10 Steps To Create The Right Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Organization

Below are 10 simple steps you can follow to create a digital marketing strategy to help you build a brand, sustain quality, communicate effectively, generate leads, convert sales, and everything in between.

Strategizing on your digital marketing plans first starts with an important question- the budget set aside for your to-be digital marketing company’s Fee and the media budget you are ready to spend on the digital medium for the financial year. Given that advertising, like any form of marketing, goes through a series of trials and errors, you must keep some wiggle room for the same. It’s thus important to have a pre-approved budget to set the conversation in the right order with a prospective digital marketing company. An already approved budget allocation means you have internally discussed the budget distribution between various media vehicles and do not need to keep struggling internally to ask for more budgets or urgent approvals last minute.

Understanding your spending budget is important, but selecting and then establishing key goals for your digital marketing agency becomes crucial. Set measurable criteria of deliverables or goals for your digital marketing company – generate leads, bring traffic, increase subscriptions, optimize content- small to big, define and then go about looking. This helps you gauge a digital marketing company to better suit your requirements. Remember, it’s a relationship with your digital marketing agency, so it’s important they understand you thoroughly. Read more about how to select a digital marketing partner for your business here.

Once on-board, it’s time to address key areas and problems with your digital marketing company. Whether you’re doing well or not is defined by how well you know your offering and your exact target audience. So, start there. Let your marketing partner understand your product or service well. Explain your company’s vision and why is it into this business specifically. The agency should be excited about your product/ service offering as a customer. Agency should have no doubts about your offering and the target market you wish to chase. The harder the questions they ask and you answer the more fruitful the discussion would be. If you can’t sell your offering to your agency, they can’t sell it to your customer for sure.

Discuss your target group with your digital marketing agency and start creating customer avatars before you figure out where to find them online. Defining your target audience by demographics isn’t enough, you need to create buyer personas based on their individual personalities, lifestyle, likes, dislikes, what motivates them, what they follow, how they spend their day, and so much more. Based on your understanding of your target group, you can create 2 to 5 avatars of your customers.

Next, you and your digital marketing agency will chart out a digital marketing funnel followed by mapping where each customer avatar is currently sitting. Based on the various phases of a marketing funnel – Awareness, Consideration, Acquisition, Repeat Purchase and Advocacy, you need to define the platforms you will use to reach each of your customer avatars at each stage of the funnel and the messaging that will be apt for that avatar. For ex: if you are promoting a car, you may want to promote the speed and mileage features to the male audience whereas the comfort and ease of driving features to the female TG. Correct messaging is very important.

It’s time to retrospect with numbers, conversions, and money spent. While you may be looking at a new plan with your current digital marketing agency, it is advisable to look back and assess your marketing channels and platforms. What has performed till now- blogs, each social media platform and Google ads, third-party affiliations, native ads, etc. Your digital marketing agency will first audit your existing data and then move on to creation. If you’re just starting, then customer avatars are what you should focus on first, and then allocate media spends with your digital marketing agency.

In any case, you can’t start the discussion with an agency and already give them a target and a budget, and ask them to show those results. That would be absurd. You need to be open towards eight changing your target or the media budget based on the estimations your current agency may share with you. Hence, generally, it’s a good idea to initiate these discussions with your current or potential digital marketing partner from Jan/ Feb onwards since in March you will need to request for a marketing budget for the next financial year and the more you are backed by data, the better an ask it will be.

Spending money with the wrong message is bound to fail. While reaching your audience through proper planning with your digital marketing company is a must, establishing the right creative strategy and messaging becomes pivotal. Why? Because you can pull monies spent on a platform that’s not doing well but bad messaging stays etched in a consumer’s mind. Spend time with your digital marketing company here because the purchase is an emotional buyer behaviour – tapping the right emotion is a must. As explained in Step 4 above, your messaging will need to be as per the customer avatar you are talking to. Only then it will ring a bell in your customer’s mind.

Even the Creative language is very important. Keep it in resonance with your existing brand image on the website, landing page and social media. All the media platforms should be talking the same language and in same style.

There are different touchpoints digitally- say, your website, blog, ads, etc.- and each platform has a role to play but which one gives you conversions? This process of giving credit to one touchpoint and validating its longer use in the plan is where your digital marketing agency will help set up attribution models, in liaison with Google Analytics tools. Deciding which to choose based on your requirements and budgeting is where your digital marketing agency will best play its part.

Setting up a digital marketing strategy without putting thought into optimization techniques is like making a half-cooked meal! A digital marketing company will guide you through Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) required to turn your website traffic into actual paying customers. Now, a conversion rate is basically how much of your leads/traffic is getting converted to sales. However, it’s definition varies based on your marketing goals that you define as a conversion online. For one marketer getting an enquiry through a landing page can be a conversion for his online campaign. Whereas, for another marketer, it could be the fact that the traffic being sent to the website is making online purchases. To optimize your conversion rate, a digital marketing company will carefully re-evaluate your digital channels from design, content, and consumer behaviour perspective, among other things to holistically provide a solution. A/ B Testing is a powerful tool used for CRO.

The main USP of any digital marketing activity is accurately monitoring down to the penny. Basis your goals, you can set up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for quantitative progress and Key Result Areas (KRAs) for a qualitative overview of the marketing strategy with your digital marketing agency. Generally, these reports should be shared with you on month-on-month basis. However, based on the campaigns you are running and the duration of the marketing activity, you can ask for reports, every hour, every day or even every week. That’s completely between you and the agency. As and when you learn more about the ongoing campaigns and their performance, you can reduce the frequency of reporting.

KPIs and KRAs provide reasoning for your digital marketing strategy. As per the requirements, whether it’s driving traffic, improving bounce rates, increasing subscriptions, etc. you need to analyze the efforts of your digital marketing company along with the Return on Marketing Investment (RoMI) monthly or quarterly. Keep analyzing the data and keep improving your digital marketing performance individually as well as as a whole.

In conclusion, while a digital marketing strategy takes time, this 10-step process is a simplified breakdown of what to expect and do. It’s imperative to partner with a right digital marketing agency that will help you guide and navigate through the process while you work parallelly perfecting your company’s offerings. Hence, choosing the right digital marketing partner for your business is where you should begin. If you need any help with your digital marketing initiatives, we are right here anyways.

All the best!

Team – The Clicks Technologies (TCT)