The Ultimate Guide to Formulating a Marketing Strategy

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is different from a marketing strategy. In broad terms, a marketing strategy is basically a plan that helps you be able to reach achievable, market-orientated goals. Digital marketing has the advantage of being highly trackable and measurable, providing highly useful metrics that are able to define market engagement online. Digital marketing strategies are becoming increasingly important.

The recent shift that the market experienced due to the global pandemic, means an increasing number of businesses are choosing to conduct their activities online. A digital marketing strategy takes various online marketing channels and utilizes them through a series of actions in order to meet target goals. A digital marketing strategy is your businesses’ long-term plan to achieve future success.

How to create a successful marketing strategy

Your strategy needs to be realistic, feasible, timely, and achievable.

A marketing strategy is not something you can approach with a ‘one-size-fits-all mentality. If a marketing strategy doesn’t have a purpose and aligns with your overall business plan, and that which specifically defines you: then it is meaningless. Some marketing strategies might work wonderfully for another business but might fail when applied to your own.

Your business needs to consider its’ various strengths and weaknesses to effectively address the specific needs of your relevant customers. The intended goals you wish to achieve should be clearly defined, measurable objectives that will allow you to generate an effective reach. By performing a number of analyses you can take the first steps to identify exactly where your business stands within the market, providing you with information on your competitors to use as a benchmark for your own business. By performing an analysis like a SWOT analysis, for example, you can compare the unique value proposition of your brand to develop a go-to-market strategy for new products.

How do you create a digital marketing strategy?

Firstly, you need to clearly define your target audience and establish what they value. Imagine who your customers are, what their lifestyles are like and what interests they have. Once you establish this it will be easy to understand which customers you will want to target, what their interests are and how to effectively position your brand favourably to them. From here you can generate engagement through your traditional channels or digital channels such as social media and blogs. Be sure that your choice of words on all written content can create a relatable personality for your customers to engage with.

The use of social listening technology can be a wonderful way of discovering which topics and content are of interest to customers, and will provide you with useful audience insights. Social listening technology will help you work out what’s trending on social platforms and will allow you to apply these insights to help you communicate with customers. This can assist you greatly when you’re attempting to come up with interesting blog topics and other things to post on social media to generate online interest in your business. In this situation adding google analytics to your arsenal will help deliver tactically on a core part of your digital marketing strategy.

SEO is an essential component of a digital marketing strategy and every business benefits in some capacity from utilizing the effects of search engine optimization (SEO). Applying SEO can be an effective way to climb the search ladder algorithm, directing traffic to your website. Improving your brand reach when it comes to search engines such as Google, can really serve to generate sales, and make your business more accessible to consumers. The effectiveness of SEO can pull more visitors to your website, simply by taking advantage of searches and including keywords in all your online content.

An effective digital strategy will need to focus on achievable, quantifiable long-term business goals, which should align with your overall business plan.

What is a digital marketing campaign?

Digital marketing strategies and campaigns are not the same things. These two terms are often used interchangeably, but in broad terms, the digital marketing campaign makes up the structured components or actions within your digital marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy is considered to be the overall strategic guidelines that your business uses to direct the decisions and executes the tactics developed in the form of a marketing campaign to achieve specific business and marketing goals. 

How to create a digital marketing campaign

It’s important that your digital marketing campaign be timely, consistent, and well thought out from the beginning. To be effective, your marketing campaign must also be flexible enough to adapt to outside changes and should be consistently monitored and tracked through reliable analysis and review. Some people find it useful to develop a template to use to track their digital marketing on a monthly basis, which can be shared and adapted by all of your marketing team.

A marketing campaign that can adapt to any unexpected local, environmental changes, and or evolving customers' desires is very important (particularly in this day and age). To secure and develop profitable, long-term relationships with your customers, you will need to establish and implement a strategy that can react well to evolving demands. Make sure that all actions taken during your campaign are consistently in line with your digital marketing strategy.

Your digital marketing strategy should consist of:

• Social media campaigns
• Blogs
• Email marketing campaigns
• Video campaigns
• Events marketing
• Podcasting
• & Marketing on emerging platforms

The short-term and long-term goals of the campaign also need to be carefully thought out. Try your utmost to engage with customers on these platforms, whilst using an authentic human voice.

Various digital assets can be used to establish such strategies and campaigns, as long as short-term and long-term goals are clearly identified and continuously monitored. Regardless of which digital outlets you might choose, do make sure that your marketing campaign is well structured and consistent.

If require advice in formulating your marketing strategy get in contact with one of our marketing experts today!