The Ultimate Digital Marketing Strategy Guide For 2022!
Have You Recently Considered Implementing A Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Business?
A Digital Marketing Strategy has become increasingly important for businesses to thrive online in 2022. In this digital marketing strategy guide, we will break down all factors in a Digital Marketing Strategy. Why your business needs one, how to create one, and how to improve an existing strategy.
Picture This – You are running a successful business through your store, where you have a great client base of customers. Your product/service is fantastic and you know it! However, you have seen “Digital Marketing”, “eCommerce”, and other terms that you are unsure of a lot recently.
You know you need to create an online presence, you just don’t know where to start. If this sounds remotely similar to your situation, then you need to read on!
If you would like more in-depth information on a customised Digital Marketing Strategy for your business, contact Agile Digital Strategy today.
1. What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?
A Digital Marketing Strategy, in simple terms, is a plan.
No matter what action you perform in business, if you don’t plan correctly, you increase your chances of failure. You wouldn’t travel through a new city without using a map, so running a Digital Marketing Campaign without a Strategy should be no different.
A Digital Marketing Strategy should be composed like most other plans. Decide on a Goal, identify your Target Audience, create a Buyer Persona, identify your Marketing Channels, and get your Timeline right.
2. Why Do You Need A Digital Marketing Strategy in 2022?
Of businesses fail in their first 2 years.
Of businesses don’t make it to 15 years.
20% of businesses fail in the first 2 years, while 75% of businesses fail within 15 years, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
From the start, new businesses have their odds stacked against them. There are several factors needed to successfully start, maintain, and scale your business. One of the biggest reasons for failure is poor planning. This also applies to existing businesses that are moving online.
If your business has an online presence in any shape or form, you need to incorporate a Digital Marketing Strategy. If your business is moving online, you definitely need to incorporate a Digital Marketing Strategy.
3. Who Needs A Digital Marketing Strategy?
Anyone who is serious about running a successful business needs a Digital Marketing Strategy.
We often get asked by clients if they need a Digital Marketing Strategy. It is understandable to be unsure and to feel like you can survive without one. However, no matter what size of business you own, everybody wants to stay ahead of the competition and keep scaling upwards.
Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy allows you to have a plan in place and ensures you know what the next steps are in your campaign. It can help you to save time by focusing on the correct marketing channels. It also helps to save money as you won’t waste resources on an audience that isn’t applicable to your business.
Any business with an already online presence and any business looking to create an online presence requires a Digital Marketing Strategy.
4. How To Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
Setting Goals
The first step to formulating a Digital Marketing Strategy is to identify your goals and objectives. Whether it is a general Digital Marketing Strategy or one based on a new product launch, setting your goals and objectives are key.
Is your goal to achieve more sales? To enter a new region? To gain new traffic to your website? Simply setting an overall goal will not work. It needs to be realistic and specific. Simply setting a goal of more sales isn’t enough. But setting a goal of 25% more sales in 6 months is attainable.
These goals need to be tied back to your overall business objectives. This will allow you to measure the success of your strategy against your overall goals.
Target Audience
The second step in your Digital Marketing Strategy should be identifying your target audience.
By defining your target audience, you can identify their buying habits, what channels they use, their pain points, etc. This allows you to save time and resources in the long term as it ensures you aren’t focusing on areas where you will deplete your budget.
Buyer Persona
What is a Buyer Persona? A Buyer Persona is a fictional representation of your perfect customer. This is based on research and data from your own customer base.
To create a buyer persona you will need to define several demographics, including age, sex, buying patterns, preferred social channels, pain points, motivations, and goals. The more detailed, the better.
By creating a buyer persona, you can help to structure your campaign by aligning several of your methods of communication within your campaign. This helps to attract the perfect customer base and allows for easier acquiring of leads/sales.
Marketing Channels
The main body of your Digital Marketing Strategy will consist of your Marketing Channels. This will consist of what areas you are going to use in your campaign. It will all tie back into your previous research and goals.
Some examples of marketing channels are SEO, PPC, Paid Social, Organic Social, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, among many others. These channels should be based on the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is an upside-down triangle. The top layer is awareness, the middle is consideration, and the bottom is conversion.
There is a lot more to the marketing funnel but a quick summary on it is; depending on the price of your product, customers may need to be warmed up before they purchase. For a product that is €25 or less, it can be perceived as an impulse buy and a customer may purchase it when they see it first. However the larger the price, the more thought the customer needs before they purchase.
For example, if you are a manufacturing business, selling industrial machines worth €30,000, your target will need to be warmed up immensely before they make a purchase decision. They start in the awareness stage, where they see/hear about your product for the first time. They will then need to see it several times over a couple of months.
This is why identifying the perfect marketing channels to focus on is crucial in turning a customer considering into a conversion.
Timeline
The timeline is the crucial final step in your Digital Marketing Strategy.
This will define how long you are using certain marketing channels and ensure that patience is kept as you will identify that results will not happen overnight. Marketing campaigns are long-term projects and need to be valued as such. By creating a long-term strategy, you will set your business up for a considerably better chance of success than looking for short-term wins.
5. How To Improve An Existing Digital Marketing Strategy?
Have you created a Digital Marketing Strategy and it’s not getting you the results you wanted?
Fear not, this isn’t the end of the World! Anyone involved in any form of business knows that success comes after failure. In our eyes, there is no such thing as a failed Digital Marketing Strategy. There is a chance to learn and use it as a catapult for an even better Digital Marketing Strategy in the future.
The first thing you need to do is to collect every piece of data you can from your current strategy. Then identify why you believe it failed. Go back through our steps above and see if any section was forgotten about or wasn’t as much detail as it should have been.
You can then evaluate whether replacing certain sections can improve your current strategy, or whether you need to start fresh.
6. Can I Create A Digital Marketing Strategy Myself?
As you have learned, creating the perfect Digital Marketing Strategy can be extensively time consuming. It can also seem burdensome, if you aren’t used to the concept of Digital Marketing, in general.
This can be especially true if you are a small business owner, or if you have had to make some of your employees redundant during Covid-19.
While it is definitely possible to create a good Digital Marketing Strategy for your business by using this Digital Marketing Strategy Guide, we have found that many clients will start their strategy and spend countless hours on it before they turn for help.
Agile Digital Strategy will use our team of experts to create the perfect, customised Digital Marketing Strategy for your business. We have gained a lot of experience from every sector and industry to allow us to provide you with the best strategy that aligns with your goals.
7. Digital Marketing Strategy Agency
Here at Agile Digital Strategy, we pride ourselves on our experience within all avenues of Digital Marketing. Collectively, our team has over 50 years of experience in digital marketing, working with many top brands in every industry.
This has given us the tools to perfect our clients Digital Marketing Strategies and to help grow their business. One of our most recent clients used their Digital Marketing Strategy created by Agile Digital Strategy to successfully enter the US market.
We also offer to implement any areas in your Digital Marketing Strategy. We offer individual services as well as packages.
If you want to create a Digital Marketing Strategy that will help you gain long-term success, get in touch with us today to discuss your options.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are a small business looking to get online, or a large business looking to scale up. Whether you are a business selling clothes through your eCommerce store, or a business selling large manufacturing machines. If you are a business that is serious about your growth and success, you need to incorporate a Digital Marketing Strategy.
Building your long-term success online has never been more important, than in 2022.
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