The digital world is constantly changing. In order to stay relevant and competitive, companies need a digital strategy that helps them adapt to these changes. The key to a successful digital strategy is to understand the current state of your company, identify your goals and challenges, and create a plan for moving forward. This article will walk you through each step in the process.
The key differences between digital and traditional marketing
Start With Your Organisation’s Mission
We recommend starting with the organisation’s mission, vision and values. Understanding where you’re going and how you plan to get there. A mission statement defines the purpose of an organisation whilst a vision statement describes its desired future state. Focus on the values that guide your organisation. This will help you understand what your organisation stands for and why it does what it does.
Think About Your Customers Needs And What They Value
The first step to creating a digital strategy is to understand your customers. What do they value? What are their needs? How do they behave and interact with your business?
Understanding what your customers want from you will help you create the right content at the right time for them. It’s also important that you understand what they are willing to pay so that you can price your products or services appropriately.
Your customer’s values and needs will help you determine how to best communicate with them. For example, if your customers value convenience and price then your digital strategy should focus on making it easy for them to find what they are looking for and purchase it quickly. The same goes for your customers’ wants. If they want high quality from their purchases, then your digital strategy should focus on providing them with features that display quality.
Understand Your Present Situation
To start, you must understand your present situation. This means understanding your current digital presence and the strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy.
You should also be aware of what your competitors are doing in terms of their digital strategies, and how they are using technology to serve their customers better than you can. Additionally, it’s important that you understand the habits of your customers as they use technology to interact with brands (where do they live on social media? What apps do they use most often?). Once you’ve gathered all this information, it’s time to come up with an actionable plan.
In order to do that, you need to think about what your goals are and how technology can help you achieve them. For example, if your goal is to improve customer retention and loyalty, you should focus on creating the best possible user experience. That means making sure your website is easy to use and responsive across all devices. Also, providing clear information about what customers can expect from you and providing excellent customer service via live chat or phone calls.
If your goal is to increase sales, you should focus on improving the overall user experience of your website. You can do this by optimising your landing pages for conversions and making sure that all traffic is directed to these pages. Also, you should start thinking about how to use customer data effectively in order to make better decisions when planning out new products or services.
If your goal is to increase brand awareness and reputation, you should focus on improving the quality of the content that you publish online. You can do this by creating interesting blog posts or videos that will be shared on social media and attract links from other sites. Also, you should start thinking about how to use social media effectively in order to reach out to new audiences and get them interested in what you have to offer.
Understand Your Target Market, Who Are They?
Finding your target market is crucial to your digital marketing strategy’s success. Understanding who your target market is will help you to create a content strategy that appeals to them. Your audience may be made up of people from different generations, genders, cultures and so on, all with different needs and interests.
As such, it’s important for you to identify the core characteristics of your audience. For example, if your business sells fire protection products then your target market could be hospitals, petrol stations, schools etc. This will help you get a better idea of what your customers need and want.
You can then use this information when creating content that’s relevant to them. For example, if your target market is schools then you might create educational videos about fire safety or post content on social media that provides helpful tips for keeping their students safe.
Understanding Your Audience Further
As well as understanding who your target market is, it’s also important to know how many people make up this group. There are a few different ways you can go about finding this information.
One way is by using Google’s Keyword Planner, which gives you an estimate of how many people search for certain keywords each month. This will help you get an idea of how many potential customers there are for the products or services that your business offers. Another way is by using Facebook’s Audience Insights, which will show you the demographics of your target audience.
Once you have a firm grasp on what your audience looks like, it’s time to start thinking about how best to reach them. The first step is understanding where they spend their time online. Are they active on social media? Do they read blogs? What sites do they visit most often? If you’re not sure, this is where Google Analytics can be an invaluable tool.
Develop The Goals Of Your Digital Strategy
Develop the goals of your digital strategy by first identifying your business goals and then mapping out how you can use digital marketing to achieve them. This will help you create a digital strategy that aligns with your overall business goals. You can then use this to create your own digital marketing plan.
You may want to consider the following:
What is your main goal? For example, do you want more traffic or leads? Or maybe you want to increase sales.
