First Question: What do I want?
These are the questions you need to answer for your Digital Marketing Strategy
Brand Awareness?
Do you want more people to know about your brand and get your products and services more widely known?
Acquisition or Lead Generation?
Do you want to reach people who’ve never bought from you before and bring them into your buyer’s journey?
Growth from existing customers?
Do you want people who’ve already bought from you before to buy more frequently or a different kind of product? If possible, set a specific goal – one with metrics attached to it
and a time limit. These might include:
X Number of leads from a piece of downloaded content in one month
% of old customers buying a secondary product within the year
% Follower growth on social media within two weeks
6 Steps to set up a Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Set a measurable goal
Prepare very a very specific goal and how you want to achieve it and by when.
Example:
“I want to make sure 100% of my current customers know I now offer video services as well. I will run email and social promotions to share this message for two months. After three months from the start of the promotion, I want to have at least one video commission from 15% of my current customers.”
2. Who is my audience?
Think about who your customers are and group them into groups that make sense for you to target new ones.
Take each of those and create a character from each.
Give him or her a name, a photo, a personality, and a few favourite things.
Our biggest tip: rank them! Before you start, be totally clear about which of them is the most important.
Example:
Persona 1:
A photographer gets leads from family and friends to do wedding photography. He first needs to win over the Bride to land the deal.
Persona 2:
Photography for small businesses for their websites or marketing material.
Persona 3:
Approach bigger company’s Marketing Managers that launch new products all the time.
User Persona Template:
3. Know your Brand
The questions you need to ask:
What are your strongest character traits?
What do you stand for?
How do you translate this into visuals and content?
What problems do you solve?
What challenges are you solving for your customers? Visualize your perceived value.
What are your distinct benefits?
List three to five benefits your customer gets from choosing your product/service that customers don’t get from going to your competitors.
What is your brand promise?
What will you always do for your customers?
This separates you from the competition.
How does this all fit together?
Try to craft a single paragraph that covers all your answers. It’s ok if things merge and overlap – the aim is to end up with a unique message.
4. Watch what your competitors are doing
Competitors are not only the ones selling the same product or service that you.
Look at the 3 different competitors:
Direct Competitors – the ones that offer the same products or services.
Indirect Competitors – the ones that may offer different products or services but compete in the same space.
Comparators - these might have a similar look and feel as a brand to you, or be other brands that your target customers use frequently too.
5. Do some research
Search for a few key terms related to your industry, and note where each brand ranks on the results page.
Follow your competitors – buy their products, read their reviews, explore their website, and sign up for their newsletter.
Ask your customers what they think your rivals do well, and what they love about brands in other sectors too. Do surveys or polls.
Note where and when you see your competitors’ ads and screenshot them.
Follow lots of other brands’ social channels.
Use paid-for online tools like Ubersuggest and DIIB for analysis of how well your competitors’ sites do in search rankings and web traffic.
6. Measure what you do
It is vitally important to track everything you are doing to know what works and what does not work so that you can adjust your plan based on what gets the best reaction.
How many Page Views do you get
How many Lead form submissions
How many Views of the video
What is the Engagement with the video (likes, comments, shares)
How many Clicks to your blog CTA
How many Leads from the social post
Increase in leads from the post vs. posts without videos
The list goes on and on but it all depends on your goals. The geographic and demographic of your audience is also important to track. With this tracking, you will soon have a benchmark on what content is performing.
To set up tracking you require Google Analytics and Tag Manager where you can set up Tags and Triggers to track specific actions.
For social it is a good practice to add UTM tracking URLs to track action from your social channels.
See the tool to generate UTM tracking URLs.
Add Competitor Analysis data to your strategy
Understanding your competitor’s data will help you to determine their strategies and see what work and does not work to learn what you can do differently.
This will help you to create data-driven campaigns that meet your goals.
Competitive analysis data can help you answer crucial questions like:
What are the main demographics of my target audience?
Which marketing channels drive the most engagement and growth?
How much brand loyalty and awareness does my business have?
