A digital marketing strategy is a plan for how you will use digital channels, such as social media, email, and your website, to reach your business goals. A successful digital marketing strategy should be tailored to your specific business and target audience, and it should include clear goals, a defined budget, and a plan for which channels and tactics you will use to reach your goals.
Here are the key components of a successful digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing Strategy Component One: Marketing Goals
Your digital marketing strategy should have clear, specific, and measurable goals. These goals should align with your overall business objectives and should be specific enough to provide direction and guidance for your digital marketing efforts. For example, your goals might include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving online sales.
One of the top mistakes I see business owners make is doing a ton of marketing tactics and they do not measure their KPIs. If you do marketing online the most important thing to understand is your data is what guides you to getting the results you are looking for.
There are many different types of marketing goals you might consider, including:
- Increasing brand awareness: Brand awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with and recognize your brand. To increase brand awareness, you might focus on tactics such as social media marketing, content marketing, or paid advertising.
- Generating leads: Lead generation refers to the process of attracting and capturing the contact information of potential customers. To generate leads, you might use tactics such as landing pages, lead magnets, or forms on your website.
- Driving online sales: If your goal is to increase online sales, you might focus on tactics such as email marketing, retargeting ads, or product pages on your website.
How To Create Brand Awareness With Your Digital Marketing Strategy
- Content marketing: Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. By consistently creating high-quality content, you can establish your brand as a trusted resource and drive traffic to your website.
- Paid advertising: Paid advertising, such as Google AdWords, social media ads, billboards (all of what we offer by the way) can be an effective way to reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness. By targeting your ads to specific demographics or interests, you can ensure that your ads are seen by the people most likely to be interested in your products or services.
How To Start Generating Leads For Your Business With A Digital Marketing Strategy
When it comes to lead generation there various components you can use online. Here are just a few from a high-level. You need a documented strategy to put these components in order to produce results.
Here are a few tactics you might consider:
- Landing pages: Landing pages are standalone web pages, designed specifically for the purpose of a marketing or advertising campaign. They typically have a specific call-to-action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.
- Lead magnets: A lead magnet is a piece of content, such as an e-book, case study or webinar, that is offered in exchange for a visitor’s contact information. Lead magnets can be effective at generating leads because they offer value to the visitor in exchange for their information.
- Forms: You can use forms on your website or landing pages to capture contact information from visitors. These can be simple contact forms or more detailed forms that ask for additional information about the visitor’s needs and interests.
- Pop-ups: Pop-ups are small windows that appear over a website’s content, often offering a lead magnet or asking visitors to fill out a form. While pop-ups can be effective at generating leads, it’s important to use them sparingly and ensure that they are not intrusive or annoying to the visitor.
- Chatbots: Chatbots are automated programs that can engage with website visitors in real-time, answering questions and offering helpful information. You can use chatbots to capture contact information from visitors or to direct them to relevant pages on your website. Add a Chat GPT bot to your website, learn more here. The ChatGPT bot increases conversions by up to 40%!
- Referral programs: Referral programs offer incentives, such as discounts or rewards, to encourage current customers to refer new customers to your business. This can be an effective way to generate leads and grow your customer base.
- Quiz Funnels: Setting up a quiz funnel is not the same as a quiz. The funnel is designed to walk your ideal client through a process of what they think they need to realizing what you have to offer is the solution. Quiz funnels are the most effective way to generate leads compared to all other tactics.
Ways We Can Help With Brand Awareness
Brand awareness are the tactics you will focus on to make your brand more aware to those who do not know you. In many cases these tactics will not get you an immediate ROI and for that reason many try to skip this step. But if you try to sell something to a person that does not know you it is like walking up to the mall and touching someone’s face. It’s weird. So we have to adhere to the psychology of relationship building.
You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, don’t do that in business either.
To increase brand awareness online you can pay to promote your blog posts, run ads for free content to get more people in your retargeting audiences, pay for display advertising etc.
If you are on LinkedIn you can track everyone that visits your website that has a profile on LinkedIn. There are exceptions of course (if people opt out of being retargeted). But most people like getting ads and have chosen to turn these settings on.
To create brand awareness you may consider social media marketing.
- Social media marketing: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn are great channels for increasing brand awareness. You can use these platforms to share content, engage with your audience, and showcase your products or services. We have a few different ways we help clients with social media marketing:
Done for you social media marketing packages. (Visit our store here and click on Social Media) We offer a variety of services to both local business, service based professionals, as well as B2C businesses. We can often tailor packages to your needs as well including TikTok, video editing etc. So contact us if you don’t see what you are looking for.
