I always mention "digital marketing strategy" or "digital strategy" a lot in my posts, but I realized a few days ago, that I haven't dedicated much time to define and talk about this topic. If you want to promote your business, it is very important that everything you are going to do is tied to a well-defined strategy. If you don't do it this way, then you will be walking blind.
What exactly is a digital marketing strategy?
There is an excellent definition of this term on the Hubspot blog, which I quote below:
"Your digital marketing strategy consists of a series of actions that will help you achieve your goals through online marketing. The term "strategy" might sound a bit intimidating, but crafting an effective digital strategy doesn't have to be difficult. In simple terms, a strategy is basically a plan of action to achieve one or more goals."
Why have a digital strategy
As I mentioned earlier, if you don't have a strategy that is defined, you will be sailing aimlessly at the moment of taking action. The strategy contains very important information about your objectives and it is through it that they are achieved.
Taking the time to define where you want to go, what you want to achieve and how you will do it will save you headaches, unnecessary expenses and of course, waste your time and energy.
Elements that should be included in every digital strategy
There are certain elements to take into account and it is essential that they are present, such as:
- A website: if your business is not on the web, then, basically, it is as if it does not exist. For your potential customers to know you, it is very important that you have an optimized website, which allows you to navigate comfortably from any device and where there is information about your company and everything you offer. It is like having an office open 24 hours a day.
- Blog: one way to attract traffic to your website is by sharing valuable content through your blog. If you have a website, but it does not have a corporate blog, I recommend you consider starting one. The blog helps you build trust while sharing useful information to people who are looking for a solution to any problem related to your products or services.
- Web positioning or SEO: after you have your website, it is necessary to take a series of actions to position it, that is to say, to make it appear within the first search results of users. This is achieved by defining keywords, optimizing content and other steps.
- Social Networks: being present in social networks, creating a community of followers and offering customer service will allow you to position your business and attract new customers.
What should a digital marketing strategy include?
Every marketing strategy must have the following:
Analysis of the current situation of the company or rather, a SWOT analysis. You must know where you are, what are your strengths, what you have to improve, what are the threats and opportunities. Other things you should also be very clear about are the following:
- How your website is positioned: For this you can use Google Analytics or Alexa Rank to know how many visitors your website has and their information. Performing a web audit, in case you have one, will provide you with valuable information to know what changes you should make to improve.
- Your presence in social networks: Performing an audit of your social networks is also important. Check how your community of followers is doing, how many clicks the links you share receive, how many profile visits, how many impressions, how many followers, likes, comments and all the analytics. Each social network allows you to see an analytics of your accounts, as long as it is a company account in most cases. Investigate what is being said about your company on social networks to know if you have a good reputation and if what you are doing is right.
Define your ideal customer: know who your products or services are aimed at, have a detailed demographic characteristics, their preferences and all the information you can gather. Hubspot has a template that, in my opinion, is great for defining who your Buyer Persona is. You can download it here so you can use it and define in detail who your ideal customer is.
Analyze your competition: you can see the information of their social networks to know how many followers they have, the level of engagement of their followers, what content they share through their blog, how their website is designed. You can use tools like Alexa Rank to analyze their websites. This way you can make a comparison with your current status. See what is working for them and what is not.
Objectives: you must establish the objectives you want to achieve, these must be measurable, realistic, achievable and have a definite date. For example, your objectives can be:
- Increase your community of followers
- Attract new clients
- Increase traffic to your website
- Increase your ecommerce sales
- Increase the number of leads
Define the actions to be taken: according to the objectives you set, then define the actions to be taken to achieve those objectives. An example could be:
- Goal: Increase the community of followers on Instagram from 1000 to 3000 in the next 3 months.
- Tactics or steps to take: Conduct sweepstakes where participants had to follow your account.Advertise through Instagram Ads with a CTA that invites to follow the account.
Define the channels you will use: it can be, create 1 weekly post on your blog and promote it through your social networks and share content through social networks.
Establish the type of content to share: the information you share can be blog posts, images, videos, tutorials, podcasts and links.
Set a budget: you must define how much money you are going to spend on your marketing strategy and do your best to stay within it.
Measure the results: after you take action, you must measure the effectiveness of what you are doing to see if it is giving the expected results or if you have to make any adjustments to the strategy.
Measurement tools
- Google Analytics: to analyze the number of visits to your website, the demographic characteristics of your visitors, the time spent on your page, etc.
- Metricool: This tool has a free version and a paid version to analyze your social networks. You can see how many followers you have gained or lost, clicks, among other data that will help you know if you are increasing your community.
- Facebook, Instagram and Twitter analytics: these social networks allow you to make a measurement with numerical data on everything that has to do with your account.
Once you define your strategy to follow, you must meet your schedules, both of actions and publications you have to do. To help you, I leave here a free template for you to download and start working.
