Why and how to implement a digital marketing strategy?
Because all companies are taking the turn of digital transformation and must rethink their internet strategy from a brand strategist both in form and substance and make changes in their marketing communication and in the choice of tools they use.
However, contrary to what one might think, having a website and several accounts on social networks is not enough to define a digital strategy.
Beyond your simple presence on the web, take advantage of the digital trend to attract, interest, and convince your future customers.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
Definition of digital marketing
As a reminder, digital marketing, also called e-marketing, web marketing, or digital marketing, consists of promoting a product or service on the internet, to a targeted audience, based on:
- many media (computer, tablet, mobile, etc.),
- a set of marketing tools,
- methods and strategies (inbound, outbound, etc.).
What is a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing campaign corresponds to the coordination of all these elements to serve the actions that make up this strategy.
For example, you can choose to start a campaign by sharing some of your most interesting or popular content on a particular social media, like Twitter or LinkedIn, to generate more leads.
The objectives of a digital strategy
The digital strategy is nothing more than a series of actions intended to achieve one or more objectives defined in an action plan, such as:
- boost the image of your brand on the internet.
- drive traffic to your website.
- improve the user experience.
- decrease your bounce rate.
- generate quality leads.
- acquire leads.
- improve the customer relationship.
- develop your content marketing to attract and interest your targets.
- convert your visitors.
You will have understood it: to build a successful digital strategy, you must take care of your online marketing, but that is not all. A comprehensive digital strategy also contains a digital transmission strategy.
How to develop a digital marketing strategy?
What are the steps to define a web marketing strategy?
Step 1: analyze your situation in the market
This step occurs before the implementation of a digital strategy, before any decision-making. Understanding the existing state of the market lets you know your target and better know their prospects while assessing the competition.
Through market research, you can analyze:
- competitors and their practices,
- consumer behavior,
- market trends,
- the geographical areas where your brand is present.
💡 Assessing the competitive context allows you to know how to position yourself against your competitors and refine the marketing targeting of your audience, to see your digital strategy from both a communication and marketing point of view.
But to be relevant in your strategies, you need to have a precise and exhaustive analysis. Therefore, many companies choose to rely on competitive intelligence tools. PriceComparat gold, for example, automatically and daily extracts a whole set of strategic data from the marketing mix (prices, stocks, advertising banners, promotional operations, newsletters, etc.). You thus benefit from a global vision, in real-time, of the marketing campaigns deployed by your competitors to make the right decisions.
Step 2: define your objectives
To make your strategy ready, bring together the leaders and the teams of the company to place a course in unison. It’s about discussing goals over a period.
Depending on the needs formulated at the analysis stage, various objectives are possible, including:
- Visibility: development of your notoriety through brand image and your online presence
- Traffic: traffic generation
- Lead: generation of leads (prospects), conversion
Customer experience: improving the experience for consumers.
Step 3: define your key performance indicators
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will help you measure performance effectively. These are for example:
- SEO ranking
- the rate of traffic created on your site
- the conversion rates
- time spent on your site
- ROI (return on investment).
Step 4: Set your budget
As for the budget, this will determine the means that you will use to achieve your objectives.
There are a wide variety of possibilities on the web, all with their advantages and disadvantages, as well as their own cost.
Step 5: identify your buyer personas
The term ” buyer personas ” refers to the target group to which your offer is addressed. This is to clearly identify the detailed profiles of your ideal customers to direct its communication according to them and, ultimately, to understand their decision to purchase by understanding their hopes, their habits, and their qualities.
What strategy and what support(s) should be used to identify them? Social media analytics tools are a great place to start, instead of a complex study of your customers and their profile, for example. Thus, you can study the character traits of your audience on Twitter analytics, for example, Instagram analytics, or Facebook Insights.
Other actions are possible, such as writing questionnaires to send to customers from software, such as SurveyMonkey.
Step 6: reflect on your website
Your website must be neat because it is the first point of contact with your future customers, but also partners, suppliers, and collaborators.
The domain name should also be taken into consideration, as it acts as a gateway into the universe of your brand.
💡 Get free and personalized support with the Solocal Digital Audit, to:
- identify your strengths and weaknesses online.
- benefit from advice via an action plan.
Step 7: design your action plan
The action plan must be in line with the customer’s journey, according to their progress through the conversion funnel, also called a conversion funnel. It is a question of defining which levers to activate for each of these phases (acquisition > conversion > retention).
Acquisition phase
Your target is on Google? Bet on SEO / SEA if it is profitable in your business model.
Your target has questions, and does it need information? Bet on inbound marketing actions.
Conversion stage
To win leads. Bet on a form to fill out following the gains of the inbound, or a white paper to distribute in advertising on social networks for example.
