7 Critical Components to Crafting a Digital Marketing Strategy

Professor of Marketing, Steuart H. Britt said: “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” In other words, you need to introduce your brand to your audience and make them aware of your business.

To achieve this goal, you will need a digital marketing strategy to help you establish your internet presence and reach your target audience through multiple online channels.

2. Setting Your Digital Marketing Goals

Setting your digital marketing goals before you engage in any activity is important for aligning your campaigns, efforts, and your workforce around the common mission.

You might want to generate more leads, improve your conversion rate, increase your sales, boost your website traffic, or do all the above. Whatever your goals are they need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

• Specific: Don’t set a broad goal like “I want to boost my website traffic”. Be specific and say: “I want to increase our organic traffic by 12% within the next three months”.
• Measurable: Set your key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
• Attainable: Be realistic with your goals, start small, and work your way up.
• Relevant: It is important to make sure your marketing and sales teams are on the same page. Otherwise, your marketing efforts might bring in new leads while your sales team struggles to close deals.
• Timely: Ensure all your goals have a timeframe set so that you can easily track your KPIs.

After you conduct your SWOT analysis and set your SMART goals, you will need to meet your buyers. This brings us to the next section.

3. Identifying Your Target Audience

To be effective, your digital marketing strategy needs to target the people who are most likely to buy your products or services, taking into account their age, interests, location, education, and more.

Here is what you can do to have a clear image of your buyers’ persona:

• Analyze your customer base
• Carry out client interviews
• Identify main industry trends
• See who are your competitors’ buyers
• Use Google Analytics

When you know your audience, you understand how to target them, so you can direct your marketing efforts toward the channels they use the most.

4. Choosing the Right Channels

The next step to creating a digital marketing strategy is to choose which of the following channels to include in your marketing efforts:

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Video marketing
• Pay-per-click campaign
• Affiliate marketing
• Mobile marketing
• Influencer marketing

Once you choose your preferred channel(s), it’s time to create content that your audience wants to consume.

5. Building Your Content Strategy

Your content strategy will largely depend on the digital channel(s) you opt for and your digital marketing goals.

Some of the most common types of content and their usage include:

• Blog posts: Blogs are the cornerstones of content marketing. They are mostly used for building brand awareness and increasing engagement rates.
• Videos: Short and entertaining video content nurtures leads via social media.
• Case studies: We recommend using case studies to demonstrate your expertise in a particular field and position yourself as an authority in your industry.
• Testimonials: This type of content offers social proof, which all users appreciate. You should integrate them into your business website.

Whatever type of content you choose for your digital marketing strategy, make sure that it is user-oriented and provides value to your audience.

6. Setting a Marketing Calendar

Digital marketing is multi-layered, and executing all planned activities effectively requires top-notch organizational skills.

By setting a marketing calendar that every member of your team needs to stick to, you can ensure that every task gets done on time.

There are many marketing calendar software to choose from including Smartsheet, Asana, and others. When deciding what software to use for planning your marketing activities, look for the following features:

• Automated sync
• Customizable calendar views
• Integration with Google calendar
• User-friendly

7. Tracking Your Results

Following your KPIs is crucial for crafting an efficient digital marketing strategy. There are over 30 digital marketing key performance indicators, but the 10 most important are:

1. Return on investment
2. Cost per lead
3. Monthly website traffic
4. Visitors per channel
5. Average time on page
6. Traffic from organic search
7. Customer acquisition cost
8. Conversion rate
9. Keyword ranking
10. Cost per conversion

When you know which tactics are delivering good results and which are not as effective, you can adjust your marketing efforts and use your resources better.

Key Takeaways

Before you start creating any kind of content, do your research, set your SMART goals, and get to know your audience. Be sure to track all your key performance indicators and adjust your strategy accordingly.

We hope our article helped you create a digital marketing strategy that targets the right people at the right time and in the right place.