How to create a Digital Marketing Strategy [13 Easy Steps]

9 min readSep 22, 2020

Gone are those days when a consumer consumed bare minimum information about your product/service in a blink of an eye while passing across a big signboard.

Now is the time when the information itself travels in a blink of an eye further grappling into the consumer’s mind and if your strategy is good enough?

It strikes a chord in their heart forever. All this is possible with the power of Digital Marketing.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital marketing refers to a mode of advertisement that aims to promote your brand or product through electronic mode and a Digital Marketing Strategy is nothing but a concrete plan to achieve the same.

A digital marketing strategy plan is an action plan that helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected online marketing categories such as Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Affiliate Marketing or Influencer Marketing.

As easy as it may sound, it’s a synergetic effect of all the crucial elements that lead to a successful completion of the Digital Marketing Strategy plan.

Simply to say it doesn’t matter what you sell, it’s important how you sell it. To carry out a successful online marketing strategy, you need a promising Digital Marketing plan!

How to create an effective Digital Marketing Strategy?

Here are 13 easy digital marketing strategy steps that will give you an entire tour of the digital marketing strategy process.

Let us begin with Defining your Business Goals

To get better results first define what is good for your business? Make a note of things you wish to achieve through your Online Marketing Strategy.

If you just talk about it, it’s a dream! It will become possible only when you envision it & real when you schedule it. Your goals could be any or all of the following:

Making your brand visible & spreading its awareness.
Intensifying its reach & improving engagement with the consumers
Increasing your followers and subscribers base.
Generating more leads & retaining customer loyalty.

All of these goals are achievable through your Digital Marketing Strategy when they are specified, calculated, relevant & timely.

Conduct Audience Research and Create a buyer’s persona

Your audience is the literal representation of your product performance and it’s very crucial to establish a connection through your online marketing strategies.

To build a long-lasting customer base, you need to first evaluate their persona i.e. simply understand their characteristics and motives that will help you create content that best resonates with them. Outline their:

Age
Location
Language, Speech, and Cultural Dialect
Earning & Spending Aptitude
Influence & Interests
Difficulties
Stage of life

Learn how to create buyer’s persona

Define Target Market

Take note of the time and what these customers buy, from where do they buy & what is the price that suits them the best.

No two brands can have the same buyer persona even if they belong to the same industry because of its unique set of goals. This exact uniqueness of your goals will help you establish your target audience and understand their buying trends with the help of different surveys, interviews, and the existing customer base.

Further segmenting your target market into multiple customer bases can help the better direction of your product/service, its distribution, pricing, and promotion efforts.

Understand the sales funnel

Now that you have completely understood your consumer’s choices and behavior, it’s time to invite them over.

Would you like to give them some cues and help them locate you? This is what sales funnel means, a pathway from visibility to the conversion of your consumer leads.

Here’s how you can build a feasible pathway through your online marketing strategies:

Attention: You create a landing page of your product/service on diverse platforms that builds awareness & captures your consumer’s attention.
Interest: You nurture your audience by offering value in exchange for email.
Decision: Your contents such as case studies, emails, free trials fascinates your audience and equips them for a purchase.
Action: You propose an offer that your leads would love then commence selling to them over & again to boost their retention.

Start creating content around your user’s pain points

Assumptions like a great Online Marketing Strategy can alone convert your prospects into a consumer are the biggest termites of consumer relationships.

If you want them to stay, ease their pain through your digital marketing plan. Don’t sell them what you want, provide them with what they need the best.

Consumers usually face these dilemmas before spending each & every penny on your product, help them release that chaos. Address the clutter of these pain points:

Economic Pain: Not only focus on the lowered price but direct your consumer with a maximum Return on their investment. E.g. a discounted subscription to your service or a discounted coupon for your product.
Productivity Pain: Present them with one of the best user interfaces that saves their time, energy, and the last burst of their fire! Provides them a solution that is so efficient & enables them to use it with ease, comfort & utmost convenience. Eg Apps that provide seamless payment gateways.
Process Pain: Streamline the entire shopping experience that can materialize well right from their online research, website navigation, product price, and availability to their final departure.
Support Pain: The entire customer relationship management is based on the premise of managing the customers once they have consumed your product/service. Help them with easy & feasible solutions to their unexpected problems while using your product & evade all the instances of bad publicity that can mount over the digital marketing platforms by these unhappy consumers. Remember Word to mouth is the fastest & the worst in this case.

Start doing SEO

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.

While you have a handful of competitors in the digital space, a good Search Engine optimization will give your digital marketing planning and strategy an edge over others.

Here’s how to create an effective Digital Marketing Strategy using Search Engine Optimization:

Technical SEO: If it takes more than a minute for your customer to locate things on your website while reading, it means your website structure is poorly built. Start with examining the backend of your website like its code, its Page Speed, and the entire website architecture. Nothing can help best optimize your website ranking & pull better traffic to it than this.
On-page SEO: Once you have fabricated the entire Site-map, it’s time to run a quality check on the content that will go live. The most crucial factor is the keywords which are either words or phrases that are most relevant to your subject and found the maximum times on the web. Selecting high quality, appropriate keywords for your content can allow you to reach the customers you want & when you want.
Off-page SEO: For people to recognize your website, you need to construct pathways and large, flashing signs that lead them there. In digital marketing terms, this indicates you need links, links, and more links. The number of “backlinks,” and the publishers carrying your website links the more you build trust in the eyes of a search engine. But concentrating equally on the quality of backlinks like the quantity is what can help you to secure your site as Google updates

SEO isn’t about winning the game of Digital Marketing, it’s learning how to play by the rules and that’s why you should care for your Search Engine Optimization.

