posted bydopweb28/05/2020
Are you looking to build an effective digital marketing strategy? Then our easy guide to digital marketing is made for you! After reading our guide, you'll understand better what digital marketing is, and you'll be ready to start crafting your own strategy.
Digital marketing is an important part of a marketing and business strategy for most small to larger businesses nowadays. Having a strong digital marketing strategy allows you to reach and expand your audience online, increasing the opportunities for new sales as well.
Let's get started with these key points about digital marketing:
Understanding what is digital marketing is the first step to getting started! We’ll be reviewing key concepts in the next sections.
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), Marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
Digital marketing represents these activities, institutions, and processes that create value for different audiences through different digital channels such as social media, email marketing, and digital advertising.
Digital marketing encompasses all the techniques marketers use to reach, engage, and convert a specific audience (customers, potential customers, partners...etc.) for a specific brand.
One of the most important steps of any digital marketing strategy is to define your target audience. Let’s see how you can do that!
Before building a digital marketing strategy, you want to know the audience to whom you will communicate important messages about your brand.
The first important questions to ask yourself are: What is the pain point that this product/service is solving? For whom it is solving that issue?
To answer these questions, we recommend looking at industry data on brands that sell similar products/services, and at existing data from your company (if available) on other products/services.
Once you have identified who will benefit from using your products or your services, you can start thinking about demographics.
Building a customer persona (a fictive customer profile) can help you identify and write down important demographic information about your target audience. For example, you could name your persona Michelle and write the information you think is relevant to get to know her as a customer.
Here are some important questions that you should ask yourself when building your persona(s):
*How old is Michelle?
*Where does she live?
*What is her job situation and income?
*What is her household situation?
*What are her main interests?
*What are the channels she uses to research information?
Let’s dive into the basics of building a successful digital marketing strategy. We’ll explore more specific digital marketing areas in the next sections.
Now that you know more about your target audience, and what information channels they use, it’s time to create your action plan!
This information will first determine which channels and digital platforms you will use to reach your audience.
For example, let’s say that your audience finds new products and services through Instagram, Facebook groups, and through Google search results. In this case, you should consider working on influencer marketing, Instagram and Facebook ads, and Google ads.
You will need to build effective campaigns for each digital marketing area you will work on. That means that you’ll be defining the goal of your campaign, your message, your budget, and your timeframe.
One tip that can be very useful when designing a campaign is to really put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
You can ask yourself for example: Does this campaign catches my attention? Does it make me want to learn more about the brand? Does it direct the person to the right information about a product/service?
If you can, ask questions to your colleagues, relatives, friends about what makes them want to click on an ad seen on social media or Google for example.
This tip will always help you to design better campaigns from a user perspective.
Social media strategy is a big part of most digital marketing plans nowadays. In fact, 91% of U.S. businesses were using social media for marketing purposes in 2019 (Statista, 2019).
When you start designing your social media strategy, it is important that you consider how you want to present your brand on social networks. Think about your branding guidelines, the tone you will have, the type of content you want to create, and its goals.
Each social media platform has its benefits, and you should identify which ones are the best fit for your goals.
For example, Instagram allows you to engage with your audience through polls, questions answered in stories, quizzes, IGTV videos...etc. This platform is a great fit if you want to interact more with your audience, and show more visual content about your brand aesthetic, products, and services.
Twitter is also a great platform for interacting with your audience as you can rapidly reply to tweets and repost them (retweet). It is used by a lot of companies to provide great customer service and to personalize their answers when engaging with their audience.
Remember to choose a social media platform(s) that fits your needs and goals to communicate with your audience, as there is no perfect formula!
Content marketing is about creating and sharing relevant and engaging content for a defined audience on various communication platforms.
The content you create and share for your audience plays a big role in the success of your digital marketing strategy. Whether it is through written content, images, or videos, your content says a lot about your brand and the messages that you want to vehicle about it.
Our top advice for creating great content is to focus on your audience. Create relevant content that has an added-value for your audience. It could be informational, entertaining, inspirational content that will appeal to your specific audience.
Managing a blog is a great way to share engaging content with your audience, and it also has a positive effect on SEO. Creating high-quality blog articles optimized for SEO is a great way to reach your audience and to boost your brand's online visibility.
In conclusion, digital marketing represents the activities, techniques, and methods used to reach and engage a defined audience.
The first step to building a successful digital marketing strategy is to identify and to get to know your audience. Finding the best digital marketing methods and creating content will be easier if you know to who you are speaking online.
If you need help to design and launch effective digital marketing campaigns, our team of experienced professionals is here for you! At Dopweb, we'll be happy to drive more traffic to your website and to boost your online presence.
