How to Structure a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy (Template)
How to Structure a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy
Click To TweetDocument Your Digital Strategy With These Templates
There's tons of advice packed into this post. Make execution easy with these templates:- User Persona Template
- Marketing Strategy Template (Excel and PowerPoint)
- Content, Social Media, and Email Marketing Templates (PowerPoint)
Identify Your Buyers’ Persona
Let’s get straight to the point. It all starts with who you want to target. Who is your buyer? What kind of person are they? What are their preferences? If you haven’t yet established a clear picture of your buyers’ persona, now’s the time to do it.How They Can Be Used in Marketing
Once you become as familiar to your buyers as their psychologists are, you’ll know what to offer them and how to connect to them in a way that's most appealing.Once you become as familiar to your buyers as their psychologists are, you’ll know what to offer them.
Click To Tweet- Role: Decision-maker when it comes to healthcare
- Age: 30 to 50 years old
- Family: With kids under 18
- Background: An educated woman who seeks to balance her career with family life. She’s always on-the-go, using online resources to help her with almost everything, including parenting and cooking.
- Goals: To keep her family in their best health and to provide quick, reliable care every time her kids are ill.
- Challenges: She doesn’t have a dedicated family physician. She’s so busy she can't keep up when her kids become sick.
Creating Buyer Personas
You may be able to imagine your target audience’s preferences. Let’s refine that picture and make sure you have a clear representation of your ideal customer.Dig Deep Within Your Database
Research. It’s the very first step to making your buyer’s persona as defined as possible.The very first step to making your buyers' persona as defined as possible is to do your research.
Click To Tweet- Customize the forms on your website. Now, this part should be helpful if you don’t have a clear understanding of who you want to communicate with.
- Pick the brains of your sales staff regarding the types of people they interact with most.
- If you haven’t even started yet, simply create your buyers' persona from scratch. The next section should help you out.
Interview Customers And Prospects
Do you already have a returning customer? Good. Interview them. Simply use incentives to attract these people to interview with you. You’ve probably come across this strategy in many companies. For instance, a telecom company may ask its long-term customers to answer a survey, and it’ll give the customers some rewards points or bill rebates as an incentive. If you’re still looking to reach out to prospects, you can do the same. Interview them through a survey, then give an incentive in the form of a discount code, or something of that nature. Interviews, however, should not be limited to survey forms. You can invite a few insightful participants to an actual, physical, ‘next-level’ meeting. You may do a round table discussion. Give these people snacks and pay for their fare and accommodation. Treat them with VIP perks.Focus on the End Result
I may have done an overkill talking about buyers’ persona at length, but you just can’t underestimate its power. Moving on, the next big thing is to pay attention to the result of your marketing strategy. What is your main goal? The best digital marketing strategy is one that’s aligned with your goals.The best digital marketing strategy is one that’s aligned with your goals.
Click To TweetDefine Your Mission & Objectives
You also need to define your vision. Your vision may sound like this: To be the trusted healthcare company that all busy, working moms in the U.S. would turn to when their kids become sick. Notice how your chosen persona or avatar partly defines that vision? Of course. Now your mission may sound like this: To provide a professional, quick, and reliable healthcare response to moms with sick kids under 18 — even in the comfort of their homes. Sounds noble. Now, your objectives — this is the part that may cause you some headaches, especially if you’re starting. Still, I promised to guide you all the way. You could have two to three objectives.- To build a network of healthcare professionals that form emergency response units, answering calls of help during home health emergencies from various states in the US.
- To build a master list of service subscribers who pay off a fixed monthly or yearly fee, enabling them to take advantage of the emergency healthcare services without the need to pay at the time of the emergency.
- To provide guided responses to all possible emergencies that may occur at home with children involved.
Your plan — or set — of strategies should depend on your company’s vision, mission, and objectives.
Click To TweetLaunch Targeted Campaigns
Here’s where we get a little technical. Targeted campaigns or advertising are offers placed before a specific ‘target.’ We mean your avatar. Your buyers’ persona. You may ask, How does this step help me with creating my digital marketing strategy? Targeted campaigns can help you with your research. It will enable you to refine your audience, know what they want, and how they want it delivered. Let’s say you’re a B2B (business-to-business) company. You could learn a lot from one tactic launched by Lloyds Banking Group. They employed a multi-faceted campaign that began with Direct Mail, with follow-ups via email, digital display, and telemarketing. Okay, don’t get lost. This campaign targeted about 70,000 businesses from different sectors. The DM featured a scorecard mechanic, inviting small business owners to review their banking arrangements. It also included a quiz, with results that were immediately compared against Lloyds’ banking services. The result? More than 700 of the targets switched their accounts. The strategy? It wasn’t a one-glance type of thing. It was a private, direct engagement. It was a targeted campaign that focused on Lloyds’ superior regard for relationships and customer service. Ultimately, the success of the campaign not only gave Lloyds leads. They got actual sign-ups. Real conversions. At the end of the day, Lloyds hit the sales button, too. The key ingredient? It was an act of research that hit all the right sales process phases. They didn’t just speak their buyers’ language. They allowed their buyers to speak. Is it possible that all you need now is a bit of targeted research? Just like Lloyds? Try out various campaign tactics. Fb ads. Google ads. Messenger bots — DMs, if you may. The keyword here is to try out. Test. Need to structure a robust digital marketing strategy? Test the tactics that are right within your reach now. Try recipe A against recipe B. See which one is more appealing. Test, refine, and test like one crazy scientist. Marketing is psychology. And to me, it’s a science.Monitor KPIs
I hope I didn’t lose you there. This post is, after all, not an article on different digital marketing strategies. It’s about how you structure your own set. Let me do a recap before we get to the KPIs. (Which, by the way, means Key Performance Indicators.) First, you need to create your customers’ persona or your avatar. Secondly, you need your focus. Where are you at? Do you want leads or sales at this point?Identify Your Relevant Metrics
Just what are metrics? These are the standards for measuring your digital marketing success. Here are some examples:- Overall website traffic
- Traffic per source
- New vs. returning visitors
- Sessions
- Average session duration
- Pageviews
- Most visited pages
- Exit rate
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- If all you’re doing is collecting leads now, you might not need to care about conversion rates, yet.
- If your focus is already on conversions, you could care more about your returning visitors than any new visitor.
- If you’re looking to boost your sales, then there’s probably nothing more relevant to you now than your conversion rate.
Measure Results After The Campaigns
What’s next after setting up your KPIs and critical metrics? You just have to pick on the many digital marketing strategies out there. Only pick those that help you max out your parameters.- If you want networked sources for your website traffic, go for Fb ads. Set them to drive more traffic to your site.
- If you want to increase your email open rates, then do an email marketing campaign like you haven’t done it before. Perhaps warm up your leads first and give something of value. Don’t just seek to obtain sales. Give them more value, and that value should return to you.
- If you want increased sessions and lower bounce rates and exit rates, then optimize your website. Make sure you have web pages that are worth people’s time.
Make sure your digital marketing strategies are working to provide you with peak performance.
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