Irma D. Rutherford The importance of digital marketing is growing. As people spend more time online, marketing budgets shift to digital. Digital marketing offers many possibilities, and it’s easy to jump into execution mode and start doing. It is important to invest in your strategy to increase your digital return on your investment. A clear strategy helps reduce waste, focus efforts, and build on what’s already working.
Here are some tips to help you create a solid digital marketing plan.
1. Analyze your findings and explore the landscape.
Analyzing and looking at your competitors is the first step to a solid strategy. This will give you a clear picture of where you are at the moment and how you compare to your competitors and help you understand your customers better.
* Evaluate your performance. Begin by looking at your performance in the past year. Analyze your data to find out what worked and what didn’t and why.
* Assess your competitors. Take some time to look at the digital presence of your competitors. Digital marketing is open to all, so it’s easy to see your competition’s digital presence.
2. Plan your strategy.
Create a strategy based on your goals and how you want them to be achieved. The GSOT strategy framework is a set of goals, strategies and objectives to help you align your plans.
* Your goals are the things you want to accomplish at a high level. It could be to increase sales by 5% or to generate 200 signups at an event.
* Strategy is the strategy you use to reach your goals. The stages often define this in the marketing funnel. You can choose to concentrate on awareness, interest and desire, or action.
* Objectives are numbers that can be measured and linked to your goal. If I want to increase sales by 5%, 200 leads may be my objective or 400 people.
* Your tactics meet your objectives. I might use social media and a landing page to attract new clients to get 200 leads.
A clear strategy will allow you to focus your efforts on the most profitable areas of business growth. You can do many things in digital marketing; the problem is to decide what you should accomplish.
3. Define your target audience.
Digital marketing offers the possibility to target very specific audiences. You can target your ideal customer with digital marketing. To understand your customer, create buyer personas.
4. Create your content strategy.
A content plan should be developed based on your marketing goals and the target audience. This will help you identify the key topics and buckets of content you want to include in your execution.
These are five ways you can get content inspiration
* Return to step 1 and search for inspiration from your competitors and customer analysis.
To see the latest trending hashtags, search Instagram hashtags. Instagram is rich in visuals, making it a great resource for inspiring content.
* Take a look at Google Search Suggestions. This will show you what people are looking for in your category.
* Visit Pinterest to discover viral, visual and highly shared content.
5. Select your channels and tactics.
Once you have identified the content that resonates most with your audience, you can choose the channels that will give you the best results.
Think about all the possible digital channels, tools, and tactics you could use. Next, prioritize your options based on the strategy you developed in step 2. Consider how each channel contributes toward your goal and objective.
