Digital Marketing Strategy
Get your digital marketing strategy right and you’re well on the way to reaching your goals.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is basically a plan for how your organisation uses digital to reach and connect with your audience. Most businesses I work with have a general marketing plan or strategy of some kind, some of them have a ‘digital’ element to this plan, but many of them don’t have a focused digital marketing strategy.
Do I need a digital marketing strategy?
The simple fact is that people are spending less and less time actually looking at the real world around them and spending much more time looking at their devices (phones, tablets, laptops, TVs), it’s a sad fact but true.
Magazines, newspapers, POS advertising, billboards and direct mail are declining fast. Use of Google, Facebook, Youtube are still growing. Data shows that the average person spends 4 hours a day on their mobile devices, not including the time watching TV.
In short, there are very few organisations that can ignore digital marketing. If you want to reach your audience, you need to be where they are, and you’ll need some kind of digital marketing strategy to make this happen.
The 7 biggest areas of digital marketing?
1) Search engine optimization (SEO)
The top 5 results on Google account for 67% of all clicks. So getting your website into the top half of page one for the keywords that matter to your organisation is normally a top priority. If you’re at the bottom of page 1 in Google’s search results page, you’ve missed out on 97.6% of all clicks – if you’re on page 2 or further back, you’re almost missing out completely. For this reason SEO is often a top priority for organisations.
2) Content marketing
Content marketing is a long term strategy that aims to build a strong relationship with your target audience, by giving high quality, engaging and relevant content. In its purest form, content marketing is telling a story that your potential audience wants to hear. At the heart of content marketing is trust. The objective is to build trust and credibility so that long before customers are making a purchasing decision, they have already given you their loyalty and trust.
3) Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It’s a well established advertising model that’s been around for 20 years. It works by directing customers to your website though adverts – you ‘pay’ when the customer ‘clicks’ on your advert to visit your site. Google runs the biggest PPC programme, but Bing, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and many others run their own platforms. PPC is quick to set up, and if implemented correctly, produces fast results – it’s often the first choice when starting with digital marketing.
4) Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing, or SMM is a form of digital marketing that uses social networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok or Snapchat. Through direct posting, or by advertising, you can reach a very defined audience and encourage them to engage with your brand. Social media is great for creating brand awareness, especially in the B2C market. Some companies pay social media users to promote their products to their followers (influencer marketing) which is quite a popular way of reaching an audience quickly.
5) Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of getting other people to promote your product or service online. The affiliate will create a coded link to your product or service, and typically they receive a payment one a purchase has been made. Affiliate marketing is a very popular way of marketing digital or shippable products (Amazon for example has a massive affiliate programme) as it’s very easy to attribute the source, track and pay a commission to the affiliate.
6) Email marketing
Email marketing is as old as email itself and it’s simply the process of using email as a communication platform to develop a relationship with someone, often with a focus such as turning a prospect into a customer. The beauty of email marketing is that much of it can be automated and once set up correctly it can have a profound impact on the entire customer journey.
7) Video marketing
Video really is a type of content and it falls under content marketing, but given that Youtube is second biggest search engine (Google being No.1) then it’s really in a class of its own. Video is an incredibly powerful tool for promoting your own products and services, not just by simply having it on your website, but sharing across social media, and also having your own YouTube channel. Video allows you to reach and educate new audiences.
Icebreaker
In order to find out if we’re the right kind of fit for each other, I ask all clients to fill out my icebreaker. This allows me to follow up with meaningful responses so that we can get down to roots of where you need help.
“I have no hesitation in recommending Steve as an expert in digital marketing. He is also just ‘one of life’s good guys’.”
Chris Elliott
“Steve took the time upfront to understand our business and translate that understanding into a digital strategy focused on delivering sales growth.
Russell Fraser
“Steve is approachable, thoughtful and dedicated. He sets his bar high and is always thinking ahead and coming up with creative and practical ways to approach digital marketing.”
Anna Lewin
“Steve has superb skills in digital growth strategy and digital marketing. He is a delight to deal with and I would wholeheartedly recommend him”
Nigel May
“Steve is creative, fun and consistently produces great results. I have worked with him many times over ten+ years and have no hesitation in recommending him.”
