Nowadays, digital transformation is an important agenda for businesses. Today’s technology makes the technological means of businesses more than software and hardware. To not become irrelevant in their environment, businesses acknowledge their need for digital transformation which requires a solid digital strategy. However, what is a digital strategy anyway? What are the components of it? Firstly, the perspective you look from is important at this point. A marketing executive sees digital strategy as social media reach, paid and organic web channel while an IT specialist focuses on cloud technologies or a finance specialist uses revenue channels. Nonetheless, digital technologies ease and enhance everyone’s job. Today we don’t need bulky spreadsheets, we are able to build websites by dragging and dropping thanks to the quick widgets of content management platforms. Moreover, now we reach broad audiences easily more than ever and find out business opportunities by the data we get from CRM tools.
In this article, we will tackle digital strategy as a matter of marketing. There are so many tools out there yet; without the proper understanding and plan, these tools may lead you to get lost in their functionality and prevent you to see the bigger picture which will actually help your business’s long-term goals. Digital strategy should eventually lead to the creation of a concrete plan or roadmap. Therefore, we will discuss what digital strategy exactly is, the differences between digital marketing strategy and a digital marketing campaign, why it is important for your business and how to build and execute a strong digital strategy. Let’s start with its definition!
What Is Digital Strategy in Marketing Perspective?
Digital marketing constitutes your ultimate plan or a blueprint to achieve your long-term or macro goal. Thus, your ultimate business goal has to be clarified before you start to create your unique digital marketing strategy. According to this purpose, you can determine numerous actions and finally decide the channels that you think you need to be present. Defining this goals is not easy though; this concrete idea only can be reached after a proper research process. Here are the steps of building a concrete digital marketing strategy:
- Knowing your customers
- Knowing your marketing objectives
- Accommodating between customer and marketing goals
- Identifying target markets
- Making competitive analysis
- Managing and allocating resources appropriately to achieve objectives
- Reviewing and optimising campaign performance
These 7 steps can help you to describe your North Star Goal which is a concept that came out of the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley and refers the ultimate goal of your company. Before jumping into how to build a digital marketing strategy and how to improve it; there is another important topic that we should go through. Digital marketing strategy is commonly confused with digital marketing campaigns. Digital campaigns are the tools which help you to reach your digital strategy goals. Campaigns consist of specific tactics serving to achieve more micro and short-term goals. Also they are more dynamic and they change in accordance to trends and new technologies while your digital strategy remains to be same. After clarifying that, let’s go through some useful tips that will help you to create an effective digital strategy.
How to Build An Effective Digital Strategy?
Now it is time to focus on motives behind strategic acts of digital marketing. Here, we will discuss effective tactics in the context of digital strategy and try to drive a frame to reach effective results. Here are 6 crucial steps which will help you to build a effective digital strategy:
- Clear and Scalable Goals: Your “north star” or ultimate goal has many fractions under itself which ultimately make it real. Smart goals are about certain achievements like desired percentage of growth in the first quarter of the year or monthly leads generation. Dividing your ultimate goal into small and scalable targets will help you to create an effective digital strategy for sure.
- Knowing Buyer Personas: Having a deep insight about your target audiences is clearly significant at the strategy phase to execute your plan smoothly. At this point, hearing your customer related departments like sales and support is important. Through the accurate and reliable insights provided by them, you will be able to draw profiles including your customers’ backgrounds, titles, needs, challenges; to sum up all the pros and cons to create an effective digital strategy.
- Analyse Your Competitors: Always stay in tune with decision making processes of your competitors; the way they use social media, paid marketing tools or their blogs. Create abstract charts to understand, what they do have in common and what you need amongst these aspects while you are creating your digital strategy.
- Customer’s Journey: Mapping the customer journey from problem identification touchpoints right through to the websites they visit, and their post-purchase evaluation forms an integral part of any Digital Marketing strategy.
- Deciding Where You Need to Be Present: Your brand has its own identity and tone of voice; thus deciding where you need to be present is a part of your digital strategy. For instance; if you your company profile appeals to mid-age people, you may not want to be in Twitch or if your target audiences follow you up for your value-set; then you might consider to corporate with the YouTubers who can reflect your value-set at its best. The same logic goes with paid marketing tools as well. If your product is niche and targets only the people who knows what they want to buy; then search ads would be more meaningful than in-app ads. This also help you to do not spend your way in an inefficient ways and serve your future goals at the very beginning.
- Focusing On The Right Digital Marketing Tactics: Digital marketing tactics are not equal to a strategy; however they are an important part of it. One of the most effective digital marketing tactic tool is Google Ads for sure. Google Marketing Hub become more prominent day by day for a good reason: they offer everything at once. Google Ads is a vast universe for those who want to create awareness, purchase intent and lastly act of buying for sure. You can present every detail of your products by using shopping ads or capitalize on a certain message by using search ads. You can even excite affinity audiences by using video ads and reach very niche and accurate audiences in YouTube. Beside of this, social media channels such Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn provide quite detailed audiences and stats which help you to execute your final strategy. On the other hand, you can always enhance customer loyalty by using email and inbound marketing. Nonetheless, keep it scalable due to the fact that every platforma and tool has their own dynamics and they are not all meant to be for you. If you choose the right platforms and tools while you are creating your digital strategy you can boost your customer reach and conversions as well.
In a nutshell, digital strategy is something which should be created at first and executed at last. By knowing your North Star Goal, fractioning your micro goals under it, analysing your goals and acts of your competitors and lastly deciding where you need to focus your energy, you can align your business goals with your digital presence and sustain your consistency in long-term.
Enkronos Digital Strategy
Do you know exactly what you need or you have a great idea and you don’t know where to start? Just contact us for a first evaluation meeting and we will see what can we build together.
Read more about services we provide:
Enkronos Marketing Team
