Key Steps to Creating a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

These days every company or brand—regardless of size—should have a carefully defined digital marketing strategy. A solid strategy will not only help you structure and measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts, but it will also establish a set of vital tools to help you adapt to changing markets, grow your business, and remain competitive.

From branding and attracting the right customers, to nurturing them down the path (funnel) of conversion, digital channels and campaigns dominate today’s marketing landscape. Learning how to leverage the spectrum of digital marketing components and data available can be a daunting and humbling experience.  Helping you make sense of it all—that’s what we do.

Here are some key steps to getting started:

Develop an initial strategy based on specific goals and KPIs

‍What do you hope to achieve through digital marketing?  A few common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are: lead generation, increased website traffic and click-through rates, online conversions/sales, customer acquisition costs, and increased brand awareness. Once your goals are set, it’s time to develop a strategy to achieve them.

Identify your audience and where to reach them

‍Who are your ideal prospects or customers? Brainstorm and research the types of consumers most likely to buy your product or service. Make a list of their demographic characteristics—age, education, occupation, marital status, likely hobbies (social sites), where they live, and what pain points you can help them resolve. Use this data to create a persona—an imaginary person to whom you’ll tailor your messaging. 

Implement initial awareness and conversion campaigns

‍Start with short posts on social media, paid media, blog posts, and/or automated email campaigns that drive prospects to a landing page with more details or an incentive to take action. Create relevant content that engages and educates people about your products/services and include links to your website. Include quality photos, illustrations, and/or infographics to support your messaging and conversion point.

Optimize and test messaging and creative to improve conversions

‍Conduct keyword research using Google’s Keyword Planner, Hubspot’s keywords tool, or other SEO aids to identify the words and phrases that will drive the most converting traffic to your site. Build keywords into your headlines and subheads. Develop A/B testing plans to see how changing headlines, messages and layouts affect your results.

Nurture and remarket to non-converters

‍It can take 7 or more engagements or impressions to turn a lead into a sale or subscriber. That’s why it’s important to create content that can be repurposed for multiple channels blogs, emails, case studies, social posts, quizzes. Be persistent and remarket to non converters through a mix of channels, make changes to your offer, and see what resonates with different audiences.

Integrate with traditional marketing

While digital marketing has largely supplanted traditional advertising and marketing tools, like print ads, direct mail, collateral brochures, radio and TV ads, and public relations, if you’ve gotten good results from any of these traditional marketing avenues in the past, consider using these as part of an integrated media campaign to cast a wider net.

Track and analyze all results

‍The beauty of digital marketing is its ability to track and gather data. Setup your tracking and test for accuracy (no one wants to sort through bad data), then measure your results on the fly. Some outcomes can come from a few days of data, but others may take months. Be sure you’re viewing trends and improvements, rather than making changes on unproven data.

You’re not alone

‍Now that you have the steps to build your digital marketing strategy, it may feel a bit challenging. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Even companies that have been creating and executing digital marketing campaigns for years continually fine tune their strategies to get better results. We’ve consolidated the following industry statistics that show a demand for more effective digital marketing.

• Only 61% of marketers believe their marketing strategy is effective. Even though many marketers doubt their strategies, they’re still pouring massive spend into digital advertising (Source: HubSpot)
• 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their top marketing challenge. Despite allocating large portions of their budgets to digital ads, many digital marketers are unable to fully gauge their results (Source: HubSpot)
• 80% of marketers report their lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective. Lead generation is another challenge for digital marketers—especially when they fail to track and optimize every phase of the customer journey (Source: BrightTALK)
• 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Driving leads is only half the battle. In many cases, leads can fall through if sales agents aren’t fully equipped to handle them (Source: Econsultancy)
• 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation. The modern customer experience is fragmented across numerous channels, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of the customer journey. With higher quality, more actionable data that ties the customer journey together, marketers can make smarter optimizations (Source: BrightTALK)

Digital Marketing Campaigns Can Yield Great Results

‍Integrated Digital marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts. But at some point, you’ve  just got to jump in and get started—one step at a time. When your creative messaging and digital strategy are working together—based on solid data— the results can be very exciting and rewarding.  Here’s just one example.

Case Study: Gateway Genomics and SneakPeek

SneakPeek is an early gender DNA test from Gateway Genomics that predicts the baby’s gender at 9 weeks with 99.6% accuracy. Expectant moms can take the test at home and send in for test results within 72 hours. The product is a category disruptor to the standard sonogram at 20 weeks or expensive blood tests.

ParkerWhite worked with the team at SneakPeek to develop a lead generation strategy and digital marketing campaign to attract new customers and build brand awareness. We made adjustments to continually optimize the customer journey which helped grow sales and traffic by more than100% year over year. In just 2 years, we helped grow SneakPeek sales by 291%. See more details here: SneakPeek case study.

Let’s talk about your digital marketing challengesReady to boost the results of your marketing efforts? Learn more about how ParkerWhite can build your digital marketing strategy and to grow your bottom line? Let’s talk.

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