With the ever-changing digital world, it can be difficult to know where to begin to market your business online. Developing a well thought out strategy for digital marketing will really help, and here are 5 tips on crafting an effective and simple plan.
1.Establish Your Goals and Objectives
Before you start to map out your digital marketing strategy, make sure to take the time to analyse and assess your goals. Really think about what it is that you want to achieve with your digital marketing plan.
Knowing exactly where you’re starting from and the direction that you’d like to go in will help ensure the success of your efforts.
Your goals could be one or all of these:
I want to raise awareness of my brand.
I want to get more people to visit my business.
I want to increase my sales.
I want to stand out from my competition.
2.Research & Identify who you are trying to attract.
Think about your customers or clients, and what will make them attracted to you and your business. Conducting thorough research into your target audience is essential when creating your digital marketing strategy. You should identify who they are, what social media they use, and what type of content they consume the most. Identifying these aspects of your audience will help you decide where to focus your efforts and choose which online channels might have the most impact.
These are the type of questions to ask. Are my clients/customers…
Men Women Other All?
Do they fall into an average age group?
Where do they live?
What social media would they most use?
Why are they looking for my product/service
What is their need / problem?
How do you satisfy their need or solve their problem?
3. Test, Evaluate, and refine Strategies
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different strategies in your digital marketing efforts. Test different content types on different channels, and evaluate which ones work best for you. You should also keep tabs on your competitors and see what’s working for them. Try to use the strategies that seem most successful for you, so you can refine them over time and get the best results possible from your campaigns.
To test your ideas, you could:
Try Facebook and Instagram and see which works most effectively for your business.
Look at your competitors or similar businesses both locally and internationally. Notice the things they do well and why you are attracted to it.
Claim your business on Google search.
4. Develop Content Plan for Multiple Channels
Creating content for all the different channels you’re active on can be overwhelming. But it’s important to have a plan that covers all of your marketing channels, so you don’t miss any opportunities. To develop a plan, create a list of platforms you want to target and determine how many pieces of content you will produce each week. The list should include social media accounts like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as other content platforms like YouTube, blogs, and distributed channels like email and podcasting.
If you can set aside a certain time each week and make it a part of your routine this will greatly increase your results.
Your plan could look like this:
Monthly: Create blog post
Send out an email.
Weekly:
Monday: Post on Facebook
Tuesday: 2 hours of content creation.
Wednesday: Post on Instagram
Thursday:
Friday: Create and post an Instagram Reel
5.Analyse the results of your content and clarify your Message
The best bit about working online is that you can see what is or isn’t working. Every online channel can give you the results from your publicised content. Once you can understand what you are doing and which bits of your content are attracting your ideal customers or clients, then you can improve your results by developing the ideas that worked best. This is how you learn to clarify your message and attract more people who are interested in what you do.
When you start out keep each stage as simple as possible. Its more effective to do one thing well than a lot of things badly.