The term "digital strategy" is widely used, but interpretations vary. We clarify what a digital marketing strategy is and provide a practical guide. Addressing questions such as what it is, when a company needs it, its components, and how to develop and implement it.
A digital marketing strategy is a cohesive set of steps, leveraging tools and tactics in digital marketing, used to achieve specific business goals. Like any strategy, it originates from set goals and comprises three essential parts:
The primary goal of developing a digital strategy is to create a comprehensive, understandable, and justified plan for achieving business objectives. Completeness and justification also imply a high probability (reliability) of achieving your goals, distinguishing it from "patchwork" digital business promotion.If you aim for reliable and predictable sales and profit growth, market share increase, and success in competitive environments, formulating a digital strategy for your company is essential.
You and your company are ready for it if:
In summary, a certain level of experience and engagement with your brand and product is required to transition to a level of work with a well-thought-out strategy. If you recognize your situation in this description, you need a digital strategy to address your challenges.
Like any strategy, internet marketing strategy:
You need numbers and facts. Collect all data related to the overall company development strategy. If you have conducted a SWOT analysis, this experience will fit in perfectly here: analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the company and the product, market opportunities, and potential threats. Identify growth opportunities.You need to patiently and thoughtfully answer dozens of questions about your business, product, market, customers, competitors, pricing, sales cycle, sales funnel, etc. What do you sell, which products are the most profitable? How do you position yourself? What advertising campaigns are running? What is the state of your website? What is your company's current reputation? What is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of your products? Why is it advantageous to buy from you? What do competitors offer? What are the advantages of their product? What sales volumes have been achieved? And what is the market demand? Objectively, how interesting are your offers, and many other questions.Why so detailed? Because at the initial stage, it is important to establish a strong foundation for your future digital marketing strategy.At this stage, you also need to analyze your target audience. Who buys from you, and what customer groups can you identify? Which of them are more active and make more purchases? For each target audience group, you need to create a Portrait of the Target Audience using the Persona method.
Based on the overall goals of your company, you need to determine the marketing and sales indicators you aim for. They should be clearly quantified. These can include:
Goals need to be defined (decomposed) for each of your key products and customer groups. Decompose them down to the number of target website visits for each product. How do you plan to achieve various overall figures, for example, in revenue considering market opportunities? This will be just a hypothesis; it is clear that you can make adjustments during the process—flexibility and adaptability are normal.When setting goals, adhere to the SMART principle. Quantification itself implies specificity and measurability, and deadlines are also necessary. Be realistic 😊
By this point, you already understand:
Now you need to assess and determine where and what problems currently exist, hindering the achievement of your goals. Perhaps there's a bottleneck in traffic – do you have very low website visits? Or is the conversion rate too low? Or is the average check too low?Or, in general, you are not offering and selling to all target audiences, or perhaps you are not upselling enough?You need a list of specific hypotheses about constraints. These constraints will later turn into key points of impact influenced by your digital strategy.After creating the list, prioritize it: choose the most suitable hypotheses in terms of the "resources/potential impact on goal achievement" ratio.
At this stage, the concrete framework of your digital strategy emerges. You reconsider the data obtained in previous stages:
You also assess whether the current promotion tools and touchpoints align with how your target audience makes purchases. As a result, you formulate key changes and tactics for your digital strategy. It's important to note that these strategies are developed for each priority combination "Product + Target Audience," regardless of how many such combinations you have. For example, your task can be formulated as follows: to increase the sales volume of the "Corporate Bankruptcy" service for the target audience "Corporations with financial problems and tax debts over 1.5 million euros" to the amount of 1,300 thousand euros per month per transaction, we need to:
After setting goals, formulating fundamental action plans for implementing the digital strategy, and having a set of tactics and tools, you need to plan resources.What resources will you need?Team: Individuals responsible for developing specific action plans and executing them. This could involve several people, one person, a project manager from your company plus an external team—there are various options.Budget for Work: Including amounts for developing or revising existing touchpoints, budgets for paid traffic, SEO, copywriters, etc.Time: Both in terms of a) implementation timelines—assess realistically, don't try to solve all problems in a couple of months, and b) the time of managers and experts from your company for participating in the strategy implementation. This could range from a couple of hours per month to several hours per week, depending on the tasks, but time will likely be required.It's important to understand that both timelines and budgets at this stage will be tentative. Concrete work plans, which could be accurately estimated, do not exist at this point. However, these benchmarks are necessary, including to detail plans correctly (which will already be part of implementation tactics, not the strategy).
Next comes the strategy's execution, i.e., tactical actions. You need to:
When creating a specific plan for implementing an internet marketing strategy, there are several important principles and rules:
By following this plan, you will formulate an effective digital strategy for your company.
Thanks for reading this material! In the future, I plan to add information about SMART, the Target Audience Portrait, and the Customer Journey Map.
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