7 Steps to Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy for 2022
Digital is becoming more and more intertwined into who a company is, what it does, and how it grows. As a result, its marketing strategy becomes more entwined with its digital transformation strategy. Even in these digital times, it would be a mistake not to plan for digital as a different thing.
While every marketing has a digital component, digital marketing involves much more than what is seen in traditional marketing. As a result, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide on developing a successful digital marketing strategy in 2020. We’ll go through what digital marketing is, the many types of digital marketing, and how to get started.
What is the definition of a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy describes how a corporation might use digital channels, platforms, and ideas to reach its commercial goals. It establishes defined objectives, ranks audiences, recognizes customer wants and habits, and specifies channel and platform requirements. Said, it lays out how you’ll plan and leverage digital to be constantly relevant.
Not only does digital marketing intersect with branding and CRM, but it also intersects with user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), and customer care:
- The Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) integrate the brand into our product experience.
- The content strategy encompasses all content that can be used as growth levers, not just typical marketing assets.
- New services, products, and experiences are being created due to digital innovation — things that are genuinely worth promoting.
How to Develop a Successful Digital Marketing Plan
We’ve defined the seven phases needed to develop a modern digital marketing strategy based on our work with customers across industries and markets.
1. Assess the Potential
The status quo has shifted, and digital is now required to be current, competitive, and appealing to customers. Which channels do your customers use to communicate with you? What are your competitors doing to be digitally transformative? How well-known is your company, and how many inbound leads have resulted in sales? You’re probably already behind if you don’t know.
2. Define Digital Marketing’s Role
What role does digital marketing play in the business?
This should not be a laundry list of marketing goals but rather a clear vision and set of strategic choices that demonstrate what digital marketing can and should do for the company.
Make sure you understand the connections between digital marketing and other parts of your ecosystem, such as brand, data, marketing, content, CX, UX, CRM, support/customer service, product innovation, and media. You can immediately sharpen your focus by simply writing down what is at stake and available options. You may then construct key performance indicators (KPIs) based on this assessment to effectively communicate to your executive team how digital is affecting the business.
3. Recognize your target demographics
Create detailed digital profiles of customers (what they desire, how they behave, how to engage with them, and who else they interact with), and map the customer journey in detail, identifying value exchanges along the way. Traditional segmentation is commonly used to start these profiles, but you’ll need to take a step further to recognize behaviors, interactions, and content, as well as functionality and experience requirements.
Many clients’ digital profiles aren’t developed on who their customers are, especially in B2B, but rather around the problems the target audience seeks to address. Roles vs. objectives. Doing so early on keeps you aware of customer requirements and tailors your goals to fulfill them.
4. Use a Multi-Channel Strategy
Utilize and activate important channels such as search, web, social, and email to create a modern channel strategy. Specific platforms and touchpoints may necessitate their own ‘channel charters,’ which define how to use them for the brand best and the business and the resources required.
Consider social media as a sales channel rather than merely a media or customer service outlet. How might social media help you achieve your company goals?
Make your search explicit. Can organic or paid search engine optimization (SEO) assist in developing brand trust, increase web traffic, or keep competitors at bay?
Consider the web in a new light. Is your website well-suited to attracting, acquiring, and converting leads?
Do you use email or marketing automation solutions to effectively nurture former, current, or potential clients?
5. Determine the resources required
Use all the data in the graph above to figure out what you’ll need to put this strategy into action, including workforce, money, and your marketing technology system (platforms, APIs, services, and data integration points). “Technology is the interface of marketing,” as Spotify’s Mayur Gupta put it, and “the pipelines bringing the many elements together.”
Building standards and playbooks for people (roles, responsibilities, and skills), processes, and tools. Many businesses overlook governance, even though it is critical for employees to understand their roles and contribute to the program’s success. Furthermore, if you’re a large or complex company, you’ll need to define “market types” to enable local leaders to recognize where they are and what they need to do to go in a new direction.
6. Create an Execution Roadmap
Organize and prioritize activities into a roadmap that takes you from strategy to implementation, even if it’s spread out across six, twelve, or twenty-four months. Don’t be overly cautious or slow, and don’t wait for annual planning cycles; be prepared and agile with multiple eventualities in mind. While organizational digital change may take time, marketing should be the most elegant driver, ready to act on opportunities as they arise.
7. Ensure that your digital transformation strategy is well-supported.
Determine how digital marketing can serve as a significant lever in this new digital transformation era, going beyond just executing its job well. It could be through creative storytelling, digital service innovation, or allowing consumer feedback to affect media spend, identify engagement opportunities, and find new audiences. As your culture gets more comfortable and encouraged by digital transformation prospects, embracing digital in your marketing function can serve as a catalyst internally.
Last Thoughts
By incorporating all seven of these elements into a digital marketing strategy, your digital team—and the executive suite—will have a clear understanding of how digital can impact your business, plans for how to do so most effectively, and appropriate measures in place to benchmark and assess the effectiveness of your efforts.
Suppose digital is a priority in your business, as it should be. In that case, you’ll probably need some strategy and execution specialists to help you develop your digital strategy, uncover digital disruption possibilities, and drive digital transformation.