keywords and phrases– A key component of SEO is researching and optimizing the phrases that are most relevant to your business.
Content optimization– Creating high-quality content (blogs, articles, videos, audio) that meets the needs of the audience and contains keywords.
Technical optimization– Improving the technical characteristics of your site – loading speed, adaptation to mobile devices, URL structure and much more. All this also affects search ranking.
Building quality backlinks– Linking to your site from authoritative and relevant sources helps build your authority in the eyes of search engines and attracts an organic audience.
Analysis and monitoring– By tracking the metrics and results of your SEO strategy, you can continually adjust it and improve the results.
An SEO strategy is suitable for almost any business, regardless of its size and industry. High-quality optimization allows your business to reach the first pages of search results, where interested customers are already expecting it to appear. SEO traffic is considered organic and can be more profitable in the long term compared to paid advertising campaigns. This strategy is almost mandatory for local businesses: restaurants, beauty salons, stores, fitness studios.
Paid advertising
Organic marketing is only part of the possible promotion methods. It is equally important to implement paid solutions, such as good old advertising. This will allow you to not only qualitatively increase brand recognition, but also reach the audience that cannot find you organically.
Paid advertising is indispensable for beginners. If your business is still too small and does not receive enough traffic, this is exactly what you need to start.
There are several types of advertising on the basis of which you can build a marketing strategy:
- Advertising in social networks;
- Pay per click (PPC);
- Google advertising;
- Affiliate advertising.
The advantage of advertising is that it is not as critically dependent on your content as other strategies. Instead of trying to lure an audience, you just need to prepare a more or less acceptable platform, set the parameters of the advertisement, and pay for it.
The benefits of paid advertising as an online marketing strategy are clear: you can target specific audiences based on their location, interests, behavior, and more. Any advertising platform will provide you with analytics that makes it easy to evaluate performance and improve future campaigns. And on top of all that, paid advertising allows you to feel less turbulence in the ever-changing world of marketing.
Influencer Marketing
Robert Cialdini in his bestseller “Psychology of Influence” spoke about the importance of authorities for a person. In the world of digital marketing, authorities are influential personalities in social networks: experts, bloggers, media personalities and other people who are followed by at least tens and hundreds of thousands of people.
To use influencer marketing as part of your strategy, the first step is to select influencers whose audience matches your target audience. Discuss the terms of cooperation, thinking through all the nuances and responsibilities of each party. Influencers will create content for you that will promote your product. This can be a review, a promo video, a photo, an article, a contest, etc. By publishing content on their platforms, influencers will introduce their audience to you, contributing to your promotion.
Influencer marketing is especially suitable for the following types of businesses:
Niche Products : If your product or service is not yet well-known or requires audience familiarization, influencers can take on this task.
Young Target Audience : Influencer marketing is especially popular among younger audiences, so if your target group includes younger consumers, this strategy may be beneficial to you.
Brands that want to communicate their values . Collaborating with influencers can help your company create the right impression and strengthen loyal relationships with consumers.
Influencer marketing is slowly becoming an integral part of the digital marketing strategy for many companies, and when used correctly, the tool can bring you some really cool results.
Email Marketing
If you think that communicating with customers via promotional emails is a thing of the past, then no: companies around the world continue to rely on email marketing. The main idea of this strategy is to send personalized letters to their customers, thus informing them about current promotions, new products, and other important things.
To successfully implement the strategy, it is enough to create a database of your clients and subscribers, segment the audience, come up with valuable and personalized content for each of them, and then automate the mailings.
Email marketing allows companies to effectively attract the attention of the audience to products or services and motivate them to buy. Regular letters with useful information and exclusive offers help to strengthen the connection with customers and make them more loyal to you. This is a fairly budget-friendly way of promotion, which, in addition, offers good analytics and many tools for optimizing campaigns, which allows you to continuously improve the strategy.
Conclusion
In conclusion, developing an effective digital strategy requires a clear understanding of your goals, target audience, and available resources. By starting with a solid foundation and navigating the key components of digital marketing, you can create a roadmap for success. To ensure your strategy is well-executed and impactful, consider partnering with a top digital marketing agency. Their expertise can help you refine your approach, craft compelling content, and effectively measure your results, ultimately driving better outcomes and achieving your digital marketing objectives.
