By
Imran Hanif, CMgr, FCMI, FIML, MIPSA
The digital revolution is the transformation of business processes and activities by using digital technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, and internet of things. It enables businesses to improve their efficiency, productivity, innovation, and customer satisfaction. A digital marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will use digital channels and tools to reach and engage its target audience, achieve its marketing objectives, and measure its performance. A digital marketing strategy should include the following steps:
Define your goals and target market:
What are you trying to achieve with your digital marketing efforts? Who are your ideal customers and what are their needs, preferences, and behaviours?
A digital strategy is a plan that outlines how you will use digital technologies and channels to achieve your business objectives. It involves identifying your target market, understanding their needs and preferences, and creating a digital product or service that meets those needs and preferences. A digital strategy also includes defining your marketing tactics, measuring your performance, and optimizing your results. To define your digital strategy goals, you need to start with your overall business goals and align them with your online opportunities. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, you might want to use digital channels to reach new customers, generate leads, or upsell existing customers. Your digital strategy goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). To define your target market, you need to conduct market research and analysis to understand who your potential customers are, what problems they have that your product or service can solve, how they behave online, and what motivates them to buy from you. You can use various methods to segment your target market, such as demographics, psychographics, Geographic’s, or behavioural characteristics. You can also create buyer personas to represent your ideal customers and their needs and goals.
Cyber criminals are constantly evolving their methods and techniques to exploit vulnerabilities and evade detection. Some of the latest techniques used by cyber criminals include:
Conduct a digital audit:
How is your current digital presence performing? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are the opportunities and threats in the digital landscape?
A digital audit is a comprehensive analysis of your online presence, including your website, social media, SEO, content, and online reputation. A digital audit can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current digital strategy, as well as the opportunities and threats in your market. A digital audit can also help you set SMART goals and KPIs for your future digital strategy.
To conduct a digital audit, you need to follow these steps:
1. Define your objectives and target audience. What are you trying to achieve with your digital strategy? Who are you trying to reach and influence?
2. Assess your current digital assets and channels. What are the tools and platforms that you use to communicate with your audience? How well are they performing in terms of traffic, engagement, conversion, and retention?
3. Analyze your competitors and industry trends. Who are your main competitors and what are their digital strategies? What are the best practices and emerging trends in your industry or niche?
4. Identify gaps and opportunities. Where are the areas that you can improve or optimize your digital strategy? What are the new or untapped opportunities that you can leverage or explore?
5. Create an action plan and roadmap. Based on your findings, what are the specific actions that you need to take to improve your digital strategy? How will you prioritize, implement, and measure them?
Choose your digital channels and tactics:
Based on your goals and target market, what are the best digital platforms and methods to reach and communicate with them? For example, you may use social media, email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, etc. One of the key steps in creating a digital strategy is to select the most appropriate digital channels and tactics for your goals and target audience. There are many factors to consider when making this decision, such as:
– The type and size of your business
– The budget and resources available
– The level of competition and market saturation
– The preferences and behaviours of your potential customers
– The objectives and metrics you want to achieve
Some of the common digital channels and tactics include:
– Website: Your website is the hub of your online presence and the main source of information and conversion for your visitors. It should be user-friendly, responsive, fast, secure, and optimized for search engines and conversions.
– Social media: Social media platforms allow you to connect with your audience, build relationships, increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads. You should choose the platforms that best suit your industry, audience, and content strategy.
– Email marketing: Email marketing is one of the most effective and cost-efficient digital tactics to communicate with your subscribers, nurture leads, increase loyalty, and boost sales. You should segment your email list, craft engaging subject lines and content, and optimize your email frequency and timing.
– Content marketing: Content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and drive profitable customer action. You should produce content that matches your audience’s needs, interests, and stage in the buyer’s journey.
– Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines for relevant keywords and phrases. You should conduct keyword research, optimize your site structure, content, and technical aspects, and build quality backlinks.
– Search engine marketing (SEM): SEM is the use of paid advertising on search engines to drive traffic to your website. You should set up a Google Ads account, create campaigns and ad groups, choose keywords and bidding strategies, write compelling ad copy, and track your performance.
– Display advertising: Display advertising is the use of visual ads on websites, apps, or social media platforms to reach your target audience. You should design attractive and relevant ads, choose the right ad formats and sizes, select the best placements and networks, and measure your results.
– Video marketing: Video marketing is the use of video content to promote your brand, products, or services. You should create videos that are informative, entertaining, or emotional, optimize them for different platforms and devices, add captions and calls to action, and analyse your views and engagement.
– Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing is the collaboration with influential people who have a large and loyal following on social media or other platforms to endorse or recommend your brand, products, or services. You should identify the right influencers for your niche, goals, and budget, establish a clear agreement and expectations, provide creative freedom and support, and monitor your campaign’s impact.
To choose the best digital channels and tactics for your digital strategy, you should:
– Define your SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals
– Research your target market and competitors
– Evaluate your current digital performance
– Select the channels and tactics that align with your goals, audience, budget, resources
– Plan your implementation and budget allocation
– Test, measure, and optimize your digital activities
Create and distribute your content:
What type of content will you create and share with your audience? How will you align your content with your brand identity and value proposition? How will you optimize your content for different channels and devices?
Creating and distributing content for digital strategy is a complex and challenging task that requires careful planning and execution. Some of the key aspects to look for while creating and distributing content are:
– The target audience: Who are you trying to reach with your content? What are their needs, preferences, pain points, and goals? How can you tailor your content to address them?
– The content goals: What are you trying to achieve with your content? What are the desired outcomes and metrics that you want to measure? How can you align your content with your overall business objectives and brand values?
– The content format: What type of content are you creating? Is it a blog post, a video, a podcast, an infographic, or something else? How can you optimize your content for the chosen format and platform?
– The content quality: How can you ensure that your content is relevant, engaging, informative, and credible? How can you use data, research, storytelling, visuals, and other elements to enhance your content quality?
– The content distribution: How can you reach your target audience with your content? What channels and platforms are you using to distribute your content? How can you leverage SEO, social media, email marketing, influencer marketing, and other strategies to amplify your content reach and impact?
Monitor and evaluate your results:
How will you track and measure your digital marketing performance? What metrics and tools will you use to assess your progress and impact? How will you adjust your strategy based on your findings and feedback?
When monitoring and evaluating results for digital strategy, it is important to have clear objectives, target segments, and key performance indicators (KPIs). These elements help to measure the impact and effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns, as well as identify the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy. Some of the common KPIs for digital marketing are cost per acquisition (CPA), customer lifetime value (CLV), conversion rate, and return on investment (ROI). Additionally, it is advisable to use digital marketing tools that can provide data and insights on the online performance of the campaigns, such as web analytics, social media analytics, email marketing software, etc. By analysing the data and insights, one can take actionable steps to improve the digital strategy and achieve the desired goals.
Conclusion
“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy”- (Jeff Bezos)
