5 steps to designing a killer digital marketing strategy on any budget

BEHIND ANY SUCCESSFUL digital marketing campaign is a carefully constructed strategy. A solid plan will enable your business to adopt an approach that is focused on identifying your customers’ needs and preferences.

By creating a strategy that is aligned with every stage of the customer journey, you can maximise leads, nurture valuable relationships and, ultimately, drive more sales for your business.

Here are the basic steps you need to follow to manage an effective digital marketing strategy, regardless of the size of your business or budget:

1. Identify your objectives

Before devising your strategy, you need to outline your goals from the outset. This may seem like a glaringly obvious piece of advice, but many businesses often neglect to take this simple step – and that can make it easy to lose sight of important high-level objectives.

Setting goals will help you to measure the effectiveness of your strategy and set the metrics you will use to define your success. Some common examples of objectives you can set include:

• Customer acquisition: ‘Increase customer acquisition by 50% through display campaigns at a cost-per-acquisition of €50 in Google AdWords’
• Customer retention: ‘Ensure annual customer churn rate is below 10%’
• Lead generation: ‘Hit a net daily lead target of 87′
• Increased brand awareness: ‘Achieve a social media following growth of 60% by end of Q3′

Outlining objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely (or SMART) will give your strategy a framework that will allow you to easily measure and manage performance.

2. Create customer personas

If you develop a detailed understanding of your customers’ behaviours, preferences and needs you can craft a strategy that is best positioned to fulfill those needs.

Any digital marketing actions we complete, for example, from content creation to email-marketing campaigns, are tailored to and targeted at specific customer personas, which significantly enhances their effectiveness.

If you’re planning a digital marketing strategy that isn’t aligned to customer personas, you will find it much more difficult to nurture and convert your leads. You can create a targeted persona quickly and easily by asking yourself a few key questions:

• What do my customers want/need?
• What are their pain points?
• How can I address their needs?
• What content topics/messaging will resonate with them most?
• What tools and channels should I use to communicate with them?

3. Prioritise your digital channels

The digital landscape is constantly evolving and at a famously fast pace. When faced with an abundance of new digital tools and channels, it can be tempting to try and establish a presence on as many as possible. However, a particularly important step is deciding which of these channels you will prioritise and incorporate into your strategy.

Rather than spreading your efforts across an unmanageable number of channels, you should aim to build a following on a few key platforms that will help you to achieve the goals you defined in step one.

Consider the social media platforms your target audience prefer to utilise, as well as the ones on which your competitors are most active as this will help to inform your own selection.

Are you marketing to a B2B audience? Perhaps you should use a platform like Slideshare to stimulate engagement and generate leads through gated industry-specific content.

Do you want to find ways to nurture leads at the bottom of the funnel? Consider creating and distributing a regular email newsletter to a list of subscribers who are already engaged with your brand.

Whatever the channel, always think about how it will complement the customer journey and strike a chord with your personas.

4. Set your budget

Regardless of your budget size, you can still make the most of it through thoughtful allocation – ie being careful where you spend it.

But how? If you’re conducting a search-marketing campaign for example, you have the power to decide how much money Google can spend displaying your text or image ads.

Whether you’re using AdWords or Facebook, you can set a daily budget to manage your outlay carefully until you have a more in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Once you know how your campaign is performing (ie Are you generating high-quality leads? Are you driving sales?), you can start to adjust your budget accordingly.

If you don’t figure out a formula for success straight away, you can continue to be careful with your spend while experimenting with different ad copy and targeting options. Start small and increase your allocation when you’ve found a winning combination!

5. Measure your performance

This is a fundamental part of understanding how you can improve your strategy. You can use analytics and reporting to identify and address issues and opportunities in your strategy and track your progress in real-time, so you can edit and adjust your approach as required.

The metrics you monitor will relate back to your initial overall goals, whether it’s using Google Analytics to measure how many of your blog visitors are being converted into leads or checking how many impressions your tweets are generating for brand awareness.

Digital marketing provides you with the opportunity to gain visibility in your customers’ inboxes, have meaningful conversations with them on social media and anticipate their queries via search engines.

You know the essential steps you need to take to execute a winning digital strategy; now all you need to do is measure your success.

Sophie Elizabeth Smith is a content marketer at the Digital Marketing Institute, which currently offers the most widely taught digital certification standard in the world. It is based in Dublin.

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