With the world going digital, every business needs a good digital marketing strategy that guides it on how to market its products and services online, increase brand visibility, and reach more customers online. The marketing channels that a business focuses on in a digital marketing plan include SEO, SEM, and Social Media marketing.

For a business to succeed in its digital marketing efforts, several best practices should be followed. In this article, we will guide you through some of these practices and show you how to implement an effective digital marketing plan.

Key Elements of a Digital Marketing Plan

Before you start implementing a digital marketing plan, you should note that this is what will serve as your roadmap. It will guide you on how to reach the advertising goals of your business. While every digital marketing strategy will depend on the individual needs of a business, there are several critical elements of an excellent digital marketing strategy. These are:

• Marketing goal. Without a marketing goal, you will be shooting in the dark. You need to have a specific and measurable goal that you want to achieve with the digital marketing plan.
• Budget. You should determine how much money you will allocate to the digital marketing plan.
• Target audience. Also, consider the people you plan to reach. This could be your current or new customers.
• Competitor. Are there other businesses offering services similar to yours?
• Online channel to use. Consider the online channel you will use to implement the digital marketing campaign.

Benefits of a Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Business

There are several reasons why your business needs a digital marketing strategy. These include:

Provide clear focus and direction

As noted earlier, one of the key elements of a digital marketing plan is the marketing goal. A digital marketing strategy will help you and your team determine where you want to go and how you want to get there. It is, therefore, the roadmap for achieving a high return on investment. 

On top of the marketing goal, the plan incorporates other strategies like market research and persona creation. Without a digital marketing strategy, you might make costly mistakes, such as targeting the wrong audience or not considering the user experience.

Get a clearer picture of the customer’s persona

A digital marketing strategy also consists of a customer persona. It is, therefore, a good option for helping businesses better understand their customers. This, in turn, allows businesses to implement a better marketing campaign that addresses customer pain points, needs, and preferences.

Without understanding your customers' buying habits and pain points, creating a marketing campaign that resonates with them can be difficult. Even when you do, it will be hard to make a converting campaign.

Make your marketing campaigns accountable

One critical step in creating a digital marketing strategy is to set both short-term and long-term goals, which should align with your business's goals. For example, if you want 100 subscribers to your newsletter in one month, you should set a target for your marketing team. Then, they can communicate their progress if they attain their target. They can also plan, execute, and effectively measure their marketing campaigns.

Steps in Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy

To get the right results, these are the digital marketing strategies to follow:

Research your target audience

You need to determine the people likely to buy your product or service. Once you understand who they are, you should evaluate their problems and behaviors. You also need to determine their favorite online platforms and their purchasing behaviors. 

Understanding this information allows you to tailor your campaign to match your target audience. You can also use it to build an emotional connection with your target audience, improve engagement, and increase turnover. For instance, a business that sells health supplements can have men aged between 45 and 80 as its target audience. Such people are more likely to be trying to overcome a particular deformity or health problem.

However, customer demographics may not be very effective as they are very broad. You need to narrow down your description of the customer persona to understand your customers better. The best way to do that is by creating a buyer’s persona, representing a picture of your target customer. There are several steps you should follow in creating a buyer’s persona. These are:

Understand your current customers

A good customer persona should represent your ideal customer. That’s why you should only create it using real insights and data. You can get information on your current customers from different sources, such as websites, customer surveys, and feedback. You can easily create your customer persona by speaking to your target customers and noting their comments.

Understand their needs, wants, and pain points

Another essential step in creating a buyer persona is determining your customer’s needs, wants, and pain points. This will enable you to align your objectives with their needs and create a plan that best suits them. By understanding their pain points and providing a solution, you can easily capture your customers' needs.

Determine the right experience

You can now combine their needs and pain points to determine their ideal experience. Consider an ideal situation where your product has no constraints and how it can help meet their needs and tackle their pain points.

Adding life to your customer persona

After collecting enough data on your customer persona, it's time to bring life to the persona.  You can do that by providing your customer persona with a real name and a picture. You can also add other demographic information such as their age, location, marital status, occupation, income level, etc. When doing that, the most important thing is to remain authentic. Remember that by creating a customer persona, you are getting into someone’s shoes and trying to see their products and services from the customer’s perspective.

Create a bio for the buyer persona

The next step is to add an engaging bio for your buyer’s persona. When doing that, you want to remain as detailed as possible. However, even as you do that, you want to avoid unnecessary data that may clutter your buyer’s persona or cause confusion.

