Your recent digital marketing strategy might not have been successful as expected. Then, check out the key elements to succeed next time!
The digital marketplace has become more crowded and fierce.
Thus, you should learn the key elements of a successful digital marketing strategy to stay ahead of your competitors! Read on below.
#1. Setting SMART objectives and goals
The objective phase is important in creating a digital strategy as it helps set clear direction, purposes, and vision for your marketing activities. In addition, the objectives and goals set in the phase allow for measuring the success of the digital campaigns.
The principle is to define SMART objectives and goals, which should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
#2. Understanding your target audience
Target audiences indicate a specific consumer group to which you want to present your digital marketing activities. They can be defined by gender, age, geographic characteristics, location, income, interests, etc.
Knowing your target audience is important in building relationships and engaging with your potential consumers more effectively.
There is no one-size-fits-all method to identify target audiences, but here are some useful tips:
- Discovering the needs and pain points addressed by your products or services.
- Getting insights from your existing consumers to evaluate the current strategy.
- Analyzing the target audiences of your competitors.
#3. Planning the core messaging strategy
Because digital audiences usually have a short attention span, conveying the right information without errors is crucial.
A proper messaging strategy guides your marketing communication campaign and helps send clear and consistent messages to target audiences. Those messages go beyond just sharing products or services information. They also build your brand identity, mission, vision, and values.
Then, what makes a successful messaging strategy? – They are:
- Factors that set your business apart
- A stated goal in alignment with digital marketing’s strategic objectives
- Insights of the target audience you want to speak to
- A compelling story to form an emotional connection with your audience
#4. Selecting suitable digital channels
A well-defined digital strategy involves multiple channels and platforms to reach as many target audiences as possible and get your messages across successfully.
The selection of channels depends on your objectives, target audience, industry, resources, budget, and competition. Popular digital channels include, but are not limited to:
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Video Marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
- Affiliate marketing
- Influencer marketing
#5. Creating an effective digital marketing funnel
A marketing funnel is closely related to your selected messages and channels because it allows serving relevant information to the right people across the right channels and at the right time.
A digital marketing funnel contains more steps and is more complex than the traditional AIDA marketing funnel, as the online customer journey is no longer linear.
We can divide the funnel into pre-purchase and post-purchase stages; each has multiple steps as follows:
We can divide the funnel into pre-purchase and post-purchase stages as follows:
- Pre-Purchase stages: Engagement > Education > Research > Evaluation > Justification > Purchase
- Post- Purchase stages: Adoption > Retention > Expansion > Advocacy.
#6. Defining measurements for digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing strategy needs to be evaluated and improved over time.
Hence, it is important to measure the performance and results of the campaigns regularly, implement cross-comparisons, and improve the current strategy, if needed.
We mention here some important KPIs for your reference:
- Website Traffic
- New Visitors and Returning Visitors
- Exit Rate and Bounce Rate
- Conversion Rate
Wrapping up
A digital marketing strategy will lay the foundation for all the next marketing activities; thus, you have to spend a lot of effort researching, testing, and planning your strategy, considering the above key elements!
