In a world where digitalization is essential, a large part of your marketing strategy must also keep pace. As a business, you need to look for your customers where they are most present - on the internet, especially on social networks. You will need an effective digital marketing strategy to be successful and to achieve your business goals.
First of all, determine your target customers
For any digital marketing strategy model, it is important that you define your target customers. The best way to do this is to create buyer personas. This concept allows you to define the different buyer profiles that are likely to be interested in your products or services. In order to develop this profile, you need to conduct surveys of the target audience.
The ideal buyer persona is based on a variety of customers, prospects and people not included in your existing community. The information you need to collect will depend, in the first instance, on whether your main activity is BtoB or BtoC. Depending on your vocation, the practices for establishing buyer profiles will be different.
Thus, you can start with the locality where most of your traffic comes from. Continue by determining the approximate age of your prospects or customers. You will need this to modify the publishing techniques for your digital marketing strategy.
Then, if there is a possibility for you to know the personal income of each of them, it would be perfect to complete the investigation. This is in order to offer better services at better prices. Knowing the interests of your target audience can also be beneficial in creating more relevant and engaging content.
Define your objectives and the tools you need
In a digital project, marketing objectives should always be clearly defined. For example, if you plan to increase your online sales by 30% over a period of 3 months, then your goal may be to generate more leads on your web platform. Therefore, the strategy you adopt must be geared towards this goal for the project to succeed.
In any case, whatever the purpose of your project, you must be able to know its scope and how to evaluate it. This means that it is essential to have the right marketing tools at your disposal. Depending on the company and the objectives, the evaluation of the effectiveness of a digital marketing strategy can be different.
However, it is important that you do it correctly. This is how you can identify flaws in order to correct actions to be taken in the future. For those who do not know much about this field, it is possible to follow a marketing training course given by qualified professionals.
Conduct a study on your various marketing and media channels
During a digital transformation, you have several marketing and media channels at your disposal. These are mainly used for your marketing strategy. In the first instance, it is important to analyse the situation as a whole to avoid being overwhelmed. Marketers often use the POEM (owned, earned and paid) technique for media classification. This method allows them to categorise the different communication techniques and channels you already have.
Owned media are the digital resources you own. This can be an online platform or several profiles on social networks. Earned media is the reputation you have gained through word of mouth. Whether it is content published on other websites, the customer relationship you have established or the result of a press article, earned media is the recognition the public has given you.
Paid media, as the name suggests, is media that you have acquired in return for a fee. This technique refers to any media or channel that you pay for to get more customers. To be clear, it is like the advertising system on television. You pay a fee to your digital media or social networks in order to get more visibility to the public.
You now have a better idea of how to manage each of your media and sales channels. You should now be able to establish good digital communication to improve your image on owned, earned and paid media.
Take the time to evaluate and plan your various internal contents
On your media or supports, the various publications determine the image you project to the outside world. Generally speaking, this is called content. On a website, everything can be scrutinised: the homepage, the "About" section, descriptions of your services and products, your history, blog posts and so on. The same goes for social networks. So remember to review the posts you have made in the past and the images you have used.
The importance of taking care of your content is to be able to turn simple site visits into leads. Whatever your business and your goals, using relevant and polished content is fundamental to your digital marketing strategy. Sometimes, some specialists in this sector offer digital marketing training to help businesses produce quality content for their target customer.
To develop a digital marketing strategy, you need to know what kind of content will help you achieve your main goals. If your goal is to get nearly 30% more leads through your website than last year, it won't help to change the content in the 'Contact Us' section. Unless, perhaps, it has been integrated into your strategy as a call to action or CTA button and is proving effective in generating leads.
Most of the time, it is also blog posts, e-books or landing pages that work best to get more leads. In any case, each company must have its own strategy. Don't hesitate to seek professional help to make your digital project a success.