Having an action plan is absolutely essential for any aspect of your business — and this is especially true for digital marketing. Without a comprehensive strategy, there’s no way to know whether a particular method is actually achieving a stated goal and if you are allocating your resources effectively.
By understanding what a digital marketing strategy is and how successful organizations develop them, you can avoid many of the common pitfalls and give yourself a clearer path to reaching your audience.
Elements of a successful digital marketing strategy
In the most basic terms, a digital marketing strategy is your overarching plan to use digital, or internet-based, methods to reach your target audience with effective messaging. Before deciding what individual tactics to use, it’s important to look at the big picture in order to know the right course of action for your brand.
This should always start with an in-depth look/audit of your business to answer specific questions about what your digital marketing strategy should look like. Your efforts should be built around these essential objectives:
- Knowing your brand — If you haven’t already done so, create or review your company’s mission and vision statements, brand guidelines, company culture, and overview of products and services. It’s important to have a clear picture of your company or organization’s identity and what it is offering before engaging in any large-scale marketing.
- Knowing your audience — This is the other side of the equation. Use your customer data and other market research to create audience profiles of the people you want to reach with your message. The better idea you can have of the types of content your target audience consumes and the forms of communication they respond to, the more successful your campaigns will be.
- Knowing your goals — The next step is starting to answer key questions like how big your budget can be, what outcomes would constitute a successful return on your investment and what types of digital marketing channels have worked for similar businesses.
Once you have the findings from the above efforts, your digital marketing strategy should take shape. You can determine the digital channels, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, to emphasize the types of messages that build a bridge between your brand and your target audience.
Create a digital marketing strategy with an experienced partner
Digital marketing is a fast-paced and complex arena, but you don’t have to go it alone. At Burg & Co., we pride ourselves not just on being experienced digital marketers, but also people who are dedicated to understanding the needs of our partners to build truly effective strategies.
Want to learn more about how we can help you? Contact us today and schedule a free consultation with our team.