- Retention phase, loyalty
- By newsletters? Bet on email capture.
- By a service rendered. Focus on application development.
- By the feeling of belonging to the brand. Bet on social networks.
What media?
In addition, the action plan can be designed considering 3 bases and evaluating those that best lend themselves to your strategy built so far through trade advertising:
Paid media (Paid media): paid marketing levers such as targeted Google AdWords advertising, paid influencers, pay-per-click, social media advertising such as Facebook ads, affiliation, etc.
Owned media: your property on the web, such as your website or blog, your content offering, your social media accounts, etc.
Earned media: what is shared and allows you to reach your target organically, at no cost: social networks, mentions of your content or your offer on external sites, etc.
Your strategy will revolve around these different media, according to your needs and your budget defined upstream.
Step 8: choose the levers to activate
Depending on your action plan and the requirements of your company, select the actions to be implemented to attain the goals you have set.
▷ Opt for an SEO strategy (SEO and SEA)
Who says digital marketing strategy, necessarily says SEO! SEO, SEA, or both?
🛠️ Search Engine Advertising or SEA
SEA, or paid search, is a marketing channel based on targeted advertising in search engines (most often Google).
Each advertisement corresponds to a keyword, a previously defined target, and the objective of clicks and expected leads.
The goal? Quickly give online visibility to your brand.
The difficulty of this lever? A SEA campaign requires regular and precise monitoring to ensure its success and return on investment.
💡 Have you launched paid referencing campaigns and want more visibility to analyze their results?
Marketing managers or digital marketing agencies will appreciate Seiso: a connection with your Google Ads account and 3 clicks are enough to receive a complete analysis of your campaigns, instantly and for free!
Another significant positive point: Seiso does not keep your data; no security or privacy issues to worry about.
▷ Adopt a strategy of presence on social networks
Networks and social media offer a multitude of options to promote your content and your brand image and thus boost your e-reputation.
True amplifiers of the messages conveyed by your brand; promise great benefits for your business. They will help you achieve various objectives: develop your notoriety, offer after-sales service, retain your customers, or even stand out from the competition.
They also allow you to:
- find new customers.
- build new partnerships.
Get to know your prospects and their habits better.
It can be time-consuming to manage your presence and visibility on multiple channels at the same time. To simplify your task, social network management tools, such as Hootsuite, Agranules, or Buffer, offer a whole range of features, such as:
- the day before,
- interaction,
- publication management,
- measurements, reporting, etc.
▷ Develop a content strategy
The technique of inbound marketing permits you to entice prospects to your site. It is both a lever for notoriety and the creation of qualified leads.
In your editorial schedule, define the subjects to be covered, when to publish, and on which channel.
Encourage your audience to react to your posts and leave comments.
☝ Depending on your objectives, you can collect contacts via forms to fill out, for example, hosted on a landing page (landing web page). It will be a question of encouraging your visitor to go to the page in question thanks to call-to-action devices.
▷ Marketing automation and lead nurturing to achieve your goals
Lead nurturing consists of subtly bringing the prospect to the commercial proposal by raising their awareness, then informing them to finally commit them to buy and thus conclude the sale.
💡 What if you could save time during the prospect research stage, quickly identify the right prospects, and devote your time to nurturing them, supporting them, and responding to their objections with relevant business arguments?
This is what Black sales offers, which makes the commercial prospecting phase a formality. You save time by automating time-consuming and unprofitable tasks, thanks to the happy marriage of sales intelligence with marketing automation.
💡 To go further, the Mapp Cloud marketing automation platform and its integrated modules Mapp Intelligence, Mapp Acquire, and Mapp Engage, maximize the ROI of your marketing actions by giving more reach and efficiency to your multi-channel campaigns (email, web, SMS, mobile push, social).
Data from different channels is centralized in one tool, making it easier to use: you can extract customer insights, and anticipate user actions and behaviors using AI to ultimately enrich your campaigns and significantly personalize the customer experience.
Final advice: measure your performance
Assess the impact…
It is essential to follow the customer journey and to exploit the benefits.
The use of artificial intelligence can be a wise choice to monitor the behavior of visitors to your site and measure the ROI of your campaigns in real-time.
You can also examine the most visited pages, to discover the content that interests your prospects the most, thanks to monitoring tools such as Google Analytics (for the website), or Hootsuite (for social networks).
… to better optimize
Depending on the results, you will be able to observe the margins of progress that are emerging. For example, you can decide to better tailor the message to the target or better target queries.
By closely monitoring all your indicators, you will be better able to carry out tests, verify the impact of an action, etc.
The ultimate goal is the continuous improvement of the customer experience, always following the same common thread: to attract, interest, and then convince.
