A
digital marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that outlines for brands what
they want to accomplish and how to reach their goals. It provides brands with
guidance as they deploy their efforts, helping to keep everything moving
efficiently and effectively. Despite the importance of a digital marketing strategy, an
estimated 65 percent of marketers say that they do not have one integrated into
their broader marketing platform, and a full 47 percent say that they have no
digital marketing strategy at all, even though they do try to employ digital
marketing tactics. This places these organizations at an incredible
disadvantage as they try to gain a foothold within the digital ecosystem.
Creating a digital marketing
strategy
Steve Trahanas says effective online marketing
strategies should provide an outline of what the brand hopes to accomplish and
how they are going to go about doing it. It should provide information about
every step of the journey, helping brands to visualize their end results. The
strategy can be adjusted as the organization progresses and they are better
able to identify the techniques that work and those that are less efficient.
1. Outline your goals and
expectations. To begin, brands should develop a list of goals that they want to see
reached through their digital marketing strategy. These goals should be
concrete and quantifiable. For example, organizations might mention a percent
increase in their share of voice, a particular jump in year over year
performance, or a certain revenue number that they would like to hit.
2. Outline your buyer
personas and their buyer journeys. Once the brand understands precisely what they hope
to accomplish with their marketing efforts, the next step is to identify
exactly who they are trying to reach with their messages. With an SEO strategy,
the importance of a target audience is far higher than with other, more
traditional marketing practices. Rather than broadcasting information to
particular demographics, brands instead must understand exactly what their
targeted customers want to read, and thus be able to entice them to explore
their website and their brand.
3. Look at your existing
content.
Now is the time when you need to look at your existing content. Steve Trahanas says perform a basic
audit to uncover the content that you already have and line it up to the buyer
journey for your different ideal customer personas. This will help you start to
understand how your content fits with the model, where your strengths lie and
where you have room for improvement in your digital marketing strategy.
4. Select the keywords for
your material. Keyword research will be the next important step in your SEO strategy. It
is important to differentiate keyword research from the old, defunct methods of
SEO and keyword stuffing. Keyword research revolves around using insights into
search patterns to identify the topics that matter the most to your audience.
You want to look at the terms and the topics that have the highest search rates
so that you can create the content that is there to answer the needs and
questions of your audience. On BrightEdge, you can perform this research using
the Data Cube. You can then even take your research a step further by using the
Recommendations engine to look at the top ten pages for a particular keyword to
gain insights into what helps these pages rank and where you can improve and
outrank them.
5. Create high-value
content, optimize it, and distribute. Armed with your keyword research, your buyer personas
and their journeys, and the insights into your most popular content, you now
need to create high-value content that will engage your customers. This content
should be driven by what you know about your target customers as well as your
defined goals. For example, share of voice or brand awareness goals might
include a greater interest in developing content for major publications or
attracting followers on social media. Goals focused on revenue will center
around creating material that guides people through the entire buyer’s journey
to conversion and making a purchase. This material will then need to be
optimized to help it stand out to the search engines and consumers.
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