Cutting through the noise and standing out in the current digital marketplace can feel like a towering impossibility, however, with some careful planning, a little due diligence, and the right approach, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.
In this article, we’re going to share some handy tips for crafting an awesome digital marketing plan to help take your brand and business to even greater heights. Let’s get started!
1. Begin by analysing your performance to date and studying your competitors
The first step is to take a look at all of your marketing efforts so far. Study the data and identify what has been working for you and what has not.
While you are at it, you should also conduct extensive competitor research. What are your fiercest contenders currently doing? Are there any major gaps in their content creation?
You should also get to know your audience. While you may already have a fairly good idea of what the average person in your target demographic looks like, there’s always more room for further research in order to create detailed buyer personas.
Data is your best friend!
2. Start mapping out your strategy
Next, you want to start mapping out your strategy in as much depth as possible. Use a framework built on your goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics. Allow us to elaborate:
- Goals: what is the end goal through your marketing? Are you looking to generate more sales? Build your brand awareness? Sign more people up to a special event? Having clearly defined goals can help shape your long-term strategies.
- Strategies: this is the vehicle you’ll use to achieve your goals – which is most typically defined as the various stages of your marketing funnel (e.g., awareness, interest, desire, and action).
- Objectives: your objectives are the measurable that link to your end goal. For example, if you want to increase sales and revenue generation, how many more leads a month would you need to reach those numbers?
- Tactics: your tactics align with your objectives. So, using the same example above, how are you going to attract those additional leads? Will you adopt an email marketing / lead magnet approach? Create a landing page and PPC ads? Use social media?
By taking a deep dive into each section, you’ll have a far clearer vision of the what, the who, and the how.
3. Develop a content creation strategy
High quality content is the bridge that gaps the void between you and your audience and without a solid content creation strategy, it will be difficult to know what to create, when and where to post it, and why.
- Look at ideas gathered from your competitor analysis.
- Use keyword research tools to find your audience’s FAQs.
- Search for various hashtags on social media to see what’s trending in your industry.
- Use Google to identify what people are searching for most in your area.
- Improve upon the types of content you have created in the past and had good engagement with.
4. Choose your digital marketing channels
While you should be open to including all of the digital marketing channels into your broader, long-term strategy, if your budget and resources are limited you’ll need to identify which can bring you the most value first. For example, if you are a local business in Australia, local SEO in Sydney can help attract more customers in your immediate community. This is a great approach in the meantime while you work on your broader SEO efforts.
5. Don’t forget your KPIs and benchmarks
When investing in digital marketing you need to set clear KPIs and benchmarks so that you can measure your success (and indeed identify where you are going wrong).
6. Always study and adopt best practices
Don’t go cutting corners if genuine and sustainable long-term success is what you are after. In digital marketing, the devil is in the details and if you aren’t thorough in every aspect of your marketing strategy you will be missing out on optimal performance and a much-needed competitive edge.
7. Analyse and adjust relentlessly
Once you have put your marketing strategy into action, never stop analysing and adjusting your approach. Collect and study as much data as possible and use those actionable insights to dial-in your efforts and perfect your messaging. This is the key to standing out from the competition.
Conclusion
And that about sums it up. As you can see, the majority of the work that goes into crafting an awesome marketing strategy is research. After that, it’s all about doing the work, analysing what is working and what is not, and making the necessary changes to refine your efforts.
Don’t give up. You likely won’t get everything right the first time, but with a continued effort, you can indeed achieve incredible things.