There’s an old saying that goes “build it and they will come.” Well, in the digital age, that just isn’t true. You have to develop a strong digital marketing strategy and use the relevant supporting systems to give you the best chance of not only reaching your audience but really connecting with them.
In short… you have to “do digital” the right way!
There’s no doubt that digital marketing is essential for any business, regardless of its size. By developing a strong digital marketing strategy and investing in the right tools and platforms, you can attract new customers and keep your existing clients coming back for more.
Marketing is a balance of creative thinking and execution. You have to be sure that every effort, no matter how small, has a purpose and isn’t just a waste of time and resources. For example, you spend hours pouring yourself into your email marketing but they generate very little interest; have you thought about keywords? Are your emails personalised? Have you targeted the right people? Are you monitoring what works and what doesn’t? The list goes on and on which means there are many things you can do to make sure you are increasing your chances of success, not just for email marketing but for all your digital output!
A successful marketing strategy needs to be flexible enough to stay current but should rest on strong foundations so consider the following before taking the leap:
1. Specify Success
If you want to be successful, it’s important that everyone on your team understands what success means. Your business can’t succeed if they don’t know how close or far away a goal is and where exactly all of their responsibilities lie in achieving a particular objective. This extends beyond the leadership team. Everyone involved in the bigger picture (which is probably everyone in your company) should know and understand the common goals of the business.
To make sure your business is on track for success, stay consistent and measure the same way each month. Track and define milestones so that you and your team are confident that you are steadily heading in the right direction and not losing focus on your goals.
2. Audience
One of the very first things you must define before creating a digital marketing strategy is your audience profile. An audience profile outlines important information related to your ideal customer (a fictional character) you’ve decided to target through your marketing efforts. The audience profile is modelled after your business’ target audience and is meant to help you create more personalised outreach. Targeting everyone is ineffective and can be a costly mistake to make. By creating audience profiles you can make sure you tailor your communication to be most effective at reaching the people who are most likely to need or want your product/services.
3. Market Research
Doing a little market research before you start implementing any changes, will allow you to gain some critical information about your market and competitors. How does your company fare against other companies in the same industry? How are you perceived by your audience in respect to other brands? Comparing and contrasting gives you the chance to really explore what works for your target market before spending your hard earned money on baseless strategies. This can help you understand how to connect with the right people and inform how you plan your next digital steps.
4. Keywords
Once you have a clearly defined target market, the next step is to figure out how best to communicate with them. This means identifying a tone of voice that appeals to your ideal customers and developing a keyword list that will allow you to reach them. Building a keyword list for blogging, social media and your main marketing site is vital if you want to have an online presence. Think about what people might type into Google if they were looking specifically for a certain service or solution to a problem.
Start with the most important keywords for your business. These are called primary keywords and consist of a summary of what you do ie. Digital Marketing Strategy Hertfordshire.
Now it’s time to take your core primary keyword list and expand it by including secondary keywords. These are more specific – for example you could add things like: Email Marketing, SEO Optimisation etc.
The next step is to put that keyword list you created into good use and consistently use your chosen words across your marketing output when engaging with your audiences. Customers expect high-quality and consistent content from brands so making sure you use the same language and tone across your material is vital to creating a sense of trust and familiarity.
5. PR and Content
The best way to create a powerful and compelling marketing pitch is by using a series of statements that will engage your audience. These should be written in the voice you want people reading them, so it’s important they reflect who they are as well! In order for this strategy to work effectively, start with identifying what product or service exists . From here think about where your solution fits into society – does solving xyz problems solve large scale issues or even several issues? Is there anything stopping us from achieving our goals that audiences will find interesting to hear about?
6. Measure
So now you have started your digital journey, how do you know everything is going according to plan? At the risk of sounding cliche, what gets measured gets achieved! To determine whether your marketing efforts are successful, you need to measure more than just sales and profit. Digital Marketing is ever-evolving so by measuring the right things you can make sure your strategy stays relevant and produces solid leads. Setting KPI metrics and measuring them throughout the course of your digital journey will help make sure everything is going according to plan and if not, it allows you to make tweaks and avoid throwing money away on what doesn’t work.
7. Budget
The number one thing to bear in mind when considering a budget is that marketing is an investment not a cost. Rather than sceptically thinking about how much you can afford to spend on your business marketing strategy, think about what return on investment this could create. Set a realistic budget with some allowance for inevitable unpredictable costs that crop up when running any project.
The way you invest your budget is important because it’ll help determine the success of any future spending. Once you’ve set yourself a realistic budget, allocate it to the most important tasks and make sure to track their performance. If for example you find your blog is a significantly better performer than other marketing channels then you want to take advantage of this and invest more funds towards getting even more eyes on your blogs and other similar material ie. eBook, white papers and so on.
8. Test
Whatever you do, don’t get stuck on one strategy. Testing is key to finding out what works for your business and evolving and adapting to the results you get as they come up by making appropriate tweaks is essential. We’ll be talking about testing in more depth in some of our upcoming content, so keep your eyes peeled.
Conclusion
If you were planning to just build a website and hope the right people would find you all by themselves, we hope this blog has given you some insight as to why that might not be the best course of action. Building a strong digital marketing strategy is essential! It’s notoriously difficult in this day and age to enter the online world just by putting your website in the cyberverse and praying. Chances of you reaching your digital goals are significantly higher with a combined approach.
We’d love to tell you more about how Focus7 can help you make sure you are doing digital – the right way.
Get in touch with us and start your journey.
With passion and professionalism in abundance, Vida Barr-Jones has an impressive track record of establishing and meeting business goals. Vida brings 34 years of commercial experience, having spent eleven years as a Board Director at Europe’s largest FTSE-listed office products wholesaler. Vida is an inspirational leader known for excellent communication and engagement across all levels.