What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that gets a product or brand in front of potential customers. The goal could be to grow the brand or hit specific revenue targets. Digital marketing strategy is a marketing strategy that lives exclusively on digital mediums such as search engines, websites or social media. The successful implementation of a digital marketing strategy can be crucial to an organization’s success, particularly in an era when more and more consumers transact business on mobile devices.
Differentiating digital marketing and digital strategy:
The two terms, strategy and campaign are often confused and used interchangeably. While there are similarities, a digital marketing strategy is different from a digital marketing campaign, though you need one in order to achieve the other.
A digital marketing strategy is the plan you have for your marketing campaign. It looks at demographics, product benefits and platforms to find success. The digital marketing campaign is the actual action you take. A digital marketing strategy can have multiple digital marketing campaigns. You might have one campaign on Facebook while another runs on Instagram. Therefore campaigns support your strategy and implement it.
Why Have a Digital Marketing Strategy?
To survive in competitive markets, you must stay active to remain relevant. As the popularity of digital marketing increases, businesses are studying the advantages of online marketing versus older, seemingly outdated platforms like radio, newspaper, and television.
While you may know that you need a marketing strategy, you may not fully understand why it is so important. Here are some reasons to consider to help you come up with a strong digital marketing strategy.
- Understand Market Share: A clear strategy helps you understand your market share better. Without this understanding, you may underestimate/overestimate the demand for your products or services. The strategy helps you fully understand the marketplace and takes into consideration customer behaviors, needs, competitors and customer profiles.
- Get To Know Your Customers: By deploying user feedback tools, you can better understand the consumer sentiment around your products or services. Being in the digital marketplace, conducting market surveys and getting customer feedback and reviews is easy. This helps you better streamline marketing tactics so as to focus on what will work best for your company hence achieving best solution for your target market.
- Competitors Gain Market Share: Without a digital marketing strategy, you can bet that your competitors do and will use it to gain market share while you rely on traditional marketing tactics. Therefore a need to invest in digital marketing to maintain visibility with your target audience and stay in the conversation when that audience is deciding to buy.
- Creating good customer service/ experience: Developing a digital marketing strategy helps you to develop your online value proposition. The goal of the value proposition is to improve the user experience when buying your product or service regardless of the customer persona. This means that your brand appeals to multiple types of buyers because it is priced right and easy to purchase. The goal is to create loyal customers who love your products and your brand and will share that with family and friends.
- Remain Agile in a Competitive Market: Businesses are constantly making adjustments to their brand and user experience. This helps them stay ahead of the competition because the changes cater to the needs or desires of consumers.
Types of Digital Marketing Strategies
When developing a digital marketing strategy, you want to think about your goals, what the audience is most receptive to and your budget. Some strategies take longer to deliver results than others. You must weigh the options to see what is best for your company.
- Content Marketing: Its focus is to create and distribute valuable, relevant and consistent content to a target audience. This content is meant to attract people to the brand and retain their interest in purchasing and learning more. The most common type of content marketing is blogging.
- Advertising: Most business owners are familiar with paid advertising. These are ads and commercials on television or radio. When it comes to digital paid advertising, the ads are located on websites, search engines or social media platforms. In paid advertising, you are buying ad space that uses digital resources to specify who sees the ad. Search engines and websites collect cookies that help advertisers tailor ads based on what consumers are searching for online.
- Email Marketing: If you already have a list of followers, you can send them emails that are designed to convert into sales. You may mix up email marketing with helpful content that isn’t directly selling, such as referring them to the latest blog or tip list, but the goal is to convert emails into customers.
- Social Media Marketing: This uses social media platforms to promote and sell your products and services. This is not purchased ads on the social media platform, but instead new and curated content that you think your audience will find valuable. This might be product reviews, testimonials, memes, infographics or other content that educates and entertains your audience. The goal is to grow your social media following to a sizeable list that allows you to promote products or services and sales directly to your target audience.
- Influencer Marketing: Influencers are people who have a large following on social media as a result of the content they publish or their celebrity status. Getting an influencer to tout your brand on their social media channels can go a long way to building a bigger following yourself and increasing sales. Influencers essentially endorse your product or service.
How to Identify Your Target Audience: Demographics and Psychographics?
Identifying your target audience is a critical step in developing an effective marketing strategy. You can do this by understanding your potential customers’ demographics and psychographics. Here’s how to go about it:
Demographics: Demographics involve the quantifiable characteristics of your audience, such as age, gender, income, education, occupation, marital status, and location. To identify the demographics of your target audience:
- Market Research: Conduct market research to gather data about your existing customers and potential ones. Use surveys, questionnaires, and online tools to collect demographic information.
