According to research, 46% of the brands do not have a marketing strategy. Not having a marketing plan can have negative effects on your business in terms of promotions and a decrease in leads. Having a clearly defined Digital Marketing Strategy is necessary to survive in today's competitive world. A marketing strategy helps set your business goals and targets and assists in boosting your business growth and development. You need to know that you are going somewhere and a Digital Marketing Plan will provide you just that. Having a pre-planned Digital Plan in action will provide stability to your business and ensure that your Digital Marketing efforts bloom fruitful results.
Let's first know what a
marketing Plan is. In simple words, a Digital Marketing Plan is the planning you do to figure out innovative ways of developing and putting your marketing strategies into action. A
Marketing Plan involves working on SEO, social media, analytics, promotions, strategies, monitoring tools, and much more. So, how can you design your own Digital
Marketing Strategy? Do you hire a
Digital Marketing Agency for fulfilling your business marketing needs or should you rely on in-house marketing? In this blog, we will guide you on how you can structure a powerful
Marketing Strategy that can create a major impact on your business.
Figuring your business's Marketing requirements
Planning without knowing what you are planning for might lead to confusion and mixed results. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is figure out your business objectives which you want to see being fulfilled through a Marketing plan. Set goals that you want to come alive through your efficient marketing Strategy. You can set and monitor any business goal such as a 10% increase in website visitors or an increase in the number of times visitors spend on your website. Setting a mission is important so that you know whether your marketing strategy proved to be successful or not.
While you are at it, go ahead and set your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are the indicators that suggest whether you are achieving the desired results from your Digital Marketing Plan or not. When it comes to KPIs, be careful of the following things:
1. Make sure to be specific with your KPIs so you can compare them easily with your actual performance
2. Create realistic KPIs that you can achieve. Take inspiration from previous Digital Marketing Plans (if any) or choose an estimate that you think is achievable. Be optimistic, decide on a figure that you think is achievable, and work on it. This will make sure that you don’t keep your expectations too high.
3. Decide beforehand, the tools that will help you monitor your KPIs. One of the most used track tools is Google Analytics.
Just remember:
"The key is to set realistic goals and then not just meet them, but exceed them in unexpected and helpful ways"

"Understanding and forming a Buyer's Persona
"The first step in exceeding your customer expects to know their expectations"
The products and services you provide might not be suitable for people of all age groups. They might attract people of a particular age group and similar interests. Understanding Buyer's Persona is one of the most important parts of forming your Digital Marketing Strategy. It involves knowing the people, who are most likely to visit your website, view your products, and purchase them. The buyer's persona is about understanding and gaining information about your ideal buyers. It's about creating a fictional image of your ideal buyer including his age group, his interests, his work, and many more things. Dig deep and become familiar with your ideal buyers just like their psychologists.
Having a buyer's persona figured out will help you connect better with your target audience and provide them with what they want and desire. Every successful company performs this step. They understand their buyers, know their desires and wants, and tweak their products and services according to their customer's satisfaction.
Define your Digital Marketing Strategy
Once you have figured out your objectives, you need to figure out a plan to make the objectives come true. You need to come up with an effective Digital Marketing Strategy for achieving those objectives. To define your marketing strategy, you need to focus on certain points like:
1. SEO
SEO is an important part of
Digital Marketing. You need to figure out how you want to do the
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your business so that you rank higher on search engines. This can be done in plenty of ways such as unique keywords, blogs, backlinking, and many more SEO related concepts.
2. Content Strategy
Developing a content strategy is significant if you wish to deliver innovative content to your audience at regular intervals. Having a pre-planned blog post calendar, social media posts, and many more things can help you to distribute content in a strategic, informative way. Moreover, regular posts give a top priority of your brand in the mind of the audience and help create a healthy brand image. Thus, you need to focus more on your Content Strategy to create a good
Digital Marketing Plan
3. Social Media sharing
Creating blog posts but not promoting them on social media will reduce the engagements by a lot. Sharing posts on social media regularly with a plan at action will boost your reach on social media platforms and audience reach. Simply use suitable hashtags, and captions, and share them on social platforms.
“A good review boosts your morale
A bad review points out your mistakes
Moreover, to know more about customer preferences, you can get in touch with your customers and ask them directly or get information through an interactive survey. Make sure to ask the "Why?" questions about their preferences, what aspects they find appealing, and more. Once you take the opinions of several people, you will find your mind running with innovative ideas that you know would appeal to your target audience. You can offer them attractive incentives such as discount vouchers, and more for taking the important time out of their schedule and helping you with your Marketing Plan.
• Emphasize Social Media Marketing
Social Media is one of the most powerful forces around the world with more than 3.6 billion users globally.
Social Media Marketing is one of the major aspects of
Digital Marketing. According to research, 43.6% of businesses agree that
social media marketing turned out to be effective for their business. You need to put special emphasis on devising interactive, entertaining, and informative social media posts regularly to reach a wider audience and gain valuable leads and customers.
• Set Monitoring Tools
How would you know that your Digital Marketing plan has worked? Your work doesn’t stop after creating and implementing a Digital Marketing Strategy. You need to monitor the results coming off from when you put your plan into action. This is one of the most important steps of your marketing strategy: monitoring the results.
For analyzing your business’ performance, you need to set-up monitoring tools that will monitor aspects such as time spent by a person on your website, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. Some of the most effective monitoring tools are Google analytics, Woopra, Fox Metrics, Go Squared, and Matomo.
Don't skip this step as this is where you would whether your marketing strategy was right or not. Make sure that you have a working data visualization system at all times to monitor your business.
Conclusion
Nothing is complicated if done concerning a plan. Having a
Digital Marketing Strategy would provide stability and strength to your marketing procedure. You cannot leave anything to chance. Follow the above steps to form a robust
Digital Marketing Plan to boost your digital presence and gain leads and new customers. Remember, “A goal without a plan is just a wish. Nothing more." Put to use the above point to create an effective marketing plan and simplify the process. If you have any valuable suggestions to add, comment down below.