10 Ways to Build an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy must be known by all business people, whether in the field of goods or services. Especially if you work in the field of marketing. Because this technique actually makes your job easier and more successful. 

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What is a digital marketing strategy?

Digital Marketing Strategy is a plan or action to achieve the set marketing goals. Goals are determined by what your business goals are and the order in which they are prioritized. Once these goals are set, a digital marketing campaign will be developed and executed to achieve them.

A digital marketing strategy is different from a digital marketing campaign. When we talk about digital marketing strategy, we are referring to a master plan or blueprint for achieving long-term or macro goals. Campaigns on the other hand are specific tactics used to achieve short term micro goals in digital marketing strategies.

Why is Digital Marketing Strategy important?

Having a strategy is just as important as having a plan to achieve any goal. It fully optimizes the implementation of the workflow, enabling high effectiveness while ignoring various areas for reviewing data analytics and following up on them

This paves the way for continuous improvement in various digital marketing strategies from search marketing (SEO/SEM), conversion rate optimization (website user experience), email marketing & social media marketing to build your business goals, get new customers and build more in relation to the existing.

Your business also needs a competitive and sustainable content marketing strategy to reach and convert more customers through harnessing the power of online content, while integrating multiple digital marketing channels with traditional media.

As businesses continue to adopt digital transformation in their core operations and in new channels to reach customers, having a good digital marketing strategy is critical to this success.

Key Components of Digital Marketing

Some of the key components of a digital marketing strategy include:

• Define brand

Use brand guidelines to define your brand and consider your business's Unique Selling Point (USP).

• Develop customer personas

Understand demographic information such as age, gender, location, and the motivations that drive people to choose products and services. Use Google Analytics to help create buyer personas and segment them according to keywords in organic traffic.

• Defining SMART 

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals. SMART Goals will help you create better targets for your digital marketing action plan. You'll see more successful results with your campaigns when you set goals that you can measure and eliminate.

SMART goals will also help to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your campaigns.

• Identify the target market

Use market research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Facebook Audience Insights to conduct market research and identify potential target markets.

• Conduct competitive analysis

Use web and social analytics tools such as weblike, Semrush, and SocialBakers to analyze your business competitors and perform a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths (strengths) , Weaknesses (weaknesses) , Opportunities (opportunities) , and Threats (threats) . SWOT is a planning process that helps your business overcome challenges and determine what it should aim for as a whole.

• Manage and allocate resources appropriately 

Resources include manpower (internal or outsourced team, external marketing agency) and budget.

• Review and optimize campaign performance

Use digital marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics to track, measure and report on the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.

10 ways to build an effective digital marketing strategy

Here are 10 ways to build an effective digital marketing strategy:

1. Define business goals 

The first step in creating a digital marketing strategy is to define your business goals. In other words, to define what you want to achieve with digital marketing.

Every goal you set should be measurable and well defined. Everything in a digital marketing campaign is scalable (from start to finish) and you need to take advantage of this and form a digital marketing plan that has specific goals and objectives.

2. Collect data about your audience 

The second step is to identify your target audience. In other words to specify in detail who you want to target with your campaign.

Some marketers, put this as the first step in the process and this is not wrong. This is definitely an exercise that you need to do in the early stages and before completing the next steps of your marketing strategy.

3. Understand customer needs

Once you know the profile of your target customer, the next step is to use different techniques and try to understand their needs and how they express it when searching for information using search engines or social networks.

There are two ways to approach this process. The first method is to take a typical digital sales funnel and identify what your customers might need at each stage. The second method is to take the different customer profiles created above, and generate a separate sales funnel for each profile.

4. Create a content marketing library

The next strategic step you need to take is to create a content asset library. You need to know your audience and their needs, now it's time to create different types of assets to use in your campaigns.

Digital assets can be blog posts, infographics, images, videos, podcasts, cover images, logos, and anything you can publish on your website or social network.

In the world of digital marketing, this is what content marketing is all about. Content marketing is important because it is the process used to decide what type of content to create, when, and where to publish it.

5. Start with SEO as early as possible

A strategic decision to make that can have a positive impact on your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible. SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but it has its caveats. It takes time to work.

Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to get any results. This is a long time to wait so most marketers tend to focus on other digital channels first (like Facebook Ads, Google Ads) that are more direct.

6. Business strategy evaluation and revision

Digital marketing is a very dynamic industry. The 'rules' change all the time and it is imperative that you evaluate and revise your digital marketing strategy to keep it current and relevant. 

The best way to evaluate your campaign is to do so based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other metrics. The most important metrics for any type of digital marketing campaign are:

• Number of website visits
• Cost per visit
• Cost per conversion
• Click-Through Rate
• Number of Conversions
• Number of micro conversions
• Time on site
• Bounce rate
• Number of social shares
• Number of comments

If you have a good analytics system and can track it for every campaign that is part of your strategy, then it will be easier to make the right decisions.

Don't forget that part of your evaluation is to look for new channels that can be added to your business strategy.

It's a good idea to look at your competitors' strategies and identify their strategies that you can include in your business marketing mix.

7. Use segmentation and email marketing automation

The ultimate goal of a digital marketing campaign is to generate more revenue for the business. But to achieve your ultimate goal, you must first consider micro-conversions.

Micro-conversions are actions taken by users that are part of the funnel leading to sales.

8. Take advantage of new traffic sources

A complete digital marketing strategy should not only take into account traditional online marketing channels but should also cater for new digital marketing strategies that are coming to the fore. 

There are several new channels that you can explore such as: Google Shopping Ads, Tik-Tok, Google Keen, Optimizing your content for voice search, and so on. These channels are new and are likely to be less competitive than established channels. This means you can get better results at a lower cost.

9. Use retargeting and personalization

So far, all of the strategies above are related to how you can reach more people, but it's equally important to follow up on users who already know your brand, but are not yet customers.

This is known as “retargeting” or “remarketing”. With retargeting, you can show certain ads to users who visit your website (or social network page) but don't convert.

10. Working on conversion optimization

What is conversion optimization? In simple terms, conversion optimization is a process to follow to optimize your website so that a higher percentage of visitors will take the desired action.

In short, a digital marketing strategy can do a lot for your business. There are many online channels to choose from. They all vary in price, potential range, usability, and purpose. What you need is a solid channel combination that best fits your business.