Digital marketing is a must for building your brand. Using traditional marketing strategies such as ads, flyers, and similar is fine. However, to help your business grow you’ll need to step into the digital world.

Digital Marketing Strategy Example and Steps

As more and more businesses turn to digital platforms for marketing, the competition is becoming more and more intense. This means that creating a few social media profiles won’t do the trick. Develop and write a winning digital marketing strategy in order to see results. Here are the basic steps you need to create your digital marketing plan.

Market and Audience Analysis

The basis of any marketing strategy is defining your ideal clients. Knowing your ideal clients will determine your actions for your marketing campaign.

Start by doing a market analysis. Focus on your competitors. Here’s what you should look out for:

• Competitors within your niche
• Competitor digital marketing campaigns
• Similarities between your services and their services
• Differences among your brand and your competitors’ brands

Based on your findings, you’ll know what you need to emphasize to stand out among your competitors.

Use tools such as Google Analytics to get real results. Run the keyword from your niche to find out how popular your niche is among users and the number of your competitors.

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When it comes to the target audience, you should also research demographics (age, gender, location, educational background, etc.) and interests (purchasing preferences, habits, likes and dislikes, etc.).

To collect that information, you can:

• Use Google Marketing Platform
• Analyze information about your current customers
• Poll your website visitors
• Survey your email subscribers
• Analyze your followers on social media
• Analyze your competitors’ followers on social media

Set Your Goals

Once you know the market situation and you determine who the campaign will target, you need to clarify your goals. Ask yourself: “What do I want to achieve with my digital marketing strategy?”

Some options are to:

• Build brand awareness
• Increase your sales
• Increase conversion rate
• Improve your relationship with the customers
• Promote your new product 

Whatever your goals are for this marketing campaign, determine them in advance and make sure your whole team understands them. 

Specifying your goals will make your campaign more targeted. When you focus your energy on specific goals, it will be easier to achieve them. 

Estelle Liotard, a digital marketing specialist at BeGraded explains why goal setting is an essential aspect of any digital marketing strategy. “Setting your goals gives your marketing campaign a real purpose. Realistic objectives help you to determine the timeline, the budget, and moves you need to make to achieve that goal,” said Estelle.

Choose Channels for Distributing Your Campaign

Your goals will naturally lead you to the next step – deciding on your marketing channels. Based on your objectives, you should pick the platforms where your campaign will be distributed. 

Some of the options are:

• Blogs and websites
• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.)
• Email 
• Paid online advertisements

You can pick as many platforms as you wish. However, keep in mind that the more channels you use, the more team members you’ll need to successfully carry out the campaign.

Based on the distribution channels you should pick and employ digital marketing tools that will enhance and improve your campaign. 

Plan Out the Content

Your goals, your audience, and your distribution channels will determine the type of content you will create. However, you shouldn’t wait for the last minute to come up with the content.

Prepare the content ideas, topics, type of posts, and figure out the schedule in advance. In that way, you won’t publish low-quality content due to a lack of time and ideas.

For example, if you want to use video content, you’ll need some time to gather everything you need to film the video. Don’t leave this for the very last minute but prepare it in advance. 

Besides your formal digital marketing plan, create a separate plan where you will write your content ideas. 

The content you plan to distribute will influence your team as well. Depending on the type of content you plan to create, you will have to hire experts that will deliver that.

Write Down the Plan

Coming up with the strategy isn’t enough. You have to put it in writing to finalize it. 

The written version of your content marketing plan should be handed out to all your team members and collaborators on the campaign. This will keep everyone on the same page and direct them towards the ultimate goal.

Improve Your Content

If writing is a challenge for your team, here are some options that may help:

• Grammarly – Before you print the digital marketing plan and hand it out to your team, make sure that there are no grammar or spelling mistakes. Grammarly can help you with that. It is a free online proofreading app that highlights any mistakes and offers you suggestions for correction. 
• Readable – Since the plan will be read by everyone from a content writer to a social media specialist, it should be written in a simple and natural way. They should all understand it and read it with ease. Check the readability score with Readable and find out whether you need to simplify some wording. 

Summing it All Up

Creating your digital marketing strategy is a must. Without a plan, your ideas and actions will change on a whim and the whole campaign could end up as a huge mess. 

Besides writing the strategy, you should base your plans on analytics and carefully pick the team members that will be a part of it. Lastly, don’t forget to keep track of the result during the campaign because they will steer all your future decisions in the right direction. 
Dorian Martin is a writer, blogger, marketing and article contributor to several businesses that offer digital marketing, AI/ML, blockchain, and data science services to their clients. He works as a content editor for TopEssayWriting,  ClassyEssay and IsAccurate.  His expertise in writing, editing, and digital marketing encourage Dorian to start providing training to other content writers.