Getting Your Digital Marketing Strategy Ready

Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing facilitates two way communication between marketer and audience, allowing digital marketing to be much more data driven, and digital marketers to tweak their marketing messages across a campaign to gain optimal results. 

As with all business practices, success in digital marketing depends on undertaking quality research and effective planning before the event, honest evaluation after the event, and repeating the process. 

The pillars of digital marketing

Let’s take a look at specifically how this process works in digital marketing. 

Step 1: Define your Goals, Objectives, and KPIs

It stands to reason that before you get going, you need to know where you are headed. Consequently, every great digital marketing plan begins with defining your goals and objectives. 

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but in fact they’re not precisely the same. 

Goals are the broad strokes of your strategy. They are the answer to the question: what do we need our marketing to do?” These can be marketing goals, such as increasing brand awareness, or business goals such as increasing sales. When setting them, it’s important to ask yourself: How do we know when they’ve been reached? The easiest way to answer that question is by including figures, dates or both. For example, instead of “increasing sales” you could make your goal “increasing sales by 100% in the next six months”. 

Objectives are the tasks you need to accomplish to achieve your goals. If your goal is to increase sales, an objective might be to carry out an advertising campaign for your top products, or to roll out an email newsletter for more repeat business from previous customers. 

Once you have your goals and objectives, build in some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are numbers that let you know if you’re on track. For example, going back to our hypothetical goal of increasing sales by 100% in the next six months, useful KPIs might be the average order size, the average invoice size, the number of orders in a given period of time, or the number of repeat orders from each client. Measuring these as you go along will give you an indication ahead of time of whether you’re likely to achieve your target, and if not, what needle needs to be moved to get there. 

Step 2: Define your ideal audience

While it’s tempting to market your product or service to everyone - after all, it’s so great how could anyone resist? - the truth is that it’s not going to be for anyone. There’s no point spending money on a marketing campaign if the vast majority of people you market to will never have any interest in your product, so before you get going, figure out who will be interested. 

This is a crucial step because figuring out who your target audience is will give you some key information on how to carry out your marketing efforts, including: 

• Where your audience are hanging out online, and where you should therefore focus your marketing efforts.
• What sort of language your audience uses and will connect with.
• What is likely to motivate them to make a purchase. 

Your target audience will be defined by the problem your product or service solves - namely, your audience will be the people experiencing that problem, who have a budget within your price range, and are within your geographical reach. 

It’s often useful to construct an ‘avatar’ of your ideal audience member so that you have someone to focus on when putting together your marketing materials. 

Step 3: Define your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Before you go out and start talking to people about your product, you need to have some idea what you’re going to say. And to figure that out, you need to define your UVP. 

Put simply, your UVP is a clear, concise summary of what problem your product or service solves, what value it brings to your customer, and what sets your product or service apart from the competition. 

When communicating your UVP to your potential customers, you need to do so talking their language. If they can’t understand what you’re offering, how it will benefit them, and why they should buy from you, they won’t buy. 

You likely already have a good idea of what you offer and what value it brings to your customers. More tricky is figuring out how to differentiate yourself. In essence there are two ways to do this: by segmenting the existing market in a new way, or by creating a brand new market. 

Some products - the iPad being the iconic example of our age - are so new that they do create new segments. No one knew they wanted an iPad until the product came along, because such an item hadn’t been on offer before. 

Vastly more common, however, is segmenting the existing market in a new way. To do this, ask yourself: Which customers are you targeting? Which of their needs do you want to meet? And at what price point? Triangulating in this way will give you your UVP. 

Step 4: Draft your customer acquisition funnel

A customer acquisition funnel is a fancy way of describing the process by which you make yourself known to a potential customer, explain the value your product or service will deliver to them, and then encourage them to make a purchase. 

Each stage of the funnel requires a marketing function to be deployed, but the way in which you use the tools at your disposal, and the way in which you communicate your offering, will vary depending on how far along the funnel your potential customer is. 

The first stage, unsurprisingly, is simply creating brand awareness, and there are a few ways to do this. Let’s look at some of them. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Google alone processes a staggering 40,000 searches every second, which adds up to a whopping 3.5 billion searches per day. With so much searching going on, you can bet that someone out there is a looking for an answer to the problem your product solves, which means, in effect, that they’re looking for you without knowing it. 

Search engine optimization is the art of getting your website to the top of the results page (or as close as possible) when they type in that query, making you the answer they were looking for. 

The way that’s done is through figuring out (not guessing!) which terms (known as ‘keywords’) they are likely to have entered when they made their search, then setting up your website to contain those same terms so that the algorithm selects your site or page as the best answer it can deliver. 

Social media - Facebook alone has 2.8 billion active users each month, of which more than two thirds visit the site daily. With that many eyeballs on screens, social media is not something you can ignore when creating your digital marketing strategy. 

At the same time, the ubiquity of social media means that companies are having to work harder than ever to stand out in the feeds and catch their audience’s attention. There are numerous ways to do this, and with each platform using its own algorithm to decide what to show each user, marketers need to tailor their content to each platform, making social media one of the most complex proficiencies in the digital marketing toolkit. 

Content - People spend time on the internet to fill a need: they have a problem they need to fix, have a question they want answered, or just want to pass their time enjoyably. By creating content - blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts and more - that meets that need, marketers can put their brand in front of an audience that is likely to be interested in what they have to offer. 

Paid acquisition channels - essentially, ads. As with traditional marketing, you pay to place your content somewhere your target audience is likely to see it, whether that’s at the top of a Google search, within a Facebook feed, or elsewhere on the internet. 

The previous three examples we’ve just looked at rely on what’s known as ‘organic traffic’ - that is, people finding your site without you paying for them to do so. Paid acquisition typically uses the same platforms, but supercharges the process by putting your content on more screens. 

Once you’ve caught the attention of your audience, you need to have somewhere to send them - known as a landing page - and a ‘call to action’ when they get there. Examples include signing up to your email mailing list,  contacting you for a quote, or even purchasing a particular product or offer. 

Step 5: Execute, measure, optimize

As we said at the top, what really sets digital marketing apart from traditional advertising is that it facilitates two way conversations between marketer and audience. 

Traditionally, marketers ran ads and weren’t able to get any feedback until a trend started to emerge in the company’s revenue. But digital marketing allows marketers to track metrics in real time, such as: how many people have seen an ad; how many people have clicked on it; where they went on the internet next; which parts of a video had people tuning out - or in. 

Not only that, but the format allows marketers to carry out A/B testing, running two almost identical ads at the same time to see which performs better and why. Even changes as small as the color of the call to action button can make a difference; making these sorts of tweaks and going again allows marketers to hone the performance of their ads throughout a campaign to get the best results. 

And once the campaign is over, even more data can be collected and fed back into the planning process, allowing marketers to build success upon success. 

What Oyster Digital can do for you

Now you have an idea of how to run a successful campaign, it’s time to get going. You may wish to hire an in-house marketing team, but with digital marketing becoming ever more specialist, it often makes better financial sense to outsource at least some of your marketing function to specialists who can deliver more in-depth knowledge and set a winning growth marketing strategy to drive high revenues for your company.

At Oyster Digital, we know what it takes to put together a growth marketing strategy that really delivers. A truly effective strategy draws on a range of cutting edge digital marketing tools and data analysis techniques to deploy the right tools at the right time in the right way. We drive business growth with hard-hitting digital solutions that help you win in hyper-competitive marketplaces with complex customer journeys.

If you would like to discuss what we can do for you, contact us now.