Digital marketing strategy is a hot issue of discussion amongst marketers today. The advantages of digital marketing are very clear to organizations that have taken advantage of it as a tool to reach customers. One main advantage that stands out is the ability to track market growth by the numbers. Your twitter profile will give you the exact number of people who are following you, retweeting your content and asking for your products. All these perks however don’t come through magic. They require a solid digital marketing strategy. So how does one go about making one?
1. Establish your goals
Digital marketing is a magnificent tool for tracking growth because goals can be broken down to exact figures. This should be the first item in your strategy. Which goals in the company can you achieve through digital marketing channels? Is it sales, brand awareness, funding or humanitarian activities?
2. Establish your target audience
With clear content goals, it then becomes clear who your content is meant for. The task at this stage is to find out which groups of people form this target audience and find out where and how they can be reached. How many people do you want subscribing to your company online, how many do you want to see your content, how much business do you want from all this activity but most importantly what message do you want to them to hear?
3. Establish your presence
The third step for a company or organization trying to reap the merits of digital marketing is to place themselves on the digital sphere. This means opening profiles on various social media networks as well as having a website, blog or any online platform that the organizations owns itself (even apps can do). Once this is done the firm needs to establish where it is already as a digital brand. How many people are talking about it and what are they saying. The other part of establishing an online presence is having the company’s identity well represented. This means defining consistent brand colours, fonts, values and messages to be used for every platform.
4. Create a content theme
Most established brands online run timed content campaigns to send certain messages across quickly. This is why a lot of trends on Twitter are based on company sponsored hashtags. The content that emerges daily is then based on this message. Once a content theme is defined, the content becomes easy to come up with because it is based on one single message; a message that when repeated in different version is easier to remember.
5. Produce a Content Calendar
A content calendar allows you to have the content theme you have come up with broken down to easy to digest bits of information. These may include videos, pictures, graphics, articles, tweets, updates and so on. What is more important however is to make sure this content is nothing short of EPIC. This way it stands out from all other online content that is competing for our audience’s already preoccupied eyeballs. All this content needs to be planned out into a well thought out calendar in order for it to be published for the audience.
6. Promote promote promote!
Now that the content is out, it needs to be seen. The essential idea is to make sure you place it in areas where the target audience can easily find it and consume it. These places might include other people’s online spaces, shared spaces and your own social space. Once this happens frequently the target audience will be drawn to your online brand and follow it for easier access to the same kind of information.
7. Analyse your progress
As the age old saying goes, if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. Tracking your digital marketing results is critical if growth is going to be under your control. Control comes from being able to see clearly which content is working for your audience and which one isn’t, which content is drawing them closer to your product and which one is drawing them further off. Sometime it may mean seeing which times are best to publish content and what the audience wants more of.
Therefore the figures that come from measuring progress can significantly improve your strategy in future.
