HOW TO DEVELOP A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY (Template Included)

As a Brand or Marketing Manager, it is extremely important to develop a Digital Marketing Strategy for your brand. A strategy holds your Digital Marketing Communications together just as the skeleton holds the human body together. Your marketing success and indeed business growth depends largely on drawing up a solid and effective digital marketing strategy that can be implemented realistically.

Here’s Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Your Digital Marketing Strategy is a compass that directs your marketing efforts. It helps you to:

1. Make informed decision

2. Measure your marketing efforts

3. Focus on the important elements

4. Develop a marketing budget

While most brand custodians understand the need to develop a digital marketing strategy for their brand, their challenge has mainly been how to develop one and knowing the various elements that a good digital marketing strategy should contain.
If you find yourself in this category or you simply need more information to augment what you have developed, here is a detailed outline of How to develop a digital marketing strategy and a Digital Marketing Strategy Template to go with this plan.

Elements of a Digital Marketing Strategy

1.  Industry Review

Briefly review the industry your brand plays in while noting the relevant development that has hit the market in the recent times. Then review how this development will affect your brand and its marketing while also noting opportunities that you can latch on to. You can use the PESTEL Model for this evaluation (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and legal)

2. Business/Brand Review

Develop a SWOT analysis of your brand to understand the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This will help you direct marketing efforts to address your weaknesses, amplify your strengths, advise relevant departments to handle the opportunities and threats.

In this age when things move fast, it is important to analyse a brand’s SWOT analysis from time to time as what may stand as your strength today may change in a couple of months and vice versa.

3. Goals and Objectives

Know what you want to achieve and set objectives accordingly.  Define your business’ overall marketing goal first, then list out your marketing objectives in clear and easily understood language.  Ensure that they are measurable and align with your metrics which will feature in the latter part of this outline.

For example;

Create top of mind awareness amongst target audience in Nigeria by getting 2million impressions across channels monthl

Drive traffic to the company’s website to achieve 400,000 visitors monthly

Generate 150 leads monthly across channels.

You can use the SMART model to evaluate your objectives to know if you are on the right track. This model simply states that your objectives must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound.

4. Identify Your Target Audience and Develop a Buyer Persona

It’s important to know your audience well and understand that they are the heart of your strategy or else your marketing efforts will be ineffective. You must understand their pain points and seek to help them solve it using relevant strategies.

To do this, you need to create a Buyer Persona for your brand. A brand can have one or more buyer personas, depending on elaborate its target audience are.

For example:

A brand like MTN will have its target audience from 18 – 60 years old. While this may form a broad target audience, it is impossible to have one marketing message that will appeal to this varied audience and their pain points will be extremely different.

In this case, they can then be broken into segments using Age, Socio-Economic class, Education etc. and a Buyer Persona developed for each of these segments to effectively address their pain points.

Looking to learn more about developing a Buyer Persona and a template to go with it, check our earlier post on How to create a buyer persona for your brand.

5. Select Your Digital Marketing Tactics and Platforms

The tactics are the specific approaches that you will deploy to meet your marketing objectives along with the platform that will support that approach.

There are different Digital Marketing tactics and the major goals that each one can help to achieve.

For example:

Display Advertising works best for awareness, Customer Acquisition and Brand Building. So, if your objective is to engage with prospects and current Clients, then Display Advertising is not a relevant tactic for this.

Also, you need to decide on the content format. What content format will you put up on your digital channels. Videos are here to stay and are the rave of the moment so it is advisable to have lots of video content. Even an article can be summarized into a 1-minute video.

It is best to have a mix of content types so as not to bore people.

In selecting the right tactics and platforms, here are the elements that should influence this decision:

Buyer Persona Profile – If your target audience is a 17-year-old guy that hangs out on Snapchat, you are better of with videos compared to developing E-books and/or  Whitepapers

Marketing Objectives – If you want to grow sales by X number, Search Ads will be a better option compared to Social Media engagement

The Industry – For example, LinkedIn is more relevant for B2B brands compared to Instagram.

6. Metrics

Set realistic and measurable KPIs.  Be very specific with your KPIs by identifying the metrics you’ll use in measuring performance. Clearly articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve. Then make sure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

Some metrics to use include, Number of leads generated, conversion rate, number of social media followers, social media engagement rate, number of content downloads, number of new visitors to the website etc.

Then Identify a method or software to help you measure each of your KPIs – for example, Use Google Analytics to measure conversion rate?

Before you begin planning your KPIs find out which metrics matter most to your CEO or the company’s board.

7. Budget

Marketing costs money so be sure to have a budget that adequately covers the tactics laid out and ensure that your budget matches your marketing objectives.

For example;

Your goal might be to increase Facebook likes by 20,000 in one week and your budget is 500 Naira. This is surely going to be difficult.

Don’t forget to include the cost of tools/software subscription, manpower (You may need to get a freelancer to write your content or hire a Graphic Artist, or even a full-scale Agency), post sponsorship, design etc.

Now you have your Digital Marketing Strategy ready for review with your management team and implementation thereafter.

However, it is important to note that marketing is fluid and things keep changing. Customer preferences change rapidly and new platforms and tools are introduced, the brand /marketing manager should keep abreast of the industry and make relevant edits on the strategy document where the needs arise.

Nonetheless, those edits must align with the business goals of the firm and the marketing objectives respectively.

Ready to develop your own digital marketing strategy? Download the Digital Marketing Strategy Template to ease your job