Get emails and start email automation

Email Automation has trusted energy of creating valuable, personal touches on a large scale.

Make an Email List and find quality subscribers who will engage with you, are easy to convert and perceive value in what you present.

Create quality content with a big compelling headline that makes your content creative and clickable.

Here Email analytics can help you find the right E-mail marketing tactics and the overall performance metrics like the click through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, list growth rate, email sharing/forwarding rate, and overall ROI.

Read my Email Marketing Guide

Start with social media marketing

It’s a huge subject to learn in one go but in a nutshell, social media is a communication play. It plants the public into PR and the market into marketing.

Simply to say it’s the use of social media platforms and websites to promote your product or service. An extensive social-media presence is one of the crucial digital marketing steps because it’s one of the best ways to escort cost-effective marketing.

But there has to be a proper plan or else social media marketing is just a buzzword. It’s very similar to digital marketing:

Setting Social Media marketing goals for your brand.
Ascertaining & Understanding your Target Audience.
Selecting the right Social Media Platform.
Planning the right content.
Evaluating your Competitors.
Analyzing its performance metrics.
Engagement, Leads, Conversion, Repeat.

Social Media Marketing makes you extremely visible. It’s not even optional anymore to have a social media presence.

You need to be present on social platforms as they are where most of your target customers spend their time.

Explore paid ads for quick results

While you post content on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and other Social Media Platforms you can observe and distinguish between some of the posts that perform extremely well than others.

These are the ones that organically resonate with your followers, track them down, and trace their click, likes, shares, and comments. These high-performing messages make the best candidates for social ads.

Prepare a budget and invest in these. Design them in a way that best optimizes its performance on the respective device and randomly test & measure the results.

Each platform will serve unique objectives of your Online Marketing Plan But some of the common types of ads are in the form of Photo, Video, Carousel Collection, or even texts and you will generally pay using one of these methods, depending on your campaign goal:

Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
Cost per conversion
Cost per video view

Explore all other marketing channels

Multichannel marketing guarantees you are pitching the most extensive catch possible. A successful multi-channel strategy grants your consumers a constant quality of experience, whichever channel they use.

The customer’s experience in buying a product influences the perception of your brand and touching out to a broad audience base never hurts, Therefore a multi-channel strategy gives you the strength to flourish your business on a global level without inevitably investing in physical stores. E.g. an e-commerce website can be created to serve in multiple currencies with regional content to attract customers in various countries, across multiple time zones with no restrictions.

Some of the other marketing channels are Community Building campaigns and Networking; User Reviews; Blogs, Google Business, Conferences, Webinars, Podcasts, Social Bookmarking, Mobile Marketing and others.

Retarget your audience to get more conversions

How do you get back the visitors who showed up to your website but never stayed?

While we have already segmented the consumer based on their demographics, this is the best strategy to target only the ones who have the potential to get converted.

Through Google Ads Helps to spread the word amongst the new consumers, it brings even more close to the ones who themselves are looking for a product similar to what you are offering. It’s no coincidence!!

The most conceived one as of now is the Facebook Ad which identifies the relevant user account. Similarly, Re-targeting can be performed through YouTube, E-mail, and other mediums by sending those customized pop-ups or simply some discounted offers based on their purchase pattern.

Work on conversion optimization and do A/B testing

This helps your businesses to perform constant experimentation and customization across websites, mobile apps, and connected devices, so that you can examine profoundly into their technology and broadly study the overall consumer experience.

Hence A/B Testing in Marketing and Innovation is simply a practice of matching two versions of a web page or app against each other to conclude which one performs better.

This helps the designers to examine the performance of any new feature introduced & such detailed stepwise checking of features can save you from a lot of trouble and marketing failure.

Measure your progress and revise the strategy as per need

If you have an inherent urge to expand and grow, you need to endeavor constant improvement and not perfection.

Mistakes should be reviewed, learned from, and dropped; not dwelled upon and stored. Take a holistic view of your Online Marketing Plan and its results.

Measure the progress by evaluating your Return on Investment; Marketing Reach and Expansion, Customer Reach and Reactions; Conversions and sales numbers, and your Product/Service feedback.

Tackle the deviations from your goal & re-strategize as per the altering trends and consumer behavior.

Conclusion

The digital marketing strategy process is a process that can feel like one big tedious task but remember as rightly said by Philip Kotler Marketing takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master, so keep learning and keep experimenting because what is serving today may not work tomorrow, but what worked yesterday may serve again in future.

Practice the following course of action and let us know your experience. Remember, the idea is not to do digital, the idea is to be digital henceforth.

If you like what I write, feel free to leave a comment below!! I would love to see you here!!

Originally published at https://vikenpatel.com on September 22, 2020.