Make your buyer’s persona organized

After creating the buyer’s persona, you need to organize your points logically. You can highlight the title and critical sections of your buyer’s persona before sharing them with your team members and clients to get their input. The goal is to ensure that other people add to the buyer’s persona as new information gets uncovered.

Break down your audience into sub-segments

You can break down your buyer’s persona into segments and subsections. While there is no limitation on how to do it, you can create three to five buyer personas. Such a number will enable you to represent most of your audience while being specific.

Do Competitor Analysis

To stay ahead of the competition, you must incorporate competitor analysis into your digital marketing campaign. Competitor analysis is the process of analyzing and identifying your competitors. It involves understanding their ins and outs and what you can do to outrank them. 

This helps you gain essential insights to improve your digital marketing strategy. You will understand the strengths you can leverage and the limitations you can avoid. Depending on your goals, the scope of the competitor analysis can be broad or narrow.

For instance, you can look at your competitor's ranking in the top 10 SERPs to focus on website SEO. You can then visit their site to check their content, website navigation, number of links they have, site speed, and other such details. When you get this information, you can use it to improve your website.

Here are the steps to follow when doing competitor analysis in digital marketing.

Determine the kind of competitor

You want to determine the level of competition you are getting from a competitor. This is important as your action will depend on the competition level. Some of the categories you can have in your grouping are:

• Primary competitors. These brands sell products or services directly related to yours, meaning you have a similar target audience.
• Secondary competitors. While their product may be similar to yours, it's a version that targets a different audience. For instance, it could be a more high-end or low-end product. For example, Gucci and Target sell similar products to different target audiences.
• Tertiary. While tertiary brands may be related to your products or services, they don't directly compete with them.

Create a profile of your competitor’s target audience

Just as you created your target audience’s profile, you must also create a profile of your competitor’s target audience. By understanding your competitor’s target audience and the channels they use, you can determine where to find your target customers and the channels you can use to reach them.

There are several elements that show the target audience. These are:

• The mission statement or the About Us section.
• Podcasts and webinars.
• Blogs.
• Their social media posts and ads.
• User-generated content.
• Customer reviews.

When you find your competitor's target audience's goals, interactions, and content, you can easily understand who they are trying to reach and whether that is bearing fruit. You can then implement strategies that differentiate you from your competitors.

Use the 4Ps of marketing

The best marketing strategy implements the 4Ps of marketing, and your competitors will do the same. You can get deeper insights into your customer’s strategy by analyzing these  4Ps. These are:

• Product: Consider what your competitors are selling and what the customers love about their products. What makes the product or service successful? What are the strengths of their products over yours?
• Price. Consider the competitor's price point. Do they use a subscription model or a one-off payment? Are prospective customers happy with the price point?
• Place. Do your competitors sell the product online, in a brick-and-mortar store, or in a combination of the two?  
• Promotion. Consider also how your customers promote their products or services. Check the digital marketing channels where they are most active and their methods.

Understand your competitor's strategy

If your competitors are seeing success in their strategy, it means there is something they are doing right. Usually, a successful strategy results from testing and tweaking strategies across different digital platforms over a while. That means they understand what works and what doesn't, and there is something you can learn from them.

For instance, you might realize that your competitors make the most sales using Twitch ads. If, after doing competitor analysis, you realize this is the method most people are using, then it should be something you can try. Similarly, if you notice that most of your competitors are ranking on the top pages of Google, it could be an indication that they are using SEO to optimize for the search engine. It's a strategy you can also consider using.

Determine your analysis framework

Depending on your needs, you can choose a framework for competitor analysis. SWOT analysis is one method for a deeper analysis of your competitor. This analysis looks for new opportunities or threats in the marketplace and helps identify strengths and weaknesses.

You can also use Porter’s Five Forces, which considers the market forces in an industry. These include factors such as:

• Rivalry between competitors.
• Threats from new market entrants.
• Subscriber’s bargaining power.
• Supplier bargaining power.

The Boston Consulting Group has also developed a growth-share matrix that analyzes your product against the competitors. This theory suggests that the value of a product depends on whether it can get a leading market share before its growth slows down.

This matrix is divided into four quadrants, each providing a degree of profitability: Star, Question Marks, Pets, and Cash Cows. Each quadrant represents a relative market share and growth.

