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How to develop a winning digital marketing strategy

We all know that usage of digital media has been on a steady incline. An average adult user spends nearly six hours a day with digital media via various platforms like mobile phones, tablets, computers, and any other connected media. In one way, it is addictive and scary, but at the same time, it gives companies an opportunity to bring their brands in front of these connected customers for their attention.

This is where a digital marketing action plan comes into play. It is a series of actions that helps an organization to achieve its goals through a judicious selection of online marketing options. Let us break down this article into three key parts i.e.

What is digital marketing?
Why is it so essential in today's business world?
Finally, some examples.

Why does an organization need a digital marketing strategy?

Every company has a different aim. However, they all lead to one destination, and that is growth, which is true whether you deal in goods or services. Organic growth is possible by reaching out to more potential customers and influencing them to purchase.

To reach out to a larger group, organizations need to take advantage of marketing resources and technologies, and in today's era, the internet tops the list.

The group of target audiences that are found online is relatively much bigger than you can draw locally. Using digital marketing strategies, organizations can reach a huge target audience that is not just measurable but also cost-effective.

It is important to have a roadmap. That way, you can make choices with the goal(s) in mind. Let us break down the top seven digital marketing strategies or the different types of digital marketing strategies.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It is a process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic through organic search
Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): An internet advertising model where an advertiser pays a fee to the publisher each time their ads get clicked. This can also be known as an in-organic way of buying visitors to your site than an organic way.
Search engine marketing (SEM): It involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through paid advertising.
Email marketing: Emails sent out to a group of people, existing or potential, containing commercial messages or any other message relevant to the brand, e.g., product launch, new offers on existing products, discounts, and other services.
Content marketing includes creating and sharing online material such as blogs, social media posts, and videos that may not promote the brand directly but are intended to build interest and engage consumers in its products and services via content.
Social media marketing: Most widely used digital marketing tool involves focusing on building brand awareness leading to an increase in conversions. A few popular platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, among others.
Affiliate marketing: A performance-based marketing in which an online retailer or brand pays commission to an external website for sales that were generated from its referrals. In other words, it rewards affiliates for each customer brought by the affiliate's efforts. The role of the affiliate here is to promote the product and earn his profit from each sale made through their efforts.

How to create a productive digital marketing strategy

Interested in how to create a digital marketing strategy? In today's world, digital marketing is a must for every business, small or big; it takes the brand to the next level. Piecing together strategies can be overwhelming. Let's tackle them through these steps:

Define your brand: First and foremost, the step begins with understanding the brand and how it will come through digital campaigns. Need to outline brand's unique selling points (USPs) and value proposition.

Understand your target audience: Before we begin to design digital campaign strategies, we need to know who we will reach out to? Identify your users' demographics and the trigger points that lead people to choose your products and services. The use of data analytics too can help in identifying these trigger points.

Equipped with the required information, you can draw different buyer personas to identify who you are trying to reach through marketing efforts and accordingly target your message towards each set of "customized buyer persona."

SMART goal framework: Your digital strategy needs to have a bigger objective than "increase in sales numbers" or "increase in audience base." You need to think about your organization's short and long-term goals. Use SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals to guide your strategy. Setting objectives and key results (OKRs) for digital marketing plans ensures that you get a higher impact.

Choose digital marketing strategies: Focus on the techniques that offer value for your brand. While you chose the best strategies for your business goal, do not miss to conduct an audit of your past struggles you had put in to build the brand to this stage where it stands today. Find out what worked and what didn't. This way, you will have a good grip on your plans and what you need to be doing correctly.

Assemble scrambled pieces: Now that you have all the creative ideas and strategic plans flowing in, you need to address plenty of concerns because the process of strategizing is about identifying what you can accomplish within the set boundary lines or constraints. These constraints can be:

Responsibility: Team accountable for carrying out the task, who will be responsible? Do you need to outsource any task?

Budget: How much budget can you pull out for carrying out digital marketing? Need to build a realistic financial plan.

Channels: What goals will be attached to which marketing channel, and which marketing channel to select from?

These elements are important to piece together a strategy and make it successful within defined limitations.

6) Ready to take off: Once you have identified your goals, your target audience, and your means, it's time to bring them all together into a template that you can use. Ensure all your channels have an appropriate tracking system in place. For example, a website should feature google analytic tracking code.

7) Monitoring results: Once the campaign is launched, next comes tracking their performances at various stages and using multiple tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Few benefits of digital marketing strategies

Boosting brand awareness: Creating brand awareness is important. You take your brand in front of your target audience through various platforms, whether through social media marketing, search results, email marketing, or any other platform. They will get to know what your product is and what sets you different from your competitors.

Increasing traffic on a website: There's always a reason why people visit a website, for product information, contact details of your office/centers, or reading your promotional emails, content, or blogs. The more visitors you are attracted to the more opportunities you have to reach out to your customers and inform them about what you have to offer. This will lead to more prospects, conversions, and sales.

Driving storefront traffic: If you have a physical store, your main objective is to bring walk-in customers to your location. Local SEO can help you to achieve this goal. While smaller retailers may feel that digital marketing is not ideal for them, it is still a powerful strategy for growth.

Increase in revenue: The most important strategy of every business is to increase revenue. By increasing traffic to your website and physical store, you can increase your company's revenue.

Digital marketing examples to inspire you

Example 1: Email Marketing - BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, a news and entertainment company that focuses on digital media. One thing that they are especially good at is Email marketing. Each day our inbox receives tens and hundreds of spam, email marketing presents a big challenge. People must get to open your email rather than deleting them immediately.

BuzzFeed's secret lies in extreme personalization. They have segmented their email marketing energies down to specific interest groups. They have dozens of newsletters that users can subscribe to.

Result: Highly targeted content that users can't wait to receive.

Example 2: Social Media Marketing - Amul

Can social media lead to the selling of dairy products? Amul is the answer. The brand always has funny insights into current domestic and international events. The brand keeps the same character on all their posts, which has become their USP.

Example 3: Content Marketing - Vogue India

The greatest weapon of content marketing is storytelling. Vogue once came up with a campaign, #Vogue Empower, about violence against women and women empowerment. They roped in celebrities like Madhuri Dixit in their videos, creating a buzz for their content marketing efforts.

And before wrapping up, here are some interesting facts for you.

4.18 billion Internet users access via mobile phones.
The average time that users spend using social media is 2h and 12 minutes.
YouTube, Google, and Facebook are the most visited websites, according to Similarweb.
90% of users watch YouTube.
32.5% of Instagram users are between 18 and 34 years old.

By looking at these figures above, one thing is for sure that digital marketing has a long way to go, and a brand that gets the pulse of the consumer and outlines the right strategy has a way to lead forward and be in the race.

Sometimes, getting started is all you need to figure out the better ways to do things, and with any process you follow, you need to be ready for some trials and some errors.