10 Digital Marketing Steps You Need To Take
Whether you are new to Digital Marketing or not I’m sure we can all agree, it can be extremely overwhelming.
Many business owners (believe it or not) still don’t fully understand or see the importance of Digital Marketing and all of its many facets. We hope this article helps by giving a better understanding and a high-level overview of how it works and why it is essential to incorporate into your business strategy.
There are many facets of Digital Marketing. Here, we will only touch on a broad picture of some of the most used critical pieces to a Digital Marketing Strategy. Some of you reading this may think this is self-explanatory.
Still, you would be surprised how many discovery calls we have been on where someone in the organization didn’t understand one of these terms or how they correlated with other functions in the Digital Marketing Strategy.
Here are ten essential pieces to a Digital Marketing Strategy - how it works and why each piece is important.
Step One: Properly Define Your Product or Service
This may be super obvious to some but, it's a very important piece that is often overlooked. You want to make sure that you are properly defining who you are and that it is consistent across all platforms. The LAST thing you want is for your website or social media visitors to be unclear about what you are offering, who you are, or what your product does.
Are you clearly explaining what makes you, your product, or service unique? We suggest taking the time to sit and write this down and then break it down into a few simple phrases.
Step Two: Have a Call to Action (CTA)
When thinking about building a Digital Marketing Strategy - what is your desired outcome? What are your goals for yourself, your company, your product, and your brand? Answering this question will help you develop a CTA for your content, ads, etc.
For example, do you want people to visit your website, book more appointments, come into your store, download an E-book, follow your page, etc.? There are so many Call to Action options so really sit down and think about your long term goals. If you have a marketing and sales team, this is an excellent time to collaborate.
Step Three: Know Your Target Audience
Who is your Target Audience? This is a vital piece of your Digital Marketing Strategy. What audience does your brand or solution serve best? You may have an idea in your head but, if you have more than one team member or employee, it is essential to have this clearly defined and written out so that everyone on the team understands who you are targeting.
Everything is centered around this piece. For example, if your target audience involves teachers, you have to consider when it comes to content where you are posting and at what time of day? Teachers have specific schedules and specific pain points that you will be speaking to.
However, like Mandy states in her article, How to Define Your Target Market, “Targeting a specific market does not mean that you are excluding people who do not fit your criteria.” In some cases, you may start with a defined target audience, and once your brand presence starts to broaden, you may learn that your solution appeals to a different or new demographic - and that is okay too. It is good to have an outline and evolve with your brand when necessary. We will touch more on that at a later step.
Step Four: Know Your Competition
Figuring out who your competitors are can help you to make your products, services, and marketing stand out. Doing your research on these competitors can help you understand what is working in your industry and what isn’t.
Steve Roemerman from Forbes, explains it well in his article, The Importance Of Competitive Intelligence And Analysis In 2020, “Competitive analysis should be used to create a competitive differentiation strategy and distinguish a company’s offering from others in the market.” This piece also comes in handy when doing SEO optimization, which we will get to next.
Step Five: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an important strategy for improving your site's rankings in search engine results. SEO affects how you show up when searched and where you show up.
Your SEO optimization can be the difference between you showing up on the first page of a web browser to the 7th page. I think we can all agree that being buried on the 7th page of a search browser will make you more difficult to find.
SEO research can be done by running your website and keywords through SEO tools such as Uber Suggest, Google Trends, Google Console, Google Analytics, SEM Rush, and many more. Once you identify your competitors, you can also do SEO research on their websites to determine what keywords and long-tail keyword phrases bring attention to their content.
Once you have done your SEO research and identified keywords that best connect with your product or service, you can then start a content strategy around these keywords to service your audience valuable content that they will find most helpful.
Step Six: Create Content
"Content marketing brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less."-The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation.
Creating content is your opportunity to speak to your audience through topics that appeal to your buyer persona! This includes creating written or visual content around those ideas and making that information accessible to your audience.
Examples of content include blogging, videos, or infographics. Don't forget that it is important to show up consistently when creating content and offer value to your audience through your choice of content.
Step Seven: Master Your Social Media
Did you know? 7 in 10 Americans use social media to connect with one another? (Source: Pew Research Center). If there are that many people on social media, that is where you need to show up.
Having social for your business or brand helps you attract customers, get customer feedback, and build customer loyalty, all while increasing your market reach. A few examples of popular social media platforms are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
If there is anything the pandemic has shown the business sector it’s the importance of flexibility and adaptability to change.
Step Eight: Run Digital Ads
Digital Ads allow you to get in front of the people who need your service or product when your organic reach has hit its limit. Optimizing your organic reach should always be at the top of the list of things to do. However, as we mentioned earlier, seven-in-ten Americans use social media. There is A LOT of competition.
When building your brand awareness, putting money behind your content can be super effective. However, this is definitely by trial and error. Ads are tricky, and running A/B testing to see what images, texts, or copy is working is super beneficial.
Step Nine: Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Did you know that the average email open rate is only 17.8%? While this may seem like a low number, 99% of consumers check their email every day, and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands. (Source: HubSpot)
With the advancements of Email Marketing platforms, you can now personalize messages to your email list by segments and more.
Email Marketing helps collect feedback, improves sales, opens communication with your audience, and generates more traffic to your website.
Step Ten: Analyze
It is important to analyze and track what is working and what isn't to assist you and your team with future planning. You do this by checking your website, google console, google analytics, social media, and often other management platforms you may be using will offer up additional metrics on your content performance.
We highly suggest saving and tracking these reports so that you can refer to them later! For example, if your campaigns are seasonal, you can refer to last year's reports to see what was working and what didn't.
We hope this was helpful for you and gave you a clearer idea of what steps you need to take to master your Digital Marketing. If you’re looking for more, download our free digital marketing guide here.
