How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy? – Beginner’s Guide with FAQs, Tips, Tricks, & More
Table of Contents
In today’s day and age, digital marketing is arguable of more importance than traditional marketing methods.
Not only is digital marketing easier to get the hang of but it can also bring in amazing returns in comparison to the investment put into it.
As a brand, you need to ensure you have a comprehensive digital marketing strategy if you expect to grow a community and stay relevant within your niche.
Quick Summary
In this post, we will discuss what a digital marketing strategy is and how you can effectively create one for your brand.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Your digital marketing strategy informs the methods and techniques you will utilize to achieve certain goals for your brand.
These goals are typically measurable digital goals such as the clickthrough rate, the conversion rate online, the number of clicks and impressions, etc.
Your digital marketing strategy should consist of measurable objectives that your brand needs to obtain within a certain period of time.
This ensures you have something to measure your progress against. If the progress you expected doesn’t happen within the specified timeframe, you can make changes to your tactics to see if that makes a difference.
Your digital marketing strategy should take note of what digital marketing methods you’ve executed well and what needs to be worked on. This ensures your brand is always on the right track when it comes to crafting effective digital marketing campaigns.
Find out what marketing strategy actually means HERE.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy? (Step-by-Step Guide)
Just like any strategy, if you want to come up with an effective one, you need to conduct a thorough amount of research first.
If you don’t take the time to plan everything out and just jump right in, the results will usually be less than satisfactory.
Learn everything there is to know about marketing and marketing strategies.
Step 1: Conduct Market Research
This is how many different marketing strategies start because, of course, if you want to create a strategy about the market, you need to know what the market looks like.
Hence, take your time and analyze the landscape of the market you want to enter with your brand. Analyze your own position to see how you stack up with your competitors.
- How far are they ahead of you? What can you do to reach the position they’re at as a brand?
- Are you ahead of them? What can you do to maintain your position ahead of them?
These are questions you can ask yourself when you conduct competitor research.
Another aspect to observe when you conduct competitor research is the digital marketing methods that they use.
- What social media platforms do they use?
- What’s their tone when they engage with their audience?
- What does their content look like?
- How do they implement calls to action?
Since your competitors are brands within your own niche, it’s highly likely that their target audience is the same as yours. If it’s not exactly the same, it’ll at least overlap quite a bit.
Hence, many of the digital marketing methods that work for them will work for you as well.
The only thing you must watch out for is that some methods require a lot of budgets which you may not have. Another thing is that some methods are meant for larger-scale companies so you must be wary of whether or not your brand is ready for certain digital marketing methods or not.
Not only does competitor research help with what digital marketing methods to use, but it can also help identify flaws in your competitors.
You can then exploit these flaws to make a digital marketing strategy that is much better than your competitors.
Study them extensively and try to figure out things that you could maybe do better than them. If you can somehow find a way to make your digital branding better, it’ll help you stand out. Thus, you’ll gain an edge over your competitors.
Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience
This could technically be a part of step 1 since it still does fall under market research.
After you analyze your competitors, you’ll have an idea of who their target audience is. As we mentioned earlier, there’s a high chance their target demographics and yours are the same.
You just need to watch out for any differences in values, core beliefs, and aspirations you may have as a brand from your competitors. As long as there are no major differences, your target audiences should practically be the same.
If you can identify an audience segment in this way, it can help you a ton down the road.
In this way, you can start to identify different target segments that you can capitalize on through many different digital marketing channels.
Take the time to do your research and build a list of different target demographics that you could target with different digital marketing strategies.
It can also be a good idea to build buyer personas. These are fictional characters that you’d develop who would represent the ideal customer that you’d like to target for your brand.
You can use many different characteristics to define them such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Demographic location
- Job
- Income
- Hobbies
- Social media platforms of choice
And any other characteristics that you think might be significant.
Want to know what target marketing is? CLICK HERE.
Step 3: Define Goals
To create a digital marketing strategy that has a high chance of success, you need to be able to measure success. To do that, you need to define goals before you even start to implement the tactics explained within your digital marketing strategy.
Since it’s a digital marketing strategy, you’ll need to define digital goals that you’d like to achieve within a certain period of time. Typically this could be any period of time but brands typically do quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly.
