Advertising on billboards, newspapers, and magazines have met a worthy opponent. Nowadays, in this technological age, you have to be quick to keep up with trends and deliver your company’s message. Digital marketing has become a must.
Lucky for you, our marketer’s guide will show you how to build your very own digital marketing business plan.
In today’s blog, we’re outlining the first 3 steps on how to build your digital marketing strategies to grow your online business effectively. These steps include:
- Fill Out a SWOT Analysis
- Define Your Digital Marketing Goals
- Create & Understand Your Target Persona
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy requires a sound digital marketing campaign. It’s the series of actions you plan and implement to achieve your digital marketing goal.
For example, if your end goal is to generate more leads from the internet, you may want to carry out a digital marketing strategy that focuses on search engine optimization (SEO).
By investing more in website design and valuable content, your site could rank higher in search engines and eventually generate more leads through this channel.
SEO has become just one of these important digital marketing tools that companies all over the globe use. For more information check out our article on how to use different SEO strategies for specific countries.
Now, let’s look at the steps needed to create a digital marketing strategy.
1. Fill Out a SWOT Analysis.
First off, when developing your digital marketing strategy you have to conduct an internal and external situational analysis (SWOT analysis) of the company.
SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The strengths and weaknesses are internal, relating to the company. Opportunities and threats are external, relating to the market.
To complete this step, you should be aware of internal and external factors such as competition, uniqueness, capital, etc.
The SWOT analysis is in a digital marketing context, just like yours should be for this situation.
This detailed chart is what you want to aim for when you create your own SWOT analysis. Similarly, notice how illustrative it is with the statistics and descriptions.
2. Define Your Digital Marketing Goals.
Once you have an idea about the market opportunities, work on defining your digital marketing goals to understand where your actions should take you.
Everything from here on out should be about getting you to those goals.
For example, think of your business as a flying airplane. If you don’t have specific goals, the winds change or the weather worsens and sudden problems can put your business off course or even worse, crash it.
I’m sure none of us want this happening. An easy way to define these goals is by creating a SMART goal.
SMART Goals.
Designed by Professor Peter Drucker in his management by objectives concept, SMART is an acronym for
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-Bound
A SMART goal includes all of these criteria to make your goals easier to understand and achieve.
For example, instead of defining your goal as “I want to start an online business where I sell bracelets.”
You could say, “By next week I will create an Etsy account to ship out the bracelets I make to my customers. In a month I’ll have made 50 bracelets to sell and I’ll aim to sell a minimum of five bracelets per week. This will build relationships and good word of mouth.”
How awesome and SMART is that?
Now that your goals are set, let’s look at the most crucial piece of the pie when building out a digital marketing plan.
3. Create & Understand Your Target Persona.
It’s the MOST important to understand your audience so you can market to them effectively!
A target audience is a specific group of people with shared characteristics who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.
Since you’ve conducted a SWOT analysis and defined your digital marketing goals, you can get more specific with your target audience. For example, you can find similar characteristics your target market shares like gender, age, hobbies, interests, employment, etc.
The possibilities are endless!
Once you have created a specific set of characteristics for your target audience based on your ideal consumer, you will be able to build out your digital marketing strategy more effectively.
We recommend that you walk in your target persona’s shoes.
Think like your target audience and reflect on questions like:
- What questions do they need answers to?
- What type of information would they find useful?
- Does the content serve their needs and address their pain points?
- Where do they “hang out” online and how can I grab their attention through digital media?
- Understanding the answers to these questions will help you build out your digital marketing strategies
