Building the Foundation for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

These days, businesses big and small are incorporating digital marketing into their overall plans, but it can be difficult to figure out where to start when there are so many techniques, approaches, and technologies to choose from. Here’s how to lay the foundation for your digital marketing strategy from the outset.

5 STEP DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY FRAMEWORK

Once you’ve defined your digital marketing goals, it’s time to build a step-by-step digital marketing strategy. Here are 5 steps that can guide you through this process:

Try to narrow down your target market by industry, geography, and/or product. Once you know who you’re marketing to, it’s easier to define your message and create a specific strategy that speaks directly to them.

• When developing your strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• What is your product or service?

• Do you have a competitive advantage?

• How will they find out about it?

• How much are they willing to spend on it?

• At what stage of their purchasing process are they currently in?

• And finally, why did they need your product or service in the first place?

By digging into those last two questions—and honing in on common answers—you’ll be able to develop messaging and positioning that appeals directly to your audience.

This should be your primary focus as you embark on your digital marketing strategy. Before you start researching, creating content, and executing paid campaigns, take some time to define who your audience is and what it wants from you. Personas are an essential aspect of digital marketing strategy because they allow you to identify problems that need to be solved in order to engage with customers more effectively.

Once you have established your goals and targets, you’ll need to determine where you’re going to focus your time and energy. This will largely depend on your brand’s strengths and its weaknesses in relation to its competitors. Do some research here – tools like Google Trends are an easy way to identify if there are any gaps in your potential customer base that could be more effectively addressed with paid advertising (such as Facebook or LinkedIn), or through greater emphasis on content marketing (such as Instagram, YouTube or blogging).

Though you might want to dive into content marketing headfirst, a key component of your digital strategy should be thinking ahead. Create an editorial calendar that lays out all of your content plans (including guest posts and sponsored pieces) so you know what you’re working on every week. It takes some time up front, but will save headaches later. If you don’t have time to commit to creating a detailed schedule, use one of these free templates from HubSpot or AWeber.

Step 5 - Develop a content marketing strategy

To implement your content marketing strategy, you first need to determine how much time and money you’re willing to allocate to it. Figure out who your target audience is and where they hang out online. It'll likely cost some money to get a website up and running as well as additional funds every month to pay someone or something to produce that content for you. Determine if you have those resources available to spend on producing original content on a regular basis. If not, think about other options like partnering with businesses in your niche instead of producing it yourself or giving away information through guest posts and interviews with similar blogs in your space.