Digital marketing is a narrow field that can be approached in million different ways. Any decent marketer or entrepreneur is now aware that the online medium is key to business growth.
Knowing how to effectively promote your business online is a great asset nowadays, as there are so many opportunities and doorways to generate abundance, both in terms of value and compensation.
In today’s post, we’ll discuss five important topics that’ll cover insightful strategies, tips, and tricks on how to develop a truly effective digital marketing plan.
Don’t forget to take some notes and do your best to implement the knowledge you gain here rather than storing it in your memory.
Create a Fabulous Strategy
A digital marketing plan is made of many things, though I’d like to separate the “plan” from the “strategy. A plan is something broader, while the strategy falls as a subcategory.
A strategy is comprised of many elements. However, there are some aspects you must necessarily consider before anything else.
Identify Your Target Audience
“For a digital marketing plan to be effective, it needs to be targeted towards the right customers. A target audience is an ideal group of individuals that are likely to buy from your brand. You can create different buyer personas and outline their ideal characteristics, their problems, their buying behaviors, and so on.” – Scott Wilson, Marketing Manager at Essays on Time.
Basically, you must know who your online audience is, how they spend time online, on what social channels do they hang, what type of videos do they watch, and so on. You should also target the basics (age, gender, location, hobbies, etc.)
Identify the Problems/Needs/Desires of Your Audience
When somebody enters your website or buys your products, they are trading their time, attention, and often money for something that we call “value”. A customer will always think in terms of “what’s in it for me”, so you should carefully identify what your target audience expects.
Identify their problems, needs, desires, urges, fears, dreams, and hopes. If you know what they truly want, your digital marketing campaigns will rock.
Establish Your Content Strategy
You can deliver value through content, products, services, and much more. However, the main value currency has been and will always be information. “Knowledge is power”, and “content is king”.
Considering that you know how your audience spends time online, you should decide on the type of content you’ll create. You can develop a long-form content blog, you can go on YouTube and start a video blog, or you can create podcasts.
Or, you can create all of these things, but decide which one you’ll focus on the most. I’d also suggest you start with one type of media content then expand as you master the first one.
Establish Your Sales Strategy
Every big brand has an automated sales strategy that is well-thought, optimized, and tested consistently.
You need to imagine and create a roadmap for your random visitors. How will they react to your homepage, what will they do, and how will you turn them into leads and then customers?
How about the targeted traffic that you’ll bring either organically or through ads? Will you use a landing page and ask them to sign-up to your email newsletter? Or will you directly push your products?
You must outline the process of your customers. The journey is very important, so make it pleasant and fill it with free value!
Focus on User Experience
User experience is probably the most important factor in today’s digital environment. Today’s internet users expect nothing more but quality experience. Your website should be mobile friendly, it should provide a simple navigation experience, and it should point all the necessary steps that people should take to advance through your sales funnel.
Google is also a big fan of UX. If your website visitors show signs that they’re pleased with the experience they’ve had on your website, Google will rank your pages and will fill you with organic traffic.
Treat Your Prospects and Customers Well
First and foremost, you should offer customer support to all of your customers. If somebody chose to trust you and trade their money for your products or services, you should at least give them the chance to ask questions and demand help.
E-mail marketing is a great way to improve the quality of your relationship with customers. An email list gives you the chance to communicate with your prospects and customers whenever you want it, for free. Treat your prospects and customers well, and they’ll reward you with loyalty.
Leverage Influencers
Influencer marketing is a great way to improve your brand’s exposure and reach a lot of targeted traffic in a very short time. Here’s a simple strategy:
You should compile a list of 50 social media influencers. They should have loyal followers and high engagement on their social pages. Grab their contact information from their social channels/blogs/websites.
Next, write a proposition. You offer $X for Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn exposure. More specifically, for 1 month, the influencer should post 4 different links (that you provide) on their news feeds/blogs/social stories. Every week, you get exposure. The price should be calibrated according to the influencer’s reach.
Track, Measure, and Optimize Your Decisions and Actions
Digital marketing is a number’s game, and that’s exactly why you need to pay close attention to the numbers that arise from your campaigns. KPI stands for the key performance metric. There are more metrics you should track, but it truly depends on your campaign’s objective.
For example, if your digital marketing campaign’s goal is to sell 100 pieces of product X, you’ll track metrics like conversion rate, CTR, CPM, EPC, and so on. If the aim was to improve your brand’s reputation, the KPI would be the number of reviews on your site, the number of new followers, and so on.
You must always decide the goal of a campaign before you start acting on it. This way, you’ll know what you’ll need to track, measure, and optimize.
There are plenty of digital marketing analytics tools you can leverage, of course, depending on your needs.
Takeaways
Developing a kickass digital marketing plan takes time, patience, and a lot of consistency. The more committed you are the more you’ll succeed. Also, remember that digital marketing is a number’s game. The key metric is traffic.
Therefore, you’ll know when a strategy works the moment your traffic, conversion rates, and sales will grow. If these performances drop, your digital strategy should be optimized as soon as possible!
Author Bio:
Lauren Adley is a writer and editor Assignment Help. She is dedicated to her family, work and friends. She is keen on reading, playing the guitar and traveling. She is interested in educational, marketing and blogging issues. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter and Google+.