Courses on how to succeed on the various platforms to get clients. These courses are great if you are just trying to master a specific platform to get clients. But if you don’t want to do it yourself our done for you services are the best.
- Social media marketing: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn are great channels for increasing brand awareness. You can use these platforms to share content, engage with your audience, and showcase your products or services. We have a few different ways we help clients with social media marketing:
Your Budget Will Determine Where You Start
Once you have defined your goals, you need to determine how much you are willing and able to spend on your digital marketing efforts. Your budget should be based on your goals, your target audience, and your overall marketing plan, and it should be allocated among the various channels and tactics you plan to use.
Determining how much you are willing and able to spend on your digital marketing efforts is an important part of developing a successful marketing strategy. Your budget should be based on your goals, your target audience, and your overall marketing plan, and it should be allocated among the various channels and tactics you plan to use.
Here are a few factors to consider when determining your marketing budget:
- Business size: Businesses with larger budgets may have more flexibility and resources to allocate to marketing efforts, while smaller businesses may need to be more strategic in their budget allocation. For example, a small business with a limited budget might prioritize high-impact, low-cost tactics such as content marketing, while a larger business with a larger budget might allocate more resources to paid advertising or experiential marketing.
- Industry and competition: The amount of money you need to allocate to marketing will depend on the industry you are in and the level of competition. For example, businesses in highly competitive industries may need to allocate more resources to marketing in order to stand out from the competition.
- Business goals: Your marketing budget should be based on your specific business goals. For example, if your goal is to drive online sales, you might allocate more resources to paid advertising or email marketing. On the other hand, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might allocate more resources to content marketing or social media marketing.
- Target audience: Understanding your target audience is key to determining your marketing budget. You should consider the channels and tactics that are most effective at reaching your target audience and allocate your budget accordingly.
How Much Should You Spend On Marketing?
On average, businesses typically spend around 10-12% of their revenue on marketing.
However, this can vary significantly depending on the size of the business, the industry, and the specific marketing goals. For example, a small business with a limited budget might allocate as little as 3-5% of their revenue to marketing, while a larger business with a larger budget might allocate 20% or more.
It’s important to remember that your marketing budget is not a set amount that you allocate once and then forget about. Instead, it’s an ongoing process that requires regular review and adjustment. As your business grows and your marketing goals evolve, you may need to adjust your budget accordingly.
One tactic I encourage my clients to employ is to make sure they have a small product or service that they can sell that 100% of their ideal clients will purchase. This allows you to run ads and pay for them as they run. As long as you are making a profit, you can keep your ads running.
Marketing Tactics Are Constantly Changing
Your digital marketing strategy should also include a plan for the specific tactics you will employ within each channel. For example, within your social media strategy, you might plan to use a mix of organic and paid posts, influencer marketing, and live video.
Here are ten additional tactics that you might consider including in your digital marketing strategy:
- Email marketing: This involves sending targeted, personalized emails to your email list to promote your products or services and nurture leads.
- Content marketing: This involves creating and sharing valuable, informative, and relevant content with the goal of attracting and retaining customers.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): This involves optimizing your website and online content to rank higher in search engine results pages and drive organic traffic to your website. Check out one of your services for SEO here.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: This involves placing sponsored ads on search engine results pages or other websites and paying a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. Find an example of one of our services here.
- Display advertising: This involves placing banner ads on other websites to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to your website.
- Affiliate marketing: This involves partnering with other businesses or individuals to promote your products or services and earning a commission for each sale made through your referral.
- Influencer marketing: This involves working with influencers or celebrities to promote your products or services to their followers.
- Social media advertising: This involves placing targeted ads on social media platforms to reach a specific audience and drive traffic to your website.
- Retargeting: This involves showing ads to people who have already visited your website in an effort to bring them back and convert them into customers.
- Video marketing: This involves creating and sharing videos on platforms like YouTube or social media to promote your products or services and engage with your audience.
There are of course a million other marketing tactics you can utilize. The key is to focus on the impact it will have, how confident you are that it will work and the ease of getting it accomplished.
If you would like help putting your marketing strategy together my Acceleration Program is ideal. We don’t just walk you through the process once but every 90 days we create a new marketing plan based upon the data from your marketing efforts. We also include a documented strategy, a long list of tools and tactics, as well as how to measure KPIs.