Identify what success looks like for these goals. For example, if you are looking for increased traffic, how many new visitors will this number represent? Is it 500 per month or 50,000 per year?
Set a timeline for each goal so that you can track progress and make necessary adjustments when needed.
Before you begin crafting your digital strategy, make sure you’ve defined the goals for it. While this may sound counterintuitive, it’s actually important to do so before getting into the minutiae of planning. The reason is simple, if your goal is to “increase engagement across social media platforms” then what’s the target figure you are striving to achieve? Can you quantify the timeframe?
If your goal is to “increase sales by 20% in 12 months”, then what are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will track over that period of time? How will you measure them? What tools will be used to gather and evaluate the data?
You need to know this information before you begin crafting your strategy, otherwise, it’s impossible to set realistic targets. Once you have a clear idea of what success looks like, it’s time to move on to the next step, defining your audience. It’s important to know who your target market is so that you can tailor your content accordingly and make sure that it appeals to them.
Understand The Context For Success In Your Market Ecosystem
Before you can create a strategy, you need to understand the context for success in your market ecosystem. To do this, look at what makes your competitors successful and how they are different from you. What are their strengths? How do they differ from each other? What are the weaknesses of your business that could be improved upon?
Once you have a good sense of what’s working and what isn’t in your market, it will be much easier to create a strategy that will help you stand out. To do this, think about how your products or services are different from everyone else’s in the industry and how they can improve people’s lives.
Once you’ve identified these things, try to get a sense of how they fit into the landscape at large. Are there any trends or changes in technology that would affect how people use products like yours? If so, what do these changes mean for you as an entrepreneur and what should your company do about them?
Create A Plan For Your Digital Strategy
The first step in creating your digital strategy is to create a plan for it. After all, you can’t set out to accomplish anything without knowing how you’re going to do so.
Your plan should include:
A business plan: You need a comprehensive business plan that outlines your goals and objectives, as well as how you will achieve them (e.g. with which technologies).
A roadmap for achieving those goals and objectives, broken down into short, medium and long-term milestones. This allows you to measure progress along the way toward achieving your goal.
A budget or other financial guidelines that help keep track of expenses incurred while creating your digital strategy and help you make the right financial decisions at each step in the process.
A project plan, if you’re working with a team of developers, designers and other consultants. This will help keep everyone on track and in sync with one another.
A timeline for when you’ll start and finish each step in your project. This helps keep everyone on track and gives you a sense of how long the process will take.
A clear statement of what your goals are, how they relate to one another and what success will look like. This will help you stay focused on what’s most important, especially when things get hectic.
Digital Strategy Is An Important Part Of Any Business Plan
A digital strategy is an important part of an overall business plan or marketing strategy. It helps you understand how to use the various tools in the digital world to achieve your goals, whether those are increasing sales or growing your audience. You can think of it as a road map that helps you understand which tools are right for your business, and how to use them in order to reach your customers.
A digital strategy can be broken down into five components:
A content marketing plan that helps you create and distribute valuable, relevant content for your audience.
A digital marketing plan that helps you use paid advertising, organic social media content and other tactics to reach your audience.
An analytics plan that helps you track how your efforts are working so that you can adjust them over time as needed.
An effective social media strategy that allows you to build a community around your brand and interact with customers in real-time.
A marketing automation strategy that helps you automate tasks so that you can spend more time on the things that matter most.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve created your digital strategy, it’s time to put it into action. Remember that digital strategy is a living document. It’s something you’ll need to update and refine over time as social media platforms, technology and your business evolve. But when you have a clear plan of action, it’s much easier to achieve your goals. The first step is to create your strategy. Once you have that, you can start building your digital presence and growing an audience.
Make sure that each channel has a specific goal in mind and then measure the results so that you know what’s working (and what isn’t). The last step is to use these insights to make changes to your strategy or adjust how you execute it going forward. To get you started, we’re just one phone call away. We will help you create an effective plan that can be used as the foundation for your next marketing campaign.
It will change over time as your business grows and evolves, so keep an eye out for ways to improve on what you’ve already done!
