Digital marketing is the brand promotion to connect with potential customers using the internet or other forms of digital communication.
As widely misunderstood, this not only includes emails, social media, and web-based marketing. It is also called online marketing.
In simpler terms, if a marketing campaign involves any form of digital communication, it is categorized as digital marketing.
A digital marketing plan helps a brand in determining effective marketing strategies before putting them into action.
Without a well-defined digital marketing plan, it is likely that you will be wasting your time and money.
Your digital marketing plan should include business and marketing goals, strategies that you are planning to use in order to achieve those goals & the timeline.
Why is a digital marketing strategy important?
Gives direction: Without a digital marketing strategy, brands lack clear strategic goals, which makes it difficult to allocate resources to each activity. This also makes it difficult to measure the analytics and reach the targets.
Understand better market share: Without a clear strategy, it is easy to underestimate the demands for digital services. It is likely that you won’t fully understand the dynamics of the online market space and its related factors like customer behavior, competitors, and profiles.
Effective Value Proposition: Online market space is very competitive, and to secure you need to be able to differentiate your brand and stand tall in the crowd. Only a well-thought digital marketing strategy can help you with this.
Understand your customers: Winning in the digital marketplace requires more than just analytics. A brand needs to utilize other tools to identify and address its weak points.
Disintegration: Marketing that is accomplished, where the digital marketer sits in the IT department, is a disaster waiting to happen. Digital marketing is most productive when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
How to create a social media strategy?
Objective: Clear, measurable, and realistic digital marketing plans can help you to define exactly what the brand wants to achieve.
These goals should be supported with concrete bases, by including specific numbers and setting a time frame that will serve as a benchmark for the progress.
Audience: For a digital campaign to be successful, the brand needs to be clear with whom they are targeting.
Segment your audience and build buyer personas that can provide you with insights about which marketing type will be effective. The goal of creating a persona is to understand the mindset of the target audience.
Budgeting: Noone will spare an unlimited amount for any digital marketing. Thus calculating a budget is very crucial.
The budget will define how much you have available to spend on digital marketing and thus allocate them towards different goals and channels.
Channels: Before executing the digital marketing strategy, you need to define the primary digital marketing channels you are looking forward to using.
The choice of the channel will be formed by taking into account the audience, goals, and budget. When defining your digital channels, consider where your audience spends most of their time. Focus on how you can deliver value to the target audience within the channels they favor most.
Marketing Calendar: A marketing content calendar allows you to map out the exact implementation of your marketing campaign & initiatives.
It also creates accountability to ensure that the team meets deadlines and the execution is carried out effectively. A calendar also ensures that consistency is maintained for each audience segment.
Measure the results: The last but most important step is to measure the result through the definition of metrics and KPIs.
You should compare the outcomes of the marketing efforts with the original goals. Make sure to measure each channel so that you can identify what’s working positively for the brand and what’s not.
The problem with most digital marketing efforts is that they miss out on one or more of the above-mentioned key factors.
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Leaving out any of the factors can result in an unclear focus or disengaged audience or the message that just doesn’t quite connect, and thus unmet goals.