Many brands just follow the latest internet marketing trends.When a social media platform becomes popular, they publish on it.

For every instant success in the Digital marketing world, there are dozens of brands quietly developing solid, data-driven digital marketing strategies. Committing to the process of growth requires intentionality and constant attention.

You don’t just want to succeed this month or this year. You want to succeed indefinitely. That’s why today we’re going to look at how you can build an internet marketing strategy that promotes long-term, ongoing growth.

Why should you have a digital marketing strategy?

Losing time and money on marketing campaigns is a common brand fear, but missing important information about your marketing goals and decision-making process can be an absolute nightmare.

When you develop a strategy, you can test and validate specific data. Let’s say your latest campaign is aimed at attracting customers with certain behaviors.

Developing a clear digital marketing strategy allows you to stress-test your marketing assumptions, which becomes especially useful when you’re targeting a specific audience.

At the same time, you’re laying the groundwork for further marketing with your strategy. Imagine a scenario where a brand’s first marketing move fails to live up to its potential. Without a developed strategy, it’s impossible to know exactly what went wrong.

Are you focusing on the wrong KPIs or KPIs? Did you have unrealistic goals? Was there something wrong with the competitor analysis? These questions become much easier to answer when you already have a well-defined digital marketing strategy in place.

4 steps to develop your digital marketing strategy

If you’ve never developed a marketing strategy, the process can seem a little daunting. When building your marketing strategy, there are dozens of potential metrics and methods you can focus on.

For now, let’s prioritize two key elements: transparency and experimentation. To maximize clarity, we’re going to spend time defining our target audience and setting clear goals. When it comes to experimentation, we’re going to focus on growing and implementing specific marketing tactics.

Over time, your strategy will become more complex as it continues to evolve. The more data you collect, the more sophisticated your strategy should be. That’s why it’s so important to build a strong foundation early in the process.

1. Research and understand your audience

Before we delve into the essence of digital marketing strategy, we need to spend some time uncovering the concept of target audiences.

The target audience is defined by specific data points such as:

• gender
• age
• education
• purchasing power
• location

By targeting specific demographics, your advertising budget is spent as efficiently as possible.

Of course, this brings us to the most challenging aspect of audience targeting: properly defining your audience.

You’ll want to start by analyzing your market. Determine whether you are working in a well-established market or developing one. Is your industry mainstream? Who are your main competitors?

Once you have clearly defined your market, think about the type of customer you are looking for. A good rule of thumb is to start with a general idea of your ideal customer and use data points to further narrow your audience.

Let’s say you sell high quality hiking backpacks. You can start by determining that one of your target audiences will be men who enjoy hiking. However, by looking at age, location, and income, you can get a much clearer picture of your ideal client. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to truly understand your audience, you need to determine how they spend their time in a digital media environment.

Find the most popular blogs in your industry, the online stores they store at, and the videos they watch. Tracking this information gives you insight into what they like to consume, which will make outreach and content creation much easier.

2. Establish objectives and key performance indicators for the digital marketing strategy

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when discussing digital marketing strategy, the concept of goal setting is usually glossed over. That’s a shame, because a clearly defined set of goals can endow your brand with some pretty useful benefits.

Remember those two key elements we mentioned earlier, transparency and experimentation? Proper goal setting ensures that your strategy will be easy to track and update.

Okay, goal setting is important. The real question is, how should you set your marketing goals?

When the average person thinks about goal setting, they tend to focus on qualitative goals. An example of a qualitative goal would be a desire to improve your brand image or increase your brand’s position in your industry.

You can begin to see the problem with these goals. Because qualitative goals are abstract, they are notoriously difficult to measure.

I’ve found that these abstract concepts are usually not useful for a mid-sized brand strategy. After all, if something is hard to measure, it’s also hard to improve.

Instead, focus on quantitative goals. If this is getting a little confusing, let’s try a little mental experiment.

Imagine we have two brands: brand A and brand B. Brand A wants to improve customer perception with its latest marketing campaign. They spend their advertising budget on creating content that presents their brand in a positive light and promote their content across multiple channels.

Even though they manage to get a lot of traffic, they quickly realize that there is a serious problem. They didn’t learn anything concrete from this campaign. Brand A doesn’t know exactly why they got so much traffic, and they’re not even sure what portion of that traffic resulted in conversions. With little focus on transparency or data collection, they walked away with no real path to growth.

Brand B had a different approach.

Instead of focusing on the abstract, they decided to find goals they could measure. Brand B didn’t just want to improve the customer experience, they wanted to increase the conversion rate of product X. Product X is responsible for 75 percent of their business, so maximizing the conversion rate of this product is a top priority for Brand B.

The goal is to increase the conversion rate of product X by five percent over the next six months. They aim to accomplish this by increasing the frequency of social media posts, creating video ads and monthly email newsletters.

Make no mistake, Brand B started the goal setting process by defining some abstract goals. The difference here is that Brand B went further and set tangible milestones for each abstract goal.#nbsp;Easy to measure, broken down into simple components to make experimentation possible.

If the goal is met, Brand B will have data showing the specific actions responsible for increasing conversions. If they don’t reach their goal, they will have clear information that shows which marketing components didn’t work properly. Either way, Brand B walks away with the information they need to make their next marketing campaign successful.

Set clear, measurable goals, identify key performance indicators that are important to your brand, and set goals that make long-term experimentation and growth possible.

3. Create your digital marketing strategy

Now that we have the basics covered, it’s time to develop and implement a digital marketing strategy.

The biggest challenge here is determining which advertising channel to focus on. If this step stresses you out, you are not alone. One of the reasons this decision can seem so daunting is the fear of investing in a channel that won’t work.

Fortunately, our structure of marketing strategies greatly reduces this risk. By starting with small, hyper-focused campaigns, brands can track how effective a particular channel is without spending thousands of dollars.

Interested in paid social media advertising? Set a goal, implement a little marketing, and determine how valuable Vkontakte advertising is to your brand. Using this data, you can predict how effective future campaigns will be in this channel.

In fact, by using this approach for multiple channels, you’ll quickly get a clear picture of which channels your audience is responding to. Constantly test marketing tactics and different target audiences to gather as much relevant data as possible.

Within a year, you’ll have a set of data that is easy to interpret and even easier to use in successful marketing campaigns.

In terms of content creation itself, there are generally two schools of thought. Sometimes your audience wants to be entertained. If it fits the brand and you’re confident in your content creation abilities, engaging content can be a powerful tool.

Maybe it’s a funny video ad, maybe it’s some memes on social media. It’s certainly not the right approach for everyone, but it’s certainly effective when used correctly. Take a look at Old Spice and see how its offbeat humor perfectly captures the brand’s voice.

Let’s say your brand just doesn’t lend itself to absurd internet humor. That’s where the second topic for reflection comes in. Educating your audience can be just as effective as entertaining them.

To be clear, when we talk about educating your audience, it doesn’t mean you’re going to educate them exclusively about your brand. Regardless of the industry, consumers have pain points that they need to address. They usually have industry-related pains for which you can’t be a direct solution.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re selling those hiking backpacks again. Can you please continue to create content about hiking backpacks? Absolutely, but there is so much more you can discuss!

If you sell products to the camping community, they have tons of questions about what grills to use, tips for first-time campers, how you should choose sleeping bags, etc. If you’re an expert in your field, you probably have content worthy of an entire blog in your head right now!

A good rule of thumb: if you wish you had known about it when you first started – it’s useful to someone You don’t need a huge advertising budget to connect with consumers. You just need to create marketing content that feels useful. If you can do this, you’ll be able to create really effective marketing campaigns.

4. Keep improving

Growth, especially long-term growth, is something that brands around the world struggle with. It’s one thing to collect all this data. Turning them into next quarter’s marketing campaign can quickly become a frustrating experience.

Here are just a few of the challenges brands face at the end of a marketing campaign.

• The brand doesn’t know what problems need fixing.
• The brand doesn’t fully understand its audience.
• The brand doesn’t see the value in its data.
• The brand has too much data and can’t make sense of it all.

While you can certainly call in professionals to help you analyze and improve, this isn’t always possible if you’re working with a limited advertising budget.

Setting clear, tangible goals and tracking results makes the process much easier, but I’ve found that some brands struggle with the concept of long-term growth. Specifically, what growth looks like in the real world.

Growth is not always a straight line. Sometimes you invest in five marketing channels and only one of them will give you a positive return on your spend.

With each new extension of your strategy, you will identify components that work and components that don’t. Experienced brands understand this and dedicate themselves to the process of facilitating the long-term growth of their business. They will explore the latest social media platforms They are trying out the latest marketing channels.

This approach probably won’t lead to astronomical growth in two months, but the goal of a solid digital marketing strategy is to not stumble into a marketing channel that delivers insane results. Why? Well, because sometimes those channels are no longer effective.

Instead of looking for a marketing unicorn, gather relevant, valuable data and slowly develop your long-term sustainable growth plan.

Frequently asked questions about marketing strategy

How can I get started in digital marketing?

Start with the basic building blocks of digital marketing. Understand your audience and set clear marketing goals. Start testing and keep experimenting until you find what works!

Is digital marketing easy?

Definitely not, but it’s far from impossible to find out! Dedicate yourself to the learning process, and you’ll end up with a digital marketing strategy that can drive long-term growth.

Is programming knowledge required for digital marketing?

Absolutely not! Many of the techniques you need to learn can be mastered on your own with enough patience and the right direction.

What are KPIs?

KPIs or key performance indicators are metrics that brands track to determine how effective their marketing is. Examples include: conversion rate, bounce rate, ROI, etc.

A guide to digital marketing strategy: conclusion

At first glance, the sheer depth of a digital marketing strategy can be daunting. There are dozens of different marketing channels. Lots of metrics to track. Honestly, there’s so much to learn, it’s no wonder some brands just outsource their marketing to agencies.

If you don’t have the budget for it or you just like to have complete control over your marketing, you need to commit to getting your digital marketing strategy right. Fortunately, getting started can actually be quite simple.

Take the time to understand your audience and make sure you set realistic marketing goals. Test your assumptions often and experiment until you find the right approach. Dedicate yourself to the process of long-term, sustainable growth by gathering relevant, valuable data and creating a solid marketing strategy.

It may seem simple, but make no mistake. If you can successfully implement these steps into your next strategy, you can outshine your competitors and create some really powerful marketing campaigns.