Businesses have gone digital, and so have their ways of carrying out their marketing initiatives. It would be safe to say, there is hardly any business today which does not have a digital presence. This boils down to one question, is having a digital presence enough? No! There are thousands of brands out there who have a digital presence but cannot gain any return from their initiatives. To have a successful brand, having a digital marketing strategy is crucial, as it aids your business in building brand awareness and customer acquisition. But how to create one, if you don’t have any experience? In this blog, we will explore how you can create a winning digital marketing strategy from scratch. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Step 1: Define your objectives
The first step of creating a strategy is defining the objective you want to achieve. You must ask yourself, what is it that you are trying to achieve? Without a clear goal, you would be burning cash and not getting any conversions. That’s right! Defining a goal might sound simple, but it is not. You need to jot down a very detailed and specific set of goals you want to achieve.
Remember it should not be too easy or too unrealistic, but you need to land in the middle. Once you have decided on your goal, you can start planning towards it by setting milestones to achieve the overall objective. Evaluating your digital marketing presence is equally important as setting up your goals as this helps you understand what to focus on to achieve your goals. Thus, you will be one step closer to achieving that winning digital marketing strategy. But wait a minute! Sounds too complex? You can hire an agency to do this job for you if you are not confident.
Step 2: Do your research
Setting up goals is just the beginning of reaching your objective. Before you begin your strategy implementation, you need to arm yourself with research. And by research we mean you need to gain an understanding of your customers. Customer research equips you with the knowledge of how your customers are interacting with brands. Their interests? Their likes? What do they dislike? Similarly, another aspect of your research is knowing your competitors.
Like the adage says keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Well, your competitors aren’t exactly your enemies, but knowing about them helps you exploit the gaps that they are not exploiting. By knowing your customers and competitors inside out, it helps you personalise your campaign. Furthermore, you optimise the channels you use as well as the marketing budget. So, as a digital marketing company in Ahmedabad, we advise that effective research helps in the long run.
Step 3: Select your channels
Now that you have a hang of where your customers buy the most from and where your competitors are present, it’s time to choose your channels. Selecting the right channel can help you convert your customers in no time. Remember each channel has got their unique strengths, so choose the channel based on your goal as well by evaluating where your audience buys from.
For instance, if you are an FMCG lifestyle brand whose customers mainly purchase through an e-commerce website, a social media strategy is worthy for your business but not in the case of a B2B brand. Here is a summary of the major social media channels and their strengths for your digital marketing strategy:
- Social media: Engages your audience, builds community, and drives traffic
- Content Marketing: Great for establishing authority, providing value, and nurturing leads
- Email Marketing: Adds personalisation to your campaigns and converts leads to sales
- SEO & SEM: Promote your online presence and drive traffic organically and paid media Remember, don’t be afraid to mix and match the channels. As a digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad, we have seen that sometimes mix and match can cause positive disruptions.
Step 4: Create a content plan
At this stage, you should have a clear idea of who your customers are and which channels they are interacting on. It’s time to create your winning strategy. Your strategy will comprise an array of actions which will respond to the specific goals that you created in the first step. These actions should also correspond to a specific timeline so that the actions can have measurable results. Some of these actions could be
- Creating a social media calendar to post original, engaging content to your followers.
- Identifying the top keywords to improve the SEO performance of your website.
- Selecting the social media channels for content publishing and establishing a frequency of posting on social media.
- Creating marketing collaterals that support your content plan e.g. newsletters, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, etc.
Once your plan is created, you can move to the next stage i.e. implementation, where you start seeing the results of your digital marketing strategy. You can also create an A/B testing plan which improves your chances of conversions.
Step 5: Analyse Results
It’s time to see whether your campaigns have performed as per your expectations or not. Or whether they require any tweaks going forward to gain results. Analysing results helps you measure the performance of your digital strategies in the form of engagement, conversions, leads and the main thing – the bottom line.
But what can you measure?
Gauge whether your customers are interacting with your campaign. What are the conversions so far? Are the leads moving ahead in the marketing funnel or are they stuck at only one stage? Are you losing engagement with your customers at any stage in your strategy?
All these questions help you understand whether your digital marketing strategy is performing well or not. Furthermore, it decides your future course of action as to what changes you need to make to your strategy to reach your goals. A couple of metrics that can help you gauge the success of your strategy are:
- Digital conversion rates
- Cost per lead
- Click through rates
- Customer lifetime values
You can arrange a team meeting post the strategy implementation and measure its results which will act as a reminder for the future digital campaigns that your team plans to carry out
Final Words:
By now you understand that creating a winning strategy is a daunting task. It requires planning at a molecular level and a ton of research before jumping onto executing it. However, it can be rewarding as well if you take the right approach towards digital marketing. In addition, to the right approach, you must keep up with the changes and trends in the digital landscape to make your digital marketing strategy a success.
Now, you are armed with this knowledge, but many more intricacies come along the way when you are planning a digital strategy. Having a partner that helps you sail your boat is not bad, many businesses choose to do that. As a digital marketing agency in Ahmedabad, we have time and again facilitated brands in growing their digital presence by crafting unique strategies. So, if you are a brand that is looking to step into the digital game and disrupt it, you know we are approachable! Don’t feel shy to click on the contact button above the page.
