Why Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy Is Important
Creating a well researched digital marketing strategy is key to long term success. It is the foundation and focus of all your marketing efforts. It will help maximise ROI and provide measurable data to analyse the success of your efforts. Without a well structured marketing plan your marketing efforts are simply a stab in the dark.
Business Goals and Values
Define what your business has to offer and the business model. Who is your business for?
Create a Value Proposition using a template like this one made popular by Geoff Moore.
| FOR | Who is the target customer |
| WHO | A statement of the need/opportunity |
| OUR | The product or service/category |
| THAT | The statement of benefit |
| UNLIKE | Closest competitor |
| OUR OFFER | The primary differentiator |
Who and When are your customers?
Who are you targeting and where in the customer journey are they? Are they unaware you offer your product or are they close to making a purchase?
Why Define a target audience?
Knowing who is likely to want or need what you are offering is key to achieving your business goals. Having too broad a target audience will result in a low ROI and wasted marketing efforts. Most paid marketing efforts (SEM, SMM) allow you to focus on who sees your ads. Having defined a target audience in your digital strategy will make this part easier.
Ask yourself:
- Who are your customers?
- How and when are they likely to use your business?
- What are their pain points? What barriers do they face?
- Which social media channels are they likely to use?
- What do they do for a living?
Most of this is guess work for a new start up but this is also why creating an avenue for customer feedback and collecting data about customers is vital. Be sure you are GDPR compliant though!
Creating objectives
‘SMART’ is a well established tool for defining marketing goals. Hubspot state - “HubSpot users that have the most success identify their long-term marketing goals using the SMART goal framework”. Being SMART about an objective is the difference between ‘I want to make more money’ and ‘I want to make £10,000 in the next 6 months selling our new {product/service}’.
So what are SMART marketing objectives?
| Specific | Your goal should be unambiguous and communicate what is expected, why it is important, who's involved, where it is going to happen and which constraints are in place. |
| Measurable | Your goal should have firm criteria for measuring progress and reaching the goal. |
| Attainable | Your goal should be realistic and possible for your team to reach. Think about time and cost. |
| Relevant | Your goal should matter to your business and address a core initiative. |
| Timely | State the expected date that you intend to reach the goal. |
Select your KPI’s
Make sure your KPI’s have metrics that are measurable and relate to your marketing goals and objectives. For instance, number of leads generated, website visitors or click through rate from email campaigns. Impact.com have a very useful post outlining the Top 10 KPI’s in marketing.
Where to market?
You will need to develop a plan as to which platforms and media you will use to market. Will you use direct marketing such as email or chat bots or pay for search and social media ads. Messaging platforms are set to see a massive rise in popularity in 2018. You could create a blog on your website or consider influencer marketing? Can you reach out to other related businesses for backlinks? Where you base your marketing efforts will ultimately depend on your target audience.
How to market?
What will your content look like?
This could be in the form of blog posts created or curated by yourself. You could hire a social media manager / marketer to do this for you. You could create ad copy and images for paid ads or even create videos to convey your message. The best strategies will use a combination of a variety of methods based on your target audience.
Measure and Optimise
The key to any digital marketing strategy is to regularly assess, measure and optimise throughout the process. Why continue spending money on an ad that clearly isn’t working or continue to send emails that had very low click through rate (CTR). Consider A/B testing ad copy or images but be sure only to have one variation during an A/B test, otherwise it will be unclear what made the difference.
We hope this helps you start to build your marketing plan. But, if you want Yellow Mango to help - get in touch.
