Depending on the scale of your biz, your digital marketing strategy might be a forever-moving machine with multiple goals and new dreams. Maybe you’re just starting out on your digital journey, the one that boosts your online presence. Maybe you’re looking to refresh your tactics or want to see a bigger payoff in your campaigns.
Today’s Read will hook you up, serving up 7 building blocks to help create an effective digital strategy. Below are all seven, but this article is really more of a guide so, to get the most out of it, we suggest fully diving in.
- Build your persona, like Marketing Molly! This is your ideal customer represented by demographics (location, age, income, job title) and psychographics (goals, challenges, hobbies/interests, priorities).
- Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need.
- Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets. This is an owned, earned, and paid media framework that will help to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets, or channels that you’re already using.
- Audit and plan your owned media (website, blog, social media) by auditing your existing content, identifying gaps in your content, and creating a content creation plan.
- Audit and plan your earned media by building up an idea of what earned media will help you reach your goals. Look where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that’s your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.
- Audit and plan your paid media. Say you’ve been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven’t seen the results you want. It’s probably time to refine your approach, or ditch it and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. Not sure how to use AdWords? HubSpot’s got you with a freebie.
- Bring it all together and what d’ya got? A path to digital marketing success! Here’s what your path will look like:
Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
One or more marketing-specific goals
An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
An owned content creation plan or wish list
One more thing: Plan your strategy over a longer period of time — say 12 months — and create a scheduled timeline for your activity. It will help you communicate your plans to your colleagues. And keep you from looking like this.
If you’re still unsure where to even start or need more help hammering out your digital strategy for optimum success, we can help with that too. Not to toot our own horn anything…but we’re like ~digital marketing experts~. Toot toot. Beep beep.
