How to create a Digital Marketing Strategy for your business

Life has become better as technology evolves; in turn, we develop alongside it. We are becoming more digitalized, and spending more time online, which has influenced how businesses operate. With each day, more businesses have moved to an online presence with a different strategy from their offline presence.

Digital marketing is more than ever a crucial component in an online and offline business. With all the information swarming the internet on digital marketing, has it ever left you feeling confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, or all three combined? I know all three left me lost and defeated but I managed to simplify things to get started on my side hustle. So I got you!

By the end of this article, you will figure out your mission, target audience, goals, and channels you need to have a long-lasting booming business. So let’s dive in.

Define your Mission and Unique Selling Point.

When you pitched your business or business idea to your mentor or friends, have they ever asked you why you chose that particular business or business idea? What problem your company seeks to solve? The answer automatically becomes your mission. Let’s take “Pick up Mtaani” as a case study. There was a gap created by the limited, expensive delivery options businesses could use. They have made delivery convenient and cheaper for both E-commerce sellers and customers. Automatically, the aspect of convenience and affordable became their unique selling point.

By finding the element that helps you to best solve your customer’s problems, shape it to make your business irresistible.

Niche Down.

A narrowed, detailed buyer persona allows you to customize your content to reach your desired outcome. By looking at demographics, interests, background, and income, you can get your user/buyer personas. This is where google analytics comes into play. By doing a careful analysis of your marketing efforts, you will identify what’s working, what’s not, and what your business needs to be successful.

Ask yourself, “why would I buy this?” List out every reason. It will help you understand the ideal demographic, background, and marketing channels.

For businesses that already have a stream of customers, a survey helps to get a more in-depth look into your audience’s mind. Questions like, What are you struggling with most when it comes to [insert problem]? Or What is your biggest fears about [insert problem]?

The trick behind effective surveys is to avoid making assumptions as much as possible. Survey Monkey is an excellent platform for source surveys to capture your audience’s opinions and voices. For a free option, check out Jotform, or Wufoo. Segment your audience into small batches to test out your survey to know what works for you.

Set SMART(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) Goals.

Having specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound plans make outlining your message easier. For bloggers, a SMART goal would look like “Reach 5000 visitors in a month, every month within 3 months. I will do X, Y, and Z to make it happen”. From this, what are the specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound aspects?

Set your Marketing Funnel.

With 4 basic steps, you can make your brand known, engage with customers, convert and get brand ambassadors. The ultimate desired outcome for a lot of businesses. Remember how step 2 requires people to know you? Well, a marketing funnel will help you answer questions like

  • How are we going to make strangers aware of our business?
  • Once they are aware that we exist, how are we going to connect with them?
  • And once we connect and they fall in love with us, how are we going to convert them into buying customers?

Choose your Medium.

Mobile phones have become so integrated into our lives to the point a day can’t pass without being online. Take the simple task of watching TV at home, ever found yourself being on your phone at the same time watching something? Or during your 10-minute break from work, you gravitate towards Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok to unwind. The 10-minute break becomes a 1-hour break. I’m guilty of this. Instagram reels have a hold on me that I can’t seem to break free of. It’s now my guilty pleasure that I fully enjoy.

Anyway, the point is choosing the right media to market your business goes a long way in terms of increasing brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.

For instance, a plumber will most likely profit more from local listing on Google than advertising on Facebook while a Vintage clothing site will profit more from adverts on Instagram and Facebook at a lower cost compared to Google paid adverts. Examples of local directories/listings to use include; Google my business, Bing Business, and Yahoo local.

When it comes to local advertising, use local directories, search engines, review sites, and social media to your advantage. Including contact features, and maps make your business easily accessible for locals to get in touch.

In short, keep these 3 rules in mind;

  • Only choose marketing channels that contain your audience
  • Prioritize your marketing channels based on effectiveness
  • To determine what is most effective, consider your business services and most importantly, your buyer persona.

Define your Content.

You have your audience, USP, and channels set. Now, how do you pull people into your marketing funnel and pull them down until they convert? Did I hear you say “selling them value’? You’re right! By focusing on the value, you have a higher conversion rate. Note that a friendly tone creates a one-on-one conversation vibe, like a direct chat.

Now content encompasses different forms such as video, podcasts, social content, google ads, or blogs. Depending on your user browser preferences, getting relevant keywords to customize your content will have your marketing strategy target the relevant audience.

Tools such as Google Keyword planner, or Bing keyword research will help you determine the content to use on your phase and exact keyword match types. Go even further and segment your audience based on the content they are interested in. This makes retargeting campaigns work effectively as each audience gets value based on their interests.