What strategic partnerships am I missing out on?
With this knowledge, you can attract your target audience, engage visitors more effectively by serving up the right content, and delight users by meeting their intent.
Different competitor types include:
Top players in your industry.
Brands that have similar content.
Sites that compete for the same search terms.
Websites where your audience is cross-browsing.
How do you perform a Competitor Analysis?
The most effective analysis is the SWOT analysis, strategic group analysis and customer journey mapping.
Identify your competitors, direct or indirect.
Research their marketing strategies and measure them over time.
Which marketing channels drive the most traffic?
Which content resonates most with audiences?
Which search terms drive the most traffic?
Benchmark the results against the industry.
Find the gaps and opportunities to meet the goals.
SEO
Ensure that your site appears in search results where your customers are searching for answers to their problems through search engine optimisation (SEO).
You need to ensure that your website is SEO optimized to rank higher in search results.
When you’re looking at your site content, make sure it is:
Relevant
Update it regularly, and use the same words people are searching to find your product or service in your content and headings.
Well-built
If it’s easy for people to navigate, Google will probably like it. Make sure the links to your sub-pages are logically named, and minimize add-ons like auto-playing videos or pop-ups asking for email addresses. This is called UX design where you determine the structure of your site and make sure the users don’t have to click multiple times to get to the content they are looking for.
Accurate
Like most people, Google doesn’t like spelling mistakes or broken links. They can count more than you might expect.
Optimized for mobile
In most cases, more than 60% of searches are conducted on mobile. So, sites that are more mobile-friendly are rewarded over those which are not. This also means that the site speed should be fast on mobile.
Test your site on Pagespeed. This will show you exactly where the issues are.
Honest
Similarly, if you try to load up your site with keywords or links on hidden pages that are intended to be seen by crawlers but not customers, that counts as deception and can incur a ranking penalty.
Credible
If another site links to yours, that’s a vote in your site’s favour. This is called backlinks and will help you to improve your site’s authority. So, if other people have recognized this expertise by linking back, that will help.
Easy to read
Don’t use images as headlines, and make sure description tags for pictures or videos are accurate.
SEO Audit
Conducting an SEO audit will give you an idea of how user-friendly your website is.
How to do an SEO audit?
Make a list of all your website pages by most frequently visited.
Add all the keyword categories that fit best.
Then add all the keywords you are not currently covering in the next column for each page.
Next is content and how you need to add the keywords to your priority pages.
Descriptions
Headings & Content
Image Titles and Alt text
URLs
Don’t hide keywords or add too many, stuffing, as Google penalises pages with too many keywords.
Promoting your user experience
As mentioned look at the user experience and minimum clicks for users to get to the content they are looking for.
If you think of the user first and then search engines you’ll be alright.
More about User Experience
Your website is your chance to show off exactly what your brand is all about and connect with your customers on your home turf.
To help you determine if your website is user friendly go to your Google Analytics and view the behaviour of your users:
Where do they click?
Which pages do they spend more time on?
What is the bounce rate? If high the content might need some update as it means that the user did not find what they are looking for.
You can also get heatmaps on Clarity to see where the page the user spends most of their time by linking it through Tag Manager to your site.
Tips for Good User Experience
As you research your competitors, update your content regularly but stay relevant.
Test your website speed regularly. Keep in mind image sizes, make sure they are optimised for the best quality at the least file size.
Ensure all your Call-to-action buttons are standing out and placed at the right spots on the pages.
Make sure all the pages on your website are mobile-responsive. When you have multiple menu items ensure the breaking point to the burger menu is activated when menu items run over to the next line.
Don’t overwhelm your users with too much content on one page or too many images that are distractive from the content you want them to read.
Conclusion:
The most important part of your strategy is knowing your brand and goals. Thereafter is the research on competitors to know that you can do better than them and attract customers to you.
Ensure that you implement all the elements that are important before you start with advertising.
Now you are ready to look at your advertising content and visuals to attract the targeted customers to your website to make the sale.
If you need assistance with your strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.
