What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing or Online Marketing is a collection of activities that are aimed at increasing sales and improving brand marketing and online business. Digital marketing is an interdisciplinary field and it require having appropriate information in the following areas:
- Marketing and Advertisement
- SEO (site optimization)
- E-mail Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Branding
- Graphics
- Market analysis and …
Major corporations in the world are launching or expanding their digital marketing activities and are trying to reduce their traditional advertising and marketing budget share and focus on marketing and online advertising.
Developing a digital marketing strategy for a company is very important in determining the goals and priorities of online marketing. With the newly emerging digital marketing area around the world, only 47% of companies have not developed a digital marketing strategy for their business. In other words, they do activities for online marketing, but they do not have a comprehensive strategy to follow. Developing a digital marketing strategy can create a competitive advantage for companies and help them achieve their goals faster.
What is a digital marketing or online marketing strategy?
In simple terms, strategy means defining priorities, goals, and future steps to achieve goals, and digital marketing strategy means identifying the priorities and goals of a company for effective presence in the online environment.
You do not need to look at the development of a digital marketing strategy in the face of a complex and difficult process, but it consists of small steps that need to be followed step by step to achieve goals.
4 Steps in Developing a Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Determine the goals
The first step in developing a digital marketing strategy is to determine the goals of your business in such a way as to be able to identify the next steps to achieve them. To do this, you should ask several key questions about your company, such as:
- What does our business plan to improve?
- What is there in the market that we can fix?
- What is our competitive advantage?
- How to implement our program?
Such questions help you to better understand your company’s digital marketing strategy and its role in the growth of your business and motivate you to take small steps to reach your goals.
2. Analysis and documentation
The analysis should help you get more information about:
- Target audience
- Business
- Target market
- Available source
One of the most important activities in this section is to identify target audiences and become familiar with their interests. This recognition will increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and attract audience participation and attention to these activities of the company.
You should also have a complete list of media that can help you implement your company’s digital marketing strategy. Then use these media in combination with their cost and benefit to shine.
Personal media
These media are actually the company’s own dedicated channels that you can implement in your digital strategy. This media is personal and will bring you little direct money. These media include:
- Design your company website and blog
- The official social networks of your company
- Your website’s newsletter
And in general, everything that is specific to your business!
Impersonal media
Non-personal media refers to a media collection that you get from your communications, such as:
- Guest post on a valid website
- PR and your free introduction
- Recommendations and opinions of others about your company and…
Paid media
Paid media is also referred to as a media collection that you can pay for your company, such as:
- Click and Banner ads on other websites
- Reproduction advertising on reputable websites
- Advertising on social networks…
3. Planning the future
Defining goals, analyzing and documenting leads to the formation of a program for implementing a digital marketing strategy. This made program helps you achieve your goals and can have different horizons (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). Asking the following questions can be useful for better planning:
- How do you get the goals set?
- What are your priorities for starting an online marketing activity?
- How many channels should you use?
- Should your campaign have multiple members?
- What are your long-term and short-term goals?
An important point in planning for digital marketing is that since the pace of change in this area is extremely high, long-term planning should not be used. In other words, having a long-term program is always useful, but it should not be too long of a wait!
4. Careful measurement and run
This is the stage in which the previous programs are executed. The more detailed the program is, the easier it is to implement and less unpredictable events happen.
One of the important advantages of digital marketing campaigns is to check its statistics live and instantaneously. In other words, analyzing the statistics during the implementation of the digital marketing strategy should ensure the efficiency of the various channels and, if problems arise, one can quickly resolve them. Coordination of the various members of the company is essential in the successful implementation of the program and the implementation of many necessary changes.
You need to define several key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaign to monitor the success of your program and monitor its changes during strategy implementation. This will help you find out about the weaknesses of your program and find ways to improve it.
For example, if your goal is to increase the sales of your website’s products, instead of just increasing your website’s traffic, it shows that your campaign has a low conversion rate and there are a number of problems.
All 4 steps above will help you achieve your goals. Each company does not spend time and energy on documenting its digital marketing strategy, and it only comes to expect a typical program, but having a well-structured strategy can help you succeed in the various stages of online marketing.