Simon Hook
“If you want help with digital strategies for growth or to generate sales via digital, I absolutely recommend Steve”
Tim Ollerenshaw
“Steve is truly passionate about understanding not just the goals of a campaign, but the business behind it.”
Stephen Emery
“I’ve worked with Steve for a number of years now, and he has a near unique ability to make the mystical world of digital make complete sense.”
Pete Freeman
How to create a digital marketing strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy often involves quite a bit of learning and discovery, but the following format is one that I recommend to clients and it’s a format that I like to work to.
Define your goals
What are the commercial goals you want to achieve? Defining these at the start is really important as it will dictate the approach you take. Increasing brand awareness would be very different to driving sales for a particular product. Even if your goals change along the way, being clear on the outcomes you want at the start is really important.
Identify your target audience
One of the great things about digital is that you can target your audience very specifically. It’s not a broad brush approach. Profiling your customers and identifying different customer personas and their specific needs will help inform you which channels and techniques to use to reach them.
Keyword research
You know who you want to target, but what are those people searching for? Keyword research is absolutely essential in bridging the gap between what you think your audience wants and what they are actually searching for. You may be surprised at what it kicks up. There are lots of free keyword research tools out there that can help with this.
Establish a budget for each digital channel
Once you’ve decided which channels are best for reaching your audience, you’ll need to set a budget. The obvious costs are advertising and paying for external resources, but even if you’re not directly advertising or using an external agency, there is still a cost to creating content and managing campaigns – even if it’s just time for your internal team.
Strike a balance
Sometimes a single pronged attack works well for some organisations, but most of the time a multichannel approach is better. Striking a balance between paid advertising, which tends to give ROI faster, and SEO or content, which offers a better longer term yield. Get advice if you can, from someone who has worked in your sector, they may be able help you decide what the best approach is.
Make sure your website is up to scratch
Depending on your specific strategy, the end result often requires you to drive people to your website to take action. It’s important to make sure that your landing pages, product information and content is spot on, as well as making sure it works well on mobile devices. Don’t forget – it’s likely that 50% or more of your audience will be using their mobile as the first way to connect.
Measurement
It’s really important to understand how to measure against your goals. Defining your KPIs such as sale value, return on advertising spend, lifetime customer value or conversion rates. Getting Google Analytics and Tag manager set up correctly with your goals, will help ensure you can clearly see what sort of return you are getting on your digital marketing spend.
Get going
Finally, once you’ve got a plan in place don’t spend too long polishing it, rather set it in motion. You’ll find the best way of refining and perfecting a plan is by running it, using the data to refine and perfect it along the way.
What does a good digital marketing strategy look like?
Research and data
A good digital marketing strategy is well researched. There are lots of tools out there to help you research your market and also snoop on your competitors. Tools include Google’s keyword planner, Google trends, Moz, ahrefs, SEMrush and Spyfu.
It’s committed
Setting a reasonable time frame, of 12 months, with monthly reviews to allow you to measure against KPIs is something i would recommend. Although some aspects of digital marketing can generate fast results, it’s better to take a longer more strategic view.
To the point
A good digital strategy is focused and to the point. It’s an action plan, not a thesis and should be lite enough to allow others see the direction you are heading in, but it should also allow you to change tack along the way if needed.
You can see if it works
A good digital marketing strategy will require you to set up right tools for measuring against your KPIs. Measurement should be at the heart of any digital marketing strategy, the data you get back can be used to optimise any campaign.
It’s never finished
A good strategy is always a work in progress, new learnings, analysing data, refining and creating smarter campaigns. A digital marketing strategy will always evolve and it’s not something that is ever finished or complete, rather an ongoing project.
Frequently asked questions
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How I can help
From small businesses with no marketing department through to larger companies with marketing teams, over the last 20 years I’ve delivered I’ve helped over 100 customers create and put into action a solid digital marketing strategy.
If you’re looking for some independent advice about your website, want to find out how I help people, or just want to pick my brain – drop me a line, I’d be delighted to have a chat.
