The core of a strategy can be defined in 8 steps.
1. Define your brand: If you don`t have a brand guideline, start with cr read more... eating this. Think about your USPs (unique selling points), value proposition, brand voice, history, mission statement, color palette and typestyle. And how you can utilize this in your online campaigns.
2. Define your buyer personas: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Consider including demographics, motivations, and behavior patterns. What does drive people to choose your products and services?
3. Create your S.M.A.R.T. goals: SMART goals are established using a specific set of criteria that ensure your goals are attainable. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Defining through the SMART framework eliminates generalities and guesswork, sets a clear finish line, and makes it much easier to track progress and identify missed targets.
4. Prioritize your digital marketing strategies: Don`t just focus on what is trendy at the moment. Make sure you focus on what offers the most value for your business according to your previously defined SMART goals. Local SEO, for example, is very trendy and useful in 2020, but customers might already find you easily through Google. Or they cannot find you accurately yet, but in your time-bound goal, you defined you need to increase revenue within a month. In that case, going for a PPC campaign might be a better choice.
5. Set your digital marketing budget: The US Small business administration suggests 7-8% of your gross revenue should go towards your marketing budget, with about 42% of that dedicated to digital marketing. The average digital marketing budget for most businesses ranges between the $2,500 and $12,000 per month.
6. Brainstorm your strategy: If you are planning to advertise, research thoroughly what platforms you should advertise on. Lead generation for law-related services won`t have much effect on Instagram, for example. Google Ads would be a better choice. How can you reach your buyer-persona the most effective way, does the advertisement platform allow me to target the criteria of the buyer persona? If you are publishing content, prioritize what needs to be released first according to your SMART goals. And create a content calendar for at least 3-6 months to achieve those goals.
7. Launch your Campaign: Now that your strategy is well defined, it`s time to launch your campaigns. But before you start, make sure that you have all the tracking options implemented.
8. Tracking of results & goals: Make sure that you can measure the performance of your strategies by tracking various goals. Standard tools used for this are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google ads. They can help you track the ROI of the strategies and provide you with valuable data to act on. For example, with Google Ads, you might have keywords that are spending a lot of your budget but are not helping with the conversions. By eliminating those keywords, and putting more focus on what is converting, you can achieve a higher ROI.
With these steps, your business can launch its first digital marketing strategy. If you don`t have the time, or not getting the results you hoped for. Consider hiring a digital marketing firm like Digital Growth to get the best results possible.
