6 Keys To Planning A Digital Marketing Strategy

If you’re building out a digital marketing strategy it means you understand that it takes a lot to put together a successful campaigns and therefore It’s really important that you have a cohesive strategy and ensure that you have included the core elements.

We’ve broken these elements down into 6 key stages you need to work through if you want to cover your strategy thoroughly. Alternatively, download our eBook and get all this valuable information to keep!

Key 1 - Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are the most critical element of your digital marketing strategy.  They’re defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based upon real data about their demographics and online behaviours as well as some educated speculation about their motivations and concerns. Whilst these are the most crucial element, quite often, we see companies putting together marketing plans without thought as to who they’re actually marketing to.

It’s really important to understand your buyer persona, what their background is, what their functions are within their organisation and what pains, problems, goals and challenges are. Then think through how your products or services help meet your personas needs.  Think about what the questions that they’re asking. 

Key 2 - Driving Traffic

Once you know who it is that you want to attract to your website, you’ll now need a strategy of how you’re going to bring people in. The best long term source of traffic is from organic search search and therefore your website should be optimised using all the SEO best practices. But attracting traffic via the search engines, isn’t just about the technical optimisation, more and more search engines are placing priority to websites that contain quality content that is going to be of value to the visitor.  Over time, if you follow your digital marketing strategy you’ll be building up a huge amount of content that will make your website more discoverable through search engines

For an extra boost, you have paid traffic.  Such as Google AdWords and social media advertising.  Effectively you’re paying to get people on your website.  The advantage to this is that you can drive very targeted traffic to your website very quickly, within minutes of you setting up your ads.

Key 3 - Converting Traffic Into Leads

Now that we are attracting your buyer personas to your website, the next stage is to convert them into leads and this is done by using conversion paths.  Quite often we talk to business owners that think that their problem is mainly around traffic generation, or they may say something along the lines of ‘We tried PPC once, but it doesn’t work for us’ - Generally that’s wrong.  The issue here is that there is no conversion path on their website.

When someone is on your website, they’re researching.  This gives you an opportunity to present that person with a premium content offer.  A piece of content that is so valuable that the person is willing to give you some details in order to obtain it.  I’m sure that you’ve probably entered your details into a website in order to download an eBook or watch a webinar and this is exactly how it works.

You read a blog or an article, then you’re presented with the next step which is to offer a premium piece of content through a call to action. Click on this and go to a landing page where you fill out a form and become a lead.

Key 4 - Lead Nurturing

The majority of people visiting your website are not ready to buy. If you’ve captured their details using your premium awareness or consideration content offers, you don’t want your sales team be spending lots of time on them right now, as they’re not sales ready. Therefore, the marketing team can nurture them and encourage them to consume more of your content to lead them all the through to the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, scoring them along the way based upon their actions and behaviours.

And this should be automated, with your marketing system sending out the right emails to the right people at the right time without needing someone to remember to press the send button.  

Once your prospect has scored enough points to warrant them being passed to sales, your sales team should reach out and close the deal.

Key 5 - Delighting your customers

Once you’ve made the sale, don’t just forget about your customers. Ask yourself, how can you impress them so that they continue to keep coming back to you, buying more frequently and increasing in value each time?  How can you make sure that their on-boarding process is top class and that they want to promote you and refer people to you. Make sure that you get their feedback so you know what they think about the experience they’ve had with your company and continue to provide them with useful post sale information.

Key 6 - Scaling your growth

Now that you’ve put in place your lead generating and nurturing system, the next stage is to scale it for growth. Systemise the process so that they are repeatable and executable by anyone in the organisation.  Analyse the results so that you can see where the roadblocks are and what you can improve to get higher quality and quantities of leads. Keep active on social media and continue to create content that answers your prospects questions.

A good digital marketing strategy is never truly complete. Always be reviewing the content you offer and the performance of your marketing metrics and you’ll be on your way to success!