5 key foundations of a Digital Marketing Strategy

I’m sure you have already started the process of developing your digital marketing strategy and how it can be applied to your business or blog.  You’ve probably considered what your competitors are doing online, how your customers and prospects buy online, how they use the internet and technology in their daily lives and how you can exploit this to the advantage of your business.  If so you are on the right lines – early planning and consideration in these areas is the key to long term success.

To help you in the planning stage, you need to understand and question when developing the foundations of your digital marketing strategy.

5 key Factors of a Digital Marketing Strategy

1.       Your Customers – Who are your customers and