• Low Growth and high market share. These are cash cows that businesses should milk for reinvestment cash.
• High growth and high share. These are the stars or the high potentials that businesses should invest in.
• High growth and low share. These should be put in question marks, meaning businesses should invest in or discard them.
• Low growth, low share. Companies should divest or discard these.

All your products will eventually become pets or cash cows. A pet means the product has failed to acquire a considerable market share and is unnecessary.

Organize Your Data

If you collect lots of data from different competitors on various sites, it's easy to get confused about data analysis. This is why you need a good way of keeping your data organized, so it will be easy to return to a previous data point to get insights. 

When your data from previous competitors is well organized, it also makes it easier to compare similar areas to determine if they are opportunities. You can organize data using different factors, such as price points, lead generation methods, social media marketing methods, offers for first-time visitors, and more.

Allocate a Digital Marketing Budget

The next step in your digital marketing campaign is to set a marketing budget. You should determine where your business will get the resources to run your digital marketing campaigns. There are several factors to consider when considering your business marketing budget. These are:

• A budget forecast. You need to create a forecast of the cost of the resources you need to implement your digital marketing campaign effectively. These could include the cost of content production, SEO, social media marketing, hiring social media managers, etc.
• Set of tools. Check your current tools and determine which ones you already have and which ones you need to buy. 
• Employees. Look at your marketing department and determine if you have enough team members. If not, consider if it will be necessary to hire more team members. Also, confirm whether you have employees in other departments that you can cross-train.
• Existing content. Check the content pieces in your library to determine the ones you want to use and the ones you can repurpose.

Set Your Marketing Goal

In our elements of digital marketing strategy, we mentioned that a social media goal is one of them. Now it’s time to set your digital media marketing goal. When setting a goal, you should ensure it is neither too broad nor too vague. 

For instance, the goal is too broad if you say you want to get thousands of people to your website. Similarly, the goal is too vague if you say you wish to increase your social media following. It will be difficult for you to measure such goals effectively, plan the action to achieve them, or have a clear roadmap on how you want your team to achieve them.

A good idea when making a digital marketing goal is to use the SMART framework. An example of a smart goal is to increase social media following by 10,000 in the next three months by running paid ads and publishing four daily posts. Now, let us break down this goal to see what you want to achieve with the goal. The specific goal, in this case, is SMART. Let us now illustrate how SMART goals should be:

• Specific: Be Specific about what you want to achieve with the goal. For example, the goal in our example is to increase your social media followers.
• Measurable. Have a framework for how you expect to measure your progress toward the goal. The number of 10,000 followers means the goal is measurable.
• Actionable. You should have an idea of the action to achieve the goal. Running paid ads and posting four times daily are the actions to meet your goal.
• Time-Bound. You should have a time frame for when you expect to meet these goals. Three months is the timeframe you expect to meet the goal.

By defining these parameters concerning your goals, you can ensure that your goals are achievable within a particular time frame. When setting goals, ensure that they are both long-term and short-term. Break down the long-term goals into smaller and overarching goals, and you can focus on achieving them in the long term.

Determine your digital marketing platform

With all the information gathered in the previous step, it's time to determine the exact channel to reach your goal. There are several ways you can group your marketing channels. These include:

• Owned channel. What business channels does your business own that you can use for your digital marketing, such as social media profiles, website, email list, etc.?
• Shared or earned channels. Do you have third-party platforms promoting your brand, such as influencers or third-party magazines?
• Paid channels. Refers to the marketing methods you will use to market your brand.

To understand the best channel to target, use the information you have gathered from your competitor and target audience research. Also, consider your marketing budget and if it will enable you to market on the platform effectively. Ensure that the platform is best suited for your marketing goal. Instead of advertising on too many platforms, targeting one or two platforms where your target audience is most active is essential.

Implement Your Digital Marketing Campaign

It's time to establish a solid strategy for your social media presence. Here are a  few methods to implement your digital marketing campaign.

• Social media. It can consist of paid ads, influencer marketing, or organic posting.
• Search. SEO and SEM.
• Email marketing. This often costs newsletters and roundups of blog posts.

Your chosen strategy will depend on your budget; therefore, you should consider the resources and costs associated with each strategy.

Conclusion

There you have it! The best practices for creating a digital marketing strategy. However, it's important to note that these steps aren't cast in stone. It is, therefore, important to keep trying and make changes to suit the new realities. Your digital marketing strategy should be flexible to ensure that it adapts to economic uncertainties, seasonal fluctuations, technological advances, evolving digital marketing trends, and more.