Because of the short concentration span that is currently a common symptom, having short, interactive, relevant videos will perfectly fit into today’s norm. That’s why Tiktok and Instagram are so addictive. From DIYs, and tutorials to comic content to news highlights, there is every kind of information surfing around waiting to be discovered.

Of course, there is 2 software that you can use to plan out your feed and social media content. Preview and Plann give you a bird’s eye view of your feed flow and layout before posting to improve your Instagram engagement.

Let’s take a look at H&M’s marketing strategy. They have become leading experts at product innovation, price approach, reduced product output, and promotion planning. The time between coming up with a product design and launching is minimal compared to other brands. And the best part is the quality is never compromised.

P.S: Pick a few types of content and prioritize them. Don’t break your bank trying to do all which will counterproductive.

Invest in Pay per Click Ads.

In the world of Search Engine Marketing, pay per clicks puts businesses on top of search engines, drawing more visitors to your website. As the name indicates, the advertiser only pays when their business ad gets clicked. Being strategic with the keyword match types you use, you can drive up traffic quality to your website simply by using exact match words or phrase match types to eliminate spending too much to trigger your ads. Phrase match uses quotations in keywords to trigger an ad while exact match uses square brackets.

Remember the vintage clothing site in step 5? Well, an exact match type would look like [vintage shops near me] or [vintage clothing shop]. Tools you can use for web analytics include; Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Web trends.

P.S: Avoid using broad matching(shows relevant and irrelevant keyword ads) so as to not waste your budget.

SEO.
The backbone of every business. By increasing website visibility, your website gets more traffic from search engine results. Hence, you have to make sure you use all the right SEO tools to design unique SEO strategies for your startup. Tools such as Google Search Console, and Google Trends, are one of the best research tools for a robust SEO strategy.

P.S: Use ad groups for each product you offer. Also, use a tracking code for pages on your website for the desired action. For example, placing a code on the checkout page for “Thank you for shopping with us” to measure successful transactions.

Email Marketing.

According to Statista, ninety-three percent of B2B marketers consider email personalization a key metric for revenue growth. While Salesforce attributes sixty-six percent of customers expect their favorite brand to know what they need. The numbers indicate the power email marketing has as well as the customer’s awareness of the kind of communication they want. So what are the benchmarks you need to consider when analyzing your email campaigns?

  • Open rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Click-to-open rate
  • Unsubscribe rate

Some budget-friendly tools I highly recommend and used so far include Sendinblue, Sendinpulse, and Mailchimp. They give you an in-depth overview of the benchmarks.

Automation.

Intelligence tools have become a big part of marketing. Automating emails, inquiry responses, content posts, and Google Analytics has made large chunks of data manageable and segmentation effective in testing out email campaigns.

By creating smaller groups of recipients who share the same background or characteristics, AI can comb through the data to build segmented lists for you to target.

Chatbots are one of the few elements of email marketing that also work outside of the email body. You can use chatbots as a lead generation tool by adding them to ungated content.

Based on user responses, the chatbots can prompt visitors to receive communications via email for better deals.

You know I will recommend the affordable chatbots I have used. My top 2 are Tidio, tawkto, As for automation software I have Integromat and Zapier for your taking.

Execute and Analyze.

After defining your objectives, funnel, audience, messaging, channels, and content, it’s time to launch your digital campaign. The whole process continuously evolves as the business evolves and new data gets analyzed. You will launch, analyze, tweak, and relaunch on a cycle. Could be monthly, or quarterly.

As a big fan of Atomic habits by James Clear, I will borrow his word to drive home this point. “Reflection and review create a long time improvement of habits”. As you review your data, your marketing strategy improves over time and you pick up behaviors that align with your personality and business model.

Roundup.

To wind up, here are the steps to build your marketing strategy;

  • Identifying your mission. It helps you to clearly describe and reach your target audience.
  • Determine what sets you apart from your competitors. It could be your company values, environmental contributions, or special ingredient.
  • Establishing a marketing funnel.
  • Use keywords to identify and create relevant content.
  • Use a few marketing channels based on your audience and user experience.
  • Invest in Pay per click Ads. An Effective strategy for brand awareness.
  • Stay on top of your SEO game. Become one of the top searches on the first page of search engines.
  • Set clear quantifiable goals for each customer journey. Automatically, tracking your gaps becomes easier and more rectifiable.
  • Automation is your friend and assistant. Use it to efficiently engage with your audience.
  • Execute and Analyze every quarter.

As James Clear stated, habits plus deliberate practice equals mastery. With more practice, your blood, sweat, and tears will bear fruits as more visibility and conversions. Play around with the tools I have recommended to automate your content, respond to customers, and improve your marketing strategy.

Remember, mistakes happen for us to learn from them. They become a stepping stone for a better future. Stay on Top of your Goals.

By, Grace Mwarania.

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