Process Of Digital Marketing

There are various situations in which Digital Marketing Process would be required. They could be:

1. You are an Entrepreneur & want to start marketing your business on Digital Media.

2. You are a Digital Marketing Agency or a Freelancer & want to Market your client’s business on Digital Media.

3. You are a Digital Marketing Executive working for an Agency, & you are told to create a Digital Marketing campaign for the client that your agency has just acquired.

Following is a 5 Step Digital Marketing Process, that can be used for marketing anything on Digital Media.

1. Research

At this stage, you will collect all the information that will be required for decision making in the next stages. Information collected during the research will become your raw material to strategize & create your digital marketing campaign. This stage can also be called as Digital Marketing Research. At this stage, you will research 4 sets of information:

• About Business

• About Your Target Customers

• About The Product That You Want To Market

• About Online Competition

Each set is unique & equally important. You will require multiple sources to collect the information.

2. Create

Once you collect information at the research stage, you can now start creating:

A) Digital Marketing Objectives / Goals

These are the ultimate goals that you want to achieve through your Digital Marketing Campaign. Every business is unique, therefore their goals will also be unique. Campaigns without clear goals will end up spending money without the assurance of achieving goals. What goals you should set, can be answered after looking at information collected at the Digital Marketing Research stage.  Learn more about Digital Marketing Objectives / Goals.

B) Digital Marketing Strategy

After you set the goals, it’s time to create a strategy to achieve those goals. Your Digital Marketing Strategy will include Positioning Strategy, Branding Strategy, Content Strategy, Digital Marketing Channels Strategy. What strategy should be adapted/created, will be answered from the information collected at the Digital Marketing Research stage.

C) Digital Marketing Plan

At this stage, you will lay down a documented plan that will include all your detailed Digital Marketing activities with timelines.

D) Creating Primary Digital Identities

The 3 primary Digital Identities of business are Website, Blog & App. These are like your online office, shops, or showrooms. These are the places where you want your target customer to reach & ultimately buy your products & services. Before you move on to the next stage, i.e promote, your primary digital identities must be fully ready. For businesses that want to sell their products through major E-Commerce portals, creating digital identities can be optional. But, it’s better to at least have a website for establishing some credibility of your business.

3. Promote

After your primary digital identities are fully ready, you will start promoting them. That means you want relevant people to start coming to your primary digital identities. This is also called as generating relevant traffic. Relevant traffic is an important word here.

The more you get relevant traffic to your website, the more the conversion you can expect. Your options to promote your website/blog / app will be:

• Search Engines

• Display Network

• E-commerce Portals

• Social Media

• Email

• Messaging

• Affiliate

The above are also known as Digital Marketing Channels, which you need to promote your Primary Digital Identities (Website / Blog / App). There are sub-channels & networks within some of the channels mentioned above.

Which channels, sub-channels, networks to go for & whether to do organic or inorganic promotions, these questions will already be answered at the Digital Marketing Strategy creation stage.

4. Analyze

Once you create your primary digital identities & start promoting them through various digital marketing channels, it’s time to start monitoring your performance. Analyzing is like looking at the outcome of your digital marketing work. You will receive analytics for your primary digital identities, as well as the channels through which you have done the promotions.

The most important & ultimate analytics for any business is the analytics of your website/blog / app. Google Analytics is widely popular to generate analytics of your primary digital identities. The 4 major sections of Google Analytics are:

• Audiences

• Acquisition

• Behavior

• Conversion

5. Optimize

Based on analysis & observations, you start making changes (fine-tuning). The changes could be in your primary digital identities or digital marketing channels. Changes are also referred to as content & design of your identities & promotional communication.

To summarize, the following are the 5 steps of the Digital Marketing Process:

In a nutshell

1. Research

At this stage, you Research about business, target customers, product/service, competition.

2. Create

At this stage, you create your digital marketing goals, digital marketing strategy, digital marketing plan & primary digital identities (website/blog/ app).

3. Promote

At this stage, you start promoting your primary digital identities through various digital marketing channels like search engines, display networks, e-commerce portals, social media, emails, messaging & affiliate programs.

4. Analyze

At this stage, you look the various analytics including the most important analytics i.e Website / Blog / App analytics & compare them with your goals. You also understand where changes must be made in order to bridge the gap between goals & actuals.

5. Optimize

At this stage, based on analysis & observations, you start making changes (fine-tuning). The changes could be in your primary digital identities or digital marketing channels. Changes are also referred to as content & design of your identities & promotional communication.