How to Formulate a Digital Marketing Strategy
This article is penned down by Aditya Rai, the Co-Founder of SORDITENTURE LLP. He is a Google Certified Marketer and has several years of industry knowledge in Digital Marketing. In this article, he has explained each part of a digital marketing strategy more straightforwardly and comprehensively.
The drastic shift in technologies has made an impactful presence in everyone’s life. Due to this, days are gone for traditional marketing tools such as billboard and newspaper ads which were the most effective marketing tools for promoting the brand and creating brand recognition in the past few decades.
When it comes to digital marketing, there are a lot of options to market your business, but it could be stressful and tiring while figuring out from where to start.
In this blog, we’re going to address the issue of formulating the digital marketing strategy from scratch that will be inclusive of all digital marketing elements and help you achieve specific goals of your choice.
1. Figure Out What You Want to Accomplish
What you want to accomplish with employing a digital marketing campaign needs a thoughtful review? Do you want to create brand awareness for your company among your potential customers? Do you want to generate leads? Do you want to scale up your sales figure, or email subscribers?
Awesome! Whatever it is that you want to accomplish with employing a digital marketing campaign, you need to name it.
Choosing marketing options is just like comparing a product in a shopping mall with its close substitute. If you go shopping for a particular product and don't know about its competitors from other brands, you would settle with the product you saw first. But if you have an actual list of your product's competitors, you're more likely to get the best purchase for your requirement.
Likewise, your goal matters a lot, and accordingly, you’ll need to employ a specific digital marketing strategy to accomplish the goal. And we’ll delve deep into this in coming segments.
2. Significance of the Digital Sales Funnel
The digital sales funnel is a vital part of digital marketing strategy that you want to grasp before actually formulating the strategy. It is made up of several steps through which buyers move while making their actual purchase of your product and becoming long-term loyal customers.
Though the steps may vary in numbers and names depending on the buyers, but they generally include the following:
- Discovery: In this step people hear about your brand or product for the first time ever.
- Research/Consideration: In this step your brand has established some brand recognition and potential buyers/users are looking for it at different mediums. They may also start searching for your competitors as well.
- Purchase: Under this step potential buyers convert into the actual buyer and user of your product.
- Loyalty: At this stage, buyers will record repetitive purchases, and they become loyal, long-term customers for your product. They may become advocates for your brand.
Users/buyers who are lurking at the discovery stage would behave differently with your ad campaigns than those who became loyal users/buyers of your product. Your ad and digital marketing campaigns need to be tailored, keeping this in mind.
3. Create Buyer Persona
The next step after digital sales funnel is to create a buyer persona required to formulate your solid and robust digital marketing strategy. You need to understand who your audience is, what they want to see from you, and on which platform you can find them; these points set up the foundation for formulating a solid strategy.
Avoid creating buyer persona based on instinct instead, it should be based on the in-depth research about your potential audience, or you can take help of the Google Analytics and Facebook’s Audience Insights to get better knowledge about your potential buyer
4. Determine Where to Find Users at all Funnel Stages
Until this stage of a digital marketing strategy you have got a clear understanding of your potential audience, but now you need to understand where to locate your audience on Internet mediums and connect with them. For this purpose, you can again connect with them while referring to your analytics on this and cross verify them with your buyer personas.
For example, let’s assume you’re running a furniture store company. You sell furniture of only high-end quality and price. Your target audience must be from someone who has the liking and preference for an exquisite collection of furniture made up of superior quality of wood and polish.
How can you reach out to them? Let’s jump into that:
- Let’s say someone who is taking time to buy furniture for a newly built home or flat might be searching for furniture on Google or Pinterest by entering the phrase “Superior quality King Size Bed.” If they find your blog post regarding that phrase on any medium, they will discover you on the Internet.
- A person who has a liking for exquisite wooden furniture may have followed several pages on Facebook regarding such furniture and spending a lot of time searching for that. Thus, you can run a Facebook ad targeting buyer persona who shows interest in high-end superior quality wooden furniture, and Facebook ads will be automatically shown on their Facebook feed.
You should consider all means of marketing channel whether paid or organic and think about your audience members are using them and what stage of funnel they’re in.
5. Employ Specific Protocols to Reach Your Goals
As you reach this stage, you have your right marketing mix and expect the audience to react. Now, it's time to build the tactics combing all the bits and pieces, and help you reach your goal.
These tactics might include:
- Creating lead magnets or lead generating widgets on the sides of all blog posts and a call to action at the end of the post. Learn how to create CTA and lead magnets from experts in SORDITENTURE LLP free of cost.
- You can increase brand recognition and visibility by just sharing the content of an influencer on social media.
- Testimony and reviews from your customers significantly improve the SEO score on Google, which could be used as the best digital marketing strategy.
6. Incorporate Automation and a Personalized Message
Personalized messages are becoming the best tool nowadays for digital marketing. It triggers a specific call to action button by stimulating the purchasing instinct of the buyers. You must have seen these kinds of messages from food delivery services such as Swiggy or Zomato, wherein they send a special personalized message to each customer to stimulate purchases.
Automation have been widely used in companies nowadays, it could be used as an email marketing strategy wherein you can send personalized emails or newsletter to your potential buyers to make them aware about your company and new launches.
7. Conclusion
While it may seem very tempting to jump onto every platform for digital marketing and employ them for your company, it could lead to severe damage, soon you’ll figure out that you’re hitting the nail in your coffin.
Running any marketing campaign needs in-depth research about your market and audience, and it could be pretty tiring for you. Without the right content and specific goals in mind, it would be like sailing on a boat without any clue of destination.
Still, having confusion about formulating strategy? SORDITENTURE LLP team will help you in formulating the digital marketing strategy for your company. Get in touch with us and see how awesome we are when it comes to digital marketing.