The goals you define could be anything that would help grow the prominence and relevance of your brand. Examples of these could be the number of followers on social media pages, the number of visitors on your website, the conversion rate on your online shop, etc.
Always remember that digital marketing goals have to be measurable.
Then, once the strategies are in place and being executed, a close eye is kept on the metrics you defined for the goals. If they seem to be on course, your digital marketing strategy is continued as usual.
However, if you notice that the metrics are not on course to reach your goal(s) within the defined time, you can go ahead and make changes to the tactics being used.
That’s the beauty of digital marketing: It allows you to make changes to your approach on the fly based on the results you receive from your efforts.
It’s something that could never be done with such ease using traditional marketing methods and that’s one of the reasons why it’s, arguably, more effective.
Step 4: Choose Your Distribution Channels
There are many existing digital marketing channels and it’s a good idea to choose a few of them for your brand. You want to avoid choosing too many as you can stretch your resources too thin if you do that.
This would result in mediocre content marketing across all platforms which would fail to bring in any customers.
Instead, you have to tap into the results you got from all the market research you performed in the first two steps.
After you conduct your market research, you get a fairly clear idea of who your target audience is. With this knowledge, you can guesstimate which digital marketing channels they would be most receptive to.
For example, if you have a product that has a target audience of mainly teenage girls, then platforms like Snapchat and TikTok would be very effective.
On the other hand, if your target audience is middle-aged men, then you would have a lot more luck with a platform like Facebook or email marketing.
The competitor research you perform can also be a good indication of which online marketing channel could work best for you.
Hence, always let market and competitor research inform the decision you make regarding which distribution channels to use.
Step 5: Develop a Content Strategy
After you know what your digital platforms are and who your target audience is, you’re ready to create content.
However, in order to perform content marketing effectively, you need to ensure you have a proper content strategy for it.
A content strategy is a plan that lays out what type of content will be created and when it will be published.
When you have such a plan, it’s much easier to be consistent with the content you push out. As we’ve learned, consistency is the key not only with audiences but also with search engines.
Step 6: Set Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators
These are the marketing goals that you laid out in step 3.
You defined them in step 3, now it’s the time to ensure checks are implemented to keep track of them as you conduct your campaigns.
Key performance indicators are metrics that provide you with an idea of how well your campaigns are performing. Examples of these include clickthrough rate, email open rate, etc.
Benchmarks are milestones or goals that you set for your brand and hope that you achieve within the allotted time frame.
For example, for a social media marketing campaign, you could have a benchmark to reach 10,000 followers by the end of the month.
Here, the benchmark is 10,000 and the key performance indicator (KPI) is the number of followers.
Step 7: Follow the Best Practices at All Stages
This is something that should be obvious but as we see the digital marketing efforts by new brands online, we feel like it needs to be stated.
Make sure that you conduct the proper research to be informed on what the best practices are for the digital marketing methods you intend to implement.
For example, if you want to increase organic traffic on your brand website by starting a blog, make sure you know what the best SEO practices are.
If you want to conduct a digital marketing campaign on a social media platform, ensure you’re aware of what the best practices are for that platform.
An example of this is that many platforms have character limits that limit how long a post can be. This can often be troublesome for digital marketers as they have to condense the brand message into a few sentences.
It can be especially troubling when they also have to include a link to the brand’s landing page since the link takes up a hefty chunk of the allotted characters.
To get around this issue, digital marketers use link shorteners.
To shorten your link with Pixelfy, register and log in.
Step 1: After you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard page where you can see the fast shortener box at the top.
Step 2: Copy the URL you want to shorten and paste it into the fast shortener box and it should take you to the next page. If it doesn’t, click on the Shorten button.
Step 3: On the next page, you’ll have your shortened link that you can copy and use within your social media posts.
Wrapping Things Up…
As you can tell, while there are many different ways to conduct digital marketing campaigns, there are certainly some steps that you can’t skip.
In the end, we advise you to just take your time with each step you take and plan as much as you can. The more planned out things are, the higher the chances of success.
If you’ve got any more questions for us, feel free to reach out in the comments section below. Check out more about marketing and its types in our blog.
Never lose
a lead again
URL shortener with all your retargeting pixels in one place.
Start free trial