- Analyze Your Customer Database: If you have an existing customer database, analyze it to identify common demographic traits among your current customers.
- Competitor Analysis: Study your competitors to see who their target audience is and whether there are overlaps with your potential audience.
- Social Media Insights: Utilize analytics tools on social media platforms to gain insights into the demographics of your social media followers.
- Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics or similar tools to analyze the demographics of your website visitors.
Psychographics:
Psychographics involve the study of your audience’s interests, values, lifestyles, behaviors, and psychological factors. To identify the psychographics of your target audience:
- Customer Surveys and Interviews: Conduct surveys and interviews to gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ values, interests, and motivations. Ask open-ended questions to uncover their lifestyle choices and beliefs.
- Social Media Monitoring: Monitor social media conversations related to your industry, product, or service to identify common interests and concerns among your potential audience.
- Create Buyer Personas: Develop detailed buyer personas that represent different segments of your audience. These personas should include not only demographics but also psychographic information, such as hobbies, goals, challenges, and pain points.
- Use Data Tools: Utilize psychographic data tools and market research reports to access data on consumer behaviors, values, and interests within your industry.
- Analyze Website Behavior: Analyze how visitors interact with your website, such as the pages they visit, the content they engage with, and the products or services they show interest in. This can provide insights into their psychographic traits.
How does Bizzyeasy shape the future of digital marketing?
- Comprehensive Analytics: Bizzyeasy offers detailed data analytics to assess the performance of marketing campaigns, which in turn could help businesses make data-driven decisions and tweaks to their strategy.
- Content Management: The tool can assist in managing and scheduling marketing content across various digital platforms, including social media, emails, blogs, etc.
- SEO Tools: Bizzyeasy provides SEO tools for keywords analysis, backlink tracking, website optimization, which could improve the visibility of businesses online.
- Email Marketing: Capabilities such as automated email sequences, newsletter generation, and tracking email open and CTR rates could be offered to enhance and monitor email marketing campaigns.
- Social Media Management: It offers social media management tools for scheduling posts, tracking performance, and managing engagement across multiple platforms.
- Customer Relationship Management: Bizzyeasy potentially integrates CRM functionality to help with the segmentation of customers, personalized marketing, and better management of leads.
- Ad Management: Tools for planning, running, and assessing the performance of paid digital ads could be incorporated into the platform.
- Competitor Analysis: Bizzyeasy can facilitate competitor analysis to help understand competitors’ strategies and adjust yours accordingly.
- A/B Testing: The platform supports A/B testing, which allows businesses to compare different versions of their marketing material to optimize response rates.
- Reporting: Detailed reports about the ROI of different digital marketing efforts could be generated to help evaluate and improve future strategies.
Conclusion:
Developing a digital marketing strategy that works takes time and effort. You may employ different tactics and campaigns to reach your ultimate goals of sales and brand awareness. Be patient with your strategy and measure success with Bizzyeasy.
Some of the Frequently Asked Questions:
Q1. What is a digital marketing strategy? And what are the keys to its success?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action to reach your desired objective. You use your organization’s digital channels for the same. A successful digital marketing strategy gets high quality leads at a low price.
Q2. What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is engaging with potential customers using the internet and digital communication. Email marketing, social media, web advertising, push notifications, blogs, etc., are a part of it.
Q3. What is a digital marketing strategy framework?
A digital marketing framework is like a roadmap for reaching your potential customers.
Q4. What are the most effective digital marketing strategies?
Paid marketing, SEO, Email marketing and social media marketing are effective digital marketing strategies.
Q5.What are the 7 C’s of digital marketing?
The 7 C’s of digital marketing are Content, Context, Connection, Communication, Conversion, Customer, and Consistency.
Q6. Which digital marketing channels are the most effective?
The most effective digital marketing channels depend on your target audience, but commonly effective ones include SEO, social media, email marketing, and content marketing.
Q7. How can I assess the effectiveness of my digital marketing efforts?
You can assess digital marketing effectiveness by analyzing metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, and return on investment (ROI).
Q8. What are the most common digital marketing pitfalls to avoid?
Common digital marketing pitfalls to avoid include neglecting mobile optimization, ignoring SEO best practices, not defining clear goals, and not tracking and analyzing data.