How To Develop A Digital Marketing Roadmap / Strategy For Businesses
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Christopher D. Reid
How To Develop A Digital Marketing Roadmap / Strategy For Businesses
To succeed in business, you must put together a first-rate, world-class marketing plan. Digital technology must be at the heart of it.
What is digital technology? And why has it had such an impact on the business world?
Digital technology allows immense amounts of information to be compressed into small storage devices. Such information can be easily generated, preserved, processed, and recalled, and this has given rise to a range of electronic products and media outlets. Digital technology powers social media, smart phones, tablets, and other information sharing tools. More and more of the world’s consumers do most of their communication, coordination, shopping, and fact-finding using digital devices. If you are to expand your business, you must establish a digital marketing strategy that taps this potential.
Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan
You should not invest in digital technology or implement it without a plan. Doing so will lead to the waste of your capital and the failure of your project. When putting together your plan, you must determine your target audience, business objectives, and value proposition.
You should draw up your digital market plan on a document which should contain the following details:
-Business goals
-Strategies to achieve them
-Action and development plans
-Investment and budget figures
-Roadmap and deadlines
In other words, all that you aim to achieve and the specific actions you intend to carry out should be in the plan.
Developing Your Digital Marketing Strategy Document
Here is a step-by-step guide for developing a digital marketing strategy document.
Step 1: Conduct a SWOT analysis
You should first carry out a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Its purpose is to make you familiar with the economic and business ecosystem your company operates in. The state of your market, your customers’ needs and their digital habits, the intermediaries, and influencers that shape their thought and action—these are just some of the factors that will come out in the analysis.
The analysis should be at once qualitative and quantitative. You should ask the following questions under each category:
1. Strengths
What are the main competitive advantages of our company?
What resources do we have?
What elements do we employ to influence a sale?
What are the one or two things we do well?
2. Weaknesses
What are we doing wrong?
What do informed people believe is going wrong with our company?
What factors negatively affect the sale of a product or the development of a project?
3. Opportunities
What gaps or demand in the market can we fill?
Which market trends do we have information about?
What technological changes are underway?
4. Threats
What obstacles do we face?
What are our competitors doing?
What financial issues are we dealing with?
Is there anyone who can drive us out of the market?
Step 2: Formulate digital marketing goals
After doing a SWOT analysis, you will be ready to set goals. This is one of the most important parts of the plan. Do not allow your team to get hung up on overzealous, over-optimistic hype. This kind of bombast means nothing; it is talk for talk’s sake, and it can lead to a disastrous situation in which everyone goes off with a half-formed impression of what the results of their work should be, but no one is held responsible for attaining them.
Keep minds focused on the creation of concrete and realistic goals for which people can be held accountable. You should use the SMART goals framework:
-Specific: clicks on your site, new leads, or new customers
-Measurable: new sales and revenue
-Attainable: benchmarks that can be achieved
-Relevant: a business result or aim
-Timely: clear deadlines
Step 3: Define the marketing strategy
Once you’ve gotten the goals of your campaign written down, it is time to start defining and shaping your marketing strategy. Here are a few pointers to get you started:
1. Segment your target audience
Your SWOT analysis should produce enough information on your target audience for you to know who they are, where they live, what electronic tools and devices they are likely to use, and what their needs, preferences, and expectations are.
2. Position yourself in the market
Establish your value proposition if you have not done so already. This should tell a prospective customer why they should choose you rather than someone else. You will then need to communicate this value proposition on the electronic platforms where your audience is present.
3. Develop a content strategy
Figure out the best means of creating, distributing, and managing original content that attracts people. You should also map out a specific communications plan for your social media accounts, blogs, email distribution chains, and the rest of the digital channels you will use.
Step 4: Develop specific digital strategies and tactics
A strategy is an achievable series of steps meant to help you reach a goal. Tactics are the specific, concrete, and definable actions you take to keep your company on task and on target toward the latter.
In executing your digital marketing strategy, you want to start with the basics. These include:
-Publishing a blog
-Advertising on social media platforms
-Offering free educational resources
-Employing SEO solutions
-Organizing webinars and podcasts
-Creating an email campaign
You will then need to look at the more advanced steps of implanting your digital marketing strategy. Specifically, you will need to:
1. Discern the personality and preferences of your buyer
Before you can sell, you must know who you are selling to. You must build a detailed profile of your potential buyers. This can be created by researching and surveying your company’s target audience.
You can use web analytic tools to identify figure out where most of your web traffic is coming from. You can use the same tools to determine the age of most of your customers.
Income is important. It is associated with class, status, and social grouping, all of which will help you better understand the general attitudes and preferences of your target audience. Income is a sensitive topic and is best gathered through research interviews.
You also want to gather qualitative psychographic information on your potential buyers. This can include:
-Personal and career goals
-Life challenges
-Hobbies and interests
-What they value most as it relates to the kind of product or service you are selling
Given the current social mood, atmosphere, and conditions in many countries—especially of those in the United States—you may find it useful to probe the political leanings of your target audience. This can give you deep insight into how to better market your product.
2. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets
In your digital marketing strategy document, you should include a spreadsheet that breaks down your existing digital channels according to an owned, earned, and paid media framework.
What are these?
Owned media refers to digital assets owned by your company. These include your website, social media accounts, blogs, and trademarked images. This is content that you have complete control over.
Earned media is the exposure you get through word-of-mouth, social media, or other types of informal and spontaneous distribution. You receive this kind of publicity and attention based on PR efforts, the amount of positive reviews you receive, the number of shares you get on social media, and other kinds of public recognition.
Paid media refers to advertisements, paid social media posts, sponsored posts, and other types of marketing vehicles and channels you pay for.
It is important to have a firm grasp of how much of each category you are invested in, and how they can be combined and synthesized to help you generate new leads. For example, if you have written a blog post as a subject matter expert, then you should post a link to the blog on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. You may have made a video that gives potential customers an inside look into how your company does business. You should post this on YouTube, and the share the YouTube clip on your social media pages.
The central point here is to maximize the production and publicity of new content.
Step 5: List potential suppliers and partners
You will need suppliers to make your campaign work. These will come in the form of service providers that specialize in certain fields of work. You will need to hire a content and submission service, an ad company, and a video production company.
To begin with the first. Writing informed and penetrating blogs, catchy social media posts, press releases, and marketing articles is not something that can be done by you or anyone on your team. Even if you had the writing talent, trying to turn out content at the level and rate required would consume all your time. You should instead use a company that employs copywriters to create the content and teams of experts dedicated to finding places to post your stuff for maximum visibility and back ling effectiveness.
An online advertisement company with a track record of success should also be part of your supply group. Google and Facebook are now the premiere ad platforms in the world. Not only will you reach the most people by placing ads through them, you will be able to do so in a cost-effective manner. You should begin with these platforms. They may be able to give you all the exposure and publicity you need. It may be possible for you to do without radio and television advertisement, which are much more expensive.
You should also consider establishing a long-term relationship with a video productions company. One of the greatest benefits of digital technology is that it has made the creation and distribution of high-quality videos much easier.
Cutting a video that promotes your brand and products can have a huge impact on your bottom line. The best videos become online memes and get shared without extra effort or expense. You should work with a video production company that specializes in making and distributing such products online. This kind of company will likely have a first-rate promotion and distribution operation, which will save you the extra cost and burden of taking your finished video to another company for the latter purpose.
You should also consider forming a marketing coalition with other companies. Rivals can sometimes be allies. And if a competitor has access to a marketing channel that gets to your target audience it may be worth making a deal with them to share the platform.
Other companies may have resources that you can leverage to advance your marketing campaign. You should encourage your people to think creatively when drawing up a list of potential partners.
Step 6: Consider financing
There is a difference between being cost-effective and being cheap. Your digital marketing campaign will not come off if you go in for penny-pinching. You should view the money it takes to get your campaign off the ground and sustaining it as an investment. And like any good investment, it may be worth borrowing the money you need.
You can do so by going back to the original investors who helped you start your company. Or, you can get your line of credit extended through your company’s bank. To get the money, you will need to convince the lending institution that you will make an adequate return. Here is another point at which you will need to crunch the numbers and present them in clear, coherent, and logical way.
Step 7: Monitor the campaign
You will eventually need to measure the results of your digital marketing campaign. But there is a crucial step before that, and it is one that many business leaders misunderstand. You must monitor the campaign to ensure that each element of it is operating at it should. In order to measure the results of your campaign, you must know exactly what you are measuring. Any number of missteps and miscommunications can disorganize your campaign. If you go from implementation to measurement without monitoring, you may get a poor result because you are assessing a campaign that significantly differs from the one you put into place.
The best way to monitor your campaign is to audit and spot check the activities and marketing products of your team and your suppliers. You should also see a rise in business, site traffic, and revenue, though these things may not happen straightaway.
Step 8: Measure results
Once you are ready to measure the results of your digital marketing campaign, you will need to turn to analytics. This is critical pillar for optimizing your digital marketing performance. You should measure every action using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which should be developed well before you implement your strategy. Using KPIs will help you determine whether you have earned the return on investment you expected. It will also help you correct errors and figure out what is working and what is not working in your campaign.
You must remember that everything moves quickly in the digital world. You must be on the lookout constantly for new threats and new opportunities. To meet this challenge, you should establish a data visualization system. This will help you and your team understand receive and process information quickly and make critical decisions.
Getting Ahead in the Digital Age
Following these steps when creating your digital marketing plan will help you order and rationalize your efforts. It will ensure that you do not leave things to chance; this must be kept to a minimum if you are to enhance your presence and power in the digital space.
The only way to get ahead in the digital age is to plan. The aim of creating a digital marketing strategy document is not to lock you into a strict and inflexible series of actions. It is to give you a roadmap, a way to sort through complexity, and to navigate through the difficulties of competing in the market.
Such a document will help you avoid the pitfalls of rash, unrealistic, and fantastical thinking. It is especially important to establish some semblance of reasonableness if you are starting a new business. If you are working with an intelligent and tech-savvy group of individuals, they will be aware of the many choices that a young company has in developing a marketing strategy. And you can get sucked into unending and futile debates over the best platforms and tools to use at every meeting. Working through the process of a digital marketing campaign document will allow you to hash all such concerns out at once and come up with an agreed path forward.
You must make digital technology your ally. You have no other choice. Consumer society is now completely driven by the various gadgets and platforms powered by digital. You must find innovative ways to leverage it to your benefit. There are plenty of tools to help you simplify the work of developing your marketing campaign, and you should prioritize finding and incorporating them into your planning sessions.
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