A digital marketing campaign promotes your business online, drives an influx of valuable traffic to your website and helps you establish brand awareness.

In short, it is a key to succeeding online that also brings a substantial return on investment. However, without a general idea or a plan on how to conduct your digital marketing, you may end up wasting time and money on failed projects.

In this article, we will discuss five obligatory steps for setting up a successful digital marketing strategy that will help your business grow online.

1. Define Your Objectives

Setting the goals for your digital marketing campaign will give you a general idea on what you want to achieve with it.

You may want to boost your brand awareness or engagement on social media platforms. You may also want to grow your email list or increase visibility on search engine results.

The objectives you will pursue will depend on the nature of your business, the current circumstances and your long-term mission. 

You should consider tracking the following goals for your digital marketing campaign:

  • The number of followers: This metric establishes the general interest in your business. Measuring the rate at which your followers increase is more useful than looking at the raw number, because not all of your followers will be actively interested in your offering.
  • Search engine optimization: You will likely undertake a series of tasks in order to improve your search engine optimization because SEO is a major part of many digital marketing campaigns – like the number of backlinks your website gets from other sources. You can get a good indicator of how well your campaign is going by tracking your SEO score’s growth. 

It is advisable to use the SMART framework that refers to setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely.

For instance, if your goal is raising  brand awareness and driving more qualified visitors to your website, you can set your objective  the way any expert digital agency would:

Metric: Get 1,500 new site visitors by the end of the month

Tactic

  • Publish relevant, well-researched, long-form blog articles that solves the audience’s pain points
  • Optimize blog articles for search engines
  • Promote blog content on social media and engage with followers to make them visit the website
  • Track the results with analytics tools and adjust the campaign where necessary

The key here is to get very specific with your goals. Achieving very specific goals will bring a greater ROI to your digital campaign.

2. Set Your Target Audience And Buyer Persona

At this point, you need to determine the audience your digital marketing campaign should reach.

The first thing to understand is that you can’t appeal to everyone with your products or services. Not everyone is interested in what you have to offer, so you have to think in terms of a very specific group of people that you can bring value to.

This is why you need to establish your target audience and, better yet, your buyer persona. This is the “avatar” of your ideal customer, the detailed description and embodiment of all the traits, habits and variables of your highly qualified prospects.

Your buyer persona represents the people who are most likely to engage with your digital marketing efforts and buy from you. Unlike a target audience which is fairly broad, a buyer persona should be defined in a lot of detail.

To find out who your buyer persona is, research your market and conduct a survey to establish their:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Gender
  • Income
  • Interests
  • Hobbies
  • Online behavior
  • Pain points
  • Motivations
  • Needs
  • Etc.

These variables will influence the aspects of your digital marketing such as visuals, messaging, copy, geotargeting, marketing channels and more.

3. Evaluate Your Budget

It is quite easy to overlook the step concerning your total budget for the digital marketing campaign. Skipping it, however, could prove very costly for your business in more ways than one.

It is critical to set a realistic campaign budget for two main reasons: it serves as a main restriction on what your marketing campaign can achieve and dictates your resource allocation. 

Digital marketing is substantially cheaper and more cost-effective than other forms of conventional marketing. This means that you will likely have a better ROI and that the same amount of money will achieve more than it would in a non-digital environment.

4. Decide On A Message

A marketing campaign consists of multiple elements, but none is more vital than messaging.

The message should have a purpose that attracts your ideal customers and invites them to take action that involves your business.

A messaging plan that envelops valuable content and consistency is an aspect of digital marketing strategy that you will need to execute on every channel. 

To ensure  consistent messaging for your campaign across multiple channels, consider these elements coined in Medium’s Marketing Playbook:

  • Positioning messaging that includes a tagline, a slogan, a positioning statement and a brief description.
  • Target customers and their role in the buying process.
  • Value messaging consisting of a value statement, value bullet points, product features and proof points.

5. Establish Your Digital Assets

Finally, establishing your digital assets marks the final step in creating a thorough digital marketing strategy.

By digital assets we mean paid media, owned media and earned media. As defined by a top Miami web design agency:

  • Paid media refers to getting your ideal customers to your website or any other channel of choice via paid platforms, like Google AdWords, PPC advertising, YouTube ads, social media ads and so on.
  • Owned media is any property that belongs to your business and is operated and controlled by your business. This is media unique to you, like your website, social media channels, blog section, infographics, videos, podcasts, downloadables and more.
  • Earned media includes customer reviews, testimonials, PRs, guest posts, user-generated content and other types of media exposure and attention that you don’t pay for. In order to get your share of earned media, strive to provide an excellent customer experience and encourage people to talk about your brand online by rewarding them for their loyalty to your business.

Conclusion

Any successful business rests on a foundation laid by a strong digital marketing strategy. Cheaper and more influential that traditional marketing, it requires a strategic and thoughtful approach to make the most of it.

By following these basic outlines for a successful digital marketing plan, you will define actionable steps you need to take to achieve sustainability, growth and prosperity.