Digital Marketing

For any marketing strategy — offline or online — you need to know who you’re marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

1) Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you’ll need.

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business. For example, if your business’s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to measure it, and more important, actually be able to measure it (e.g., have the right digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goal(s), but it’s vital to ensure you’re able to do so, as it’s these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, the Reporting add-on in your HubSpot software brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn’t.

 

2) Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and assets.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate into your strategy, it’s helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. The owned, earned, and paid media framework helps to categorize the digital ‘vehicles’, assets, or channels that you’re already using.

 

3) Audit and plan your owned media.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content. Every message your brand broadcasts can generally be classified as content, whether it’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, or social media posts. Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand’s profile online — and when it’s optimized, it can also boost any efforts you have around search/organic traffic. Whatever your goal, you’re going to need to use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

To build your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what content is going to help you reach your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last year, it’s unlikely that your ‘About Us’ page is going to be included in your strategy — unless that page has somehow been a lead generation machine in the past.

Audit your existing content

Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals. If your goal is lead generation, for example, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the last year. That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your website that’s converting well.

The idea here is to figure out what’s currently working, and what’s not, so that you can set yourself up for success when planning future content.

Identify gaps in your existing content

Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have. If you’re a math tutoring company and have discovered in your audience research that one of your persona’s biggest challenges is finding interesting ways to study, but you don’t have any content that speaks to that concern, then you might look to create some.

Create a content creation plan

Based on your findings and the gaps you’ve identified, make a content creation plan outlining the content that’s necessary to help you hit your goals. This should include:

• Title
• Format
• Goal
• Promotional channels
• Why you’re creating it (e.g., “Marketing Molly struggles to find time to plan her blog content, so we’re creating a template editorial calendar”)
• Priority level (to help you decide what’s going to give you the most “bang for your buck”)

In today’s business world, the pressure to grow is persistent and unwavering. A company must continue to evolve to stay innovative, relevant and competitive. In almost every individual’s mind, growth is the definition of success. Whether it be a decision-maker, an investor or a customer, growth is something everyone craves to be a part of. In part, it can be explained as a psychological effect, but the reality is, if a company is not growing, it is declining.

There are many different strategies that a company will pursue in order to achieve its individual growth goals. These strategies might be: to expand on or add a new array of strengths, to explore unique territories, to strengthen competitive advantages or to explore untapped potential, to name a few.

At Ekul, we have a fully functional digital workflow that provides four key benefits to our company:

• Improved productivity
• Process transparency
• Faster business reaction time
• Improved accountability

Having a clear understanding of what you are currently doing and where you want to be is the first step of the digital marketing planning. In order for you to outline your plan, you should be able to figure out where you stand and how much you have to do to achieve digital marketing excellence.

It is crucial to define and monitor the right KPIs for your business and work hard toward achieving them. Measuring them in real time helps make any adjustments to avoid failure, especially when these KPIs are not even close to being reached. Having a dashboard that provides you these metrics can help make adjustments in a timely matter.

Relying On Offline

Creating a digital marketing strategy is no different than creating any other marketing strategy. The challenge here is in knowing how to convince top management that you need one. It’s easy for those of us who have been around this digital environment for a long time to realize this is something indispensable. We believe in it and have been a witness to its success. However, not everyone has this mentality, and our lack of empathy for these people and our sense of obviousness doesn’t help us sell very well.