Many companies are challenged by increasing competition in digital marketing.
So, what steps can we follow to have a clear digital marketing plan?
Here are 5 steps:
1. Objectives
Set your marketing objectives in alignment with your business objectives. Do you want to enter a new market, increase your online sales or develop a new channel?
You might want to:
build your brand awareness
enhance your brand image
understand your customers
establish thought leadership in a specific sector
2. Segmentation
Once you have your marketing objectives in place, segment your customers.
Here you want to understand who your customers are in order to position your brand and create your unique value proposition.
Nice! But how do we segment our customers?
We can segment them using a few elements like:
demographics
behaviours
psychographics (interests, passions, motivations)
technology use
customer lifetime value (CLV)
3. Strategy Creation
This is the crucial bit. Select those strategies that fit with your business and customers.
Do you want to increase access? Engage with your customers more? Are you looking to customise your products and services?
Once you pick up your strategy, it is time to test and try.
Brainstorm with your team and create a list of ideas. Rank them on criteria like relevance, ROI, feasibility...
Now pick your winning ideas and move to the next step.
4. Execution
Are you ready? Good. You can now select your team and split the tasks.
If you don’t have all required skills for your strategy, then leverage on what you already have or develop new capabilities - > outsourcing can be a great solution here.
5. Measurement
And finally, identify the metrics to measure the impact of your strategy against your initial objectives.
Here are 3 metrics (there are many more):
level of engagement (online and on social media)
click through rates (CTR)
likelihood of customers to return...
Remember, you can group your metrics in 4 categories - > See here what the 4 categories are for your Digital Marketing and ROI.
Now ask yourself: what will digital marketing success look like? What can I do if I need to ramp up online marketing?
Ah, one last thing! Keep a start-up mentality and spend time on the problem before tackling the solution(s).
Comments? Ideas? Challenges? Feel free to share them here.
Thank you for reading.