6 Steps to Creating a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

Do you know how to create a digital marketing strategy and what should you consider for it? We explain how to create it in 6 steps.

If you have a company or a brand and you have a presence on the internet, you have to know that it is not enough just to be and fill in by filling in, but that everything you do has to be done based on a digital marketing plan.

Why?

Because the most common thing is that brands create their profiles on social networks and their blog, without knowing what to do with them, on what to publish, and without too many criteria. And this is a clear error, you cannot go on a journey without knowing where you want to go.

What is a digital marketing plan?

Let’s start here, by talking about what a digital marketing plan is. It consists of a document that includes those elements that make up your digital marketing strategy to plan its development, all the actions to be carried out, through which channels they will be carried out, and ultimately, how to reach your final goal.

In any case, both must go hand in hand and be in line with the general objectives of the company.

So that each company can develop its digital strategy, depending on each case, it can have a person who is in charge of digital marketing internally, or subcontract the profile of an external online marketing consultant who can help develop it appropriately.

Well, with that said, how are we going to develop this digital marketing plan? We are going to focus on the 6 fundamental steps to get to it.

1. Analyze your company and its environment

To begin with, it is crucial to know what situation your company is in, and what the environment is like, what happens around it. In other words, carry out an internal and external analysis of it.

If you analyze how your company or brand has evolved since it has a digital presence, you can see what has been done so far. And most likely, you will realize that what had been done to date was not based on any planning but was rather a ‘you have to be on the internet, and that’s it’. The room for improvement is therefore very wide.

Internally, to make a good diagnosis, it begins by analyzing:

Web analytics: Check out what volume of monthly traffic your website receives, which pages are the most visited, how long users spend browsing your website, etc.

SEO positioning: Find out the position of your company in Google concerning the competition and under what terms or keywords it is positioned.

Blog: If you have one, analyze what material is being published on and if it is based on an editorial plan to make such publications.

RSS: What social networks does the company have active, who is in charge of managing them, if they are up to date and what content is being published or shared on them.

Digital advertising: If campaigns are carried out on different platforms (such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads …), review all these aspects well and contrast the situation with the person in charge of the company to see how receptive it is to improve the situation.

Externally, take a good look at the environment of your company, know well who you are targeting (your target audience), and your competition.

You must study and understand well the situation for the competition, to also know where your potential customers are and by what means they move digitally.

If you want to know the situation of your company, it is very useful to carry out a SWOT analysis, where you can analyze and capture the weaknesses, threats, strengths, and opportunities of your company.

2. What objectives are pursued?

As we have commented, the company must have global objectives, and although some will be more focused on the offline part, we will have to focus on purely online ones and even adopt some of those general objectives to take them to the digital field.

But these objectives must be defined and have a date. Without knowing when to achieve a goal, it is difficult to know what will have to be done to reach them.

The objectives have to be SMART, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and defined in time.

There are no generic objectives, it will always depend on each company, each sector, and what specific needs exist in each case.

3. What will your digital strategy be like and what tactics will you use?

Once the objectives have been analyzed and defined, different strategies will have to be activated to achieve them.

The objectives can be to attract, convert or retain users, and based on these, some tactics or others may be carried out, such as social networks, e-mail marketing, SEO positioning strategies, paid advertising, site optimization web, etc.

Let’s look at a couple of somewhat generic examples to understand what we are talking about:

If we seek to improve the online presence and the notoriety of the brand, the tactic could be to create educational content, whether an image or video format and the strategy to distribute these through the Facebook profile or YouTube channel.

If in another case we wanted to increase the generation of leads for our database, and that they are qualified, we could carry out a live workshop (webinar) or create an e-book and design and create a landing page for users to reach up to there and thus provide us with your data, either through participation in that workshop or by downloading said ebook.

In any case, the possibilities are many, and different options will have to be considered depending on the objective pursued.

4. What content plan and actions will be carried out?

It is important to draw up a content plan for the different communication channels available and to achieve the objectives set.

There must be a clear structure on which to base and define the topics that will be discussed according to each product or service that each company offers.

Each decision made regarding these points must have a justification, and it is important to know what the investment will be to do this and how the performance of the shares will be measured, as we will see in the following points.

5. Measure the performance of all actions

There is only one way to know if what you are doing is reporting results and it is working. And the way is by measuring, measuring everything. Any marketing consultant needs to make measurements to know the return on investment because if not, you will never know if things are being done well and how you can improve.

A digital marketing plan is dynamic and should vary based on these measurements. Through the results obtained in the monthly reports, it will be seen what has gone better or worse and how the project is evolving.

For this, we will use the KPIs or key performance indicators, with which we will measure each action, and it is necessary to establish them first.

Let’s take the example of what metrics we could use to study the performance of our website. In this case, we would take into account the number of total sessions, the unique users who have visited us, the number of page views, the sources of traffic, the devices through which the traffic comes, etc.

6. Define the investment

This part is always complex, and it always seems like it is a blindfold to come up with concrete figures.

Many variables influence when defining the investment to be made: it will depend on the resources each company has, the cost of creating the content (images, videos, creatives), and the cost of the different ads that are made on platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.

The general recommendation would be to start moderately, and depending on the results of the different measurements, make reinvestments in those items that need it most.

In any case, whatever the size of your company, it is necessary to have a digital marketing plan if we want to avoid what we mentioned at the beginning, which is to be on the internet for the simple fact of being there, but to truly have a good presence on the Internet.

Dev Bhushan

Digital Marketing Specialist at SEMReseller

• SEO

01 Sep 2020