A well thought out marketing strategy can set a business up for success, where avoiding it altogether can waste a lot if time and resources.
A well thought out digital marketing strategy should address the following questions:
- What are you marketing?
- Who are you marketing to?
- How will you reach your target audience?
- Where will you market your produce and/or service?
The aim is to be proactive rather than reactive
The purpose of a digital marketing plan for any organisation is to push you through the process of researching and clearly identifying your aims and goals, along with clearly identifying digital personas and carefully choosing which channels to go after them and how.
A marketing strategy will lead you to identifying clear business objectives – such as increase brand awareness, increase sales, increase customer retention, reduce cost per lead, reduce cost per acquisition of customers – these are common objectives – to make them part of a successful digital campaign requires breaking them down into detail.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and ill spend the first four sharpening my axe”
It’s important to deconstruct business objectives and reverse engineer them into digital goals. For example if the objective is to increase sales we would first translate this into a digital goal ie increase the website’s conversion rate, increase average order size. We now have something coherent to work with.
Once we have clear goals we can setup KPI’s and use analytical tools to keep count. At this stage we can begin setting nominal KPI targets – for example increase conversion rates from 2% to 3%. This is something you can now achieve through digital channels.
The next thing is to create personas of your ideal customer – break it down into details so you can understand them as much as possible – the saying you should know your customer so well that you know what is hanging on their fridge applies here. It’s also good to answer the question, “If i’m your ideal customer, why should I buy from you?”. As an example, we at Big Fusion would answer this question with:
- We design bespoke marketing campaigns to meet your specific business goals.
- We get the best results possible for our clients every time.
- We’re completely honest about what can and cannot be achieved from a campaign upfront.
- We have an incredible track record of success.
The next thing is to break down the channels which will be used to meet each goal. It’s important to go into significant detail about each channels strategy, including SEO, social, email, PPC etc. I recommend breaking this section up into customer acquisition, customer reach, customer retention and map the digital channels to the Sales/Buyer cycle.
The final step is to figure out how you will measure everything – each channel should be measured to ensure the effectiveness of each. Produce a matrix of core metrics to check if you’re on target to meet your goals.
A good structure for your marketing strategy:
- Market Research and Competitor Analysis
- Objectives and Goals
- Audience Setting and Value Propositions
- Channel Strategy
- Implementation
- Measurement
