by Digital marketing has become a pillar on which most businesses rely to reach their online target audience. Like everything else, there must be an effective strategy to reach the specific target audience and ultimately convert them. Structuring a digital marketing strategy involves understanding the business, its audience, and the market in which they both exist. According to a business without a marketing strategy or one with the wrong strategy has left the race for its competitors to win.
As a business owner looking to dominate your competition, setting the right marketing strategy is essential to your success. Here are the key steps to structuring a marketing strategy.
- Set a goal
- Evaluate the existing digital marketing presence
- Familiarize with the digital sales funnel
- Develop buyer personas
- Locate customers on the funnel
- Create an appropriate content plan
- Review results
The above actionable steps are essential to achieving your digital marketing goals. Delving into each step, you’d understand why you ought to have a marketing plan that puts you in the face of your target audience.
Set a goal
The first step in any strategy session is to set a goal. Knowing the desired results can guide your steps and approach. Decision makers can use the SMART criteria to set their goals. The SMART criteria help business owners to set Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals.
One of the biggest mistakes one can make at this stage is to set unattainable or unrealistic goals. It is better to set a huge long-term goal and smaller short-term goals that eventually culminate into the desired outcome.
Evaluate the existing digital marketing presence
A common mistake people make during strategy sessions is to discount existing frameworks and their results. Your existing digital marketing presence is a great way to draw data on what works and what doesn’t.
Gathering data from the existing framework can ease stress and help you fine-tune your plans and approaches. This data can be obtained across your web properties like your website, social media, email marketing data, pay-per-click advertising, and content marketing or SEO success.
Using data from these many sources, you can easily make resource re-allocation decisions based on channels that offer more returns.
Familiarize with the digital sales funnel
The digital sales funnel maps each consumer’s journey. It tells you where the consumer is on that journey and helps you identify how best to approach them. As a brand building a digital marketing strategy, you need to know where your customers are on this journey.
The various stages consumers occupy on that journey are classed into four categories;
Awareness: Here is where you make your brand/business known to the consumer through social media channels, SEO and content marketing, paid to advertise, etc.
Interest: This is where you raise the consumer’s interest in your products/services. This stage helps the consumers know who you are and what sets you apart from others.
Engage: Engaging your customer solidifies your relationship and helps build confidence and loyalty. This can be achieved with engaging content that addresses concerns and encourages consumers to ask questions.
Action: This stage converts the consumer from visitors into paying customers. At this stage, the consumer is ready to take action by purchasing your products/services.
Develop buyer personas
Knowing your audience is key to selling products/services to them. By knowing your audience, you can determine what they respond to and how to use those prompts to help them make decisions. In developing your buyer personas, you need to get the following right;
- Who your audience is
- The right narrative that resonates with your audience
- Specific prompts your audience responds to.
Locate customers on the funnel
Having understood the sales funnel and who your buyer personas are, you also need to know where they are on the sales funnel. A buyer at the first stage is better off with information about your brand and not marketing emails requiring them to take instant action.
By locating where the customer is on the funnel, you can walk them through the steps and eventually convert them.
Create an appropriate content plan
Your content plan can make or mar your digital marketing strategy. Having gone through the first five steps, you should pretty much understand who your audiences are, where they are on the sales funnel, and how best to take them through the conversion journey.
One of the ways to take them through that journey is by providing the right content. The right content leads the consumer from wherever stage they may be through to the end. In creating the right content, you need to;
- Develop a keyword strategy
- Create a content calendar
- Create a content publication schedule across your digital assets
- Use appropriate Call To Actions (CTAs)
- Leverage marketing automation tools
Review results
The difference between a successful and failed marketing strategy is in the results. Reviewing the results gives you a better understanding of what could have been done better or what you had omitted during the process.
Using this seven-step guide, you can create the most effective marketing strategy to take your business to the seven-figure revenue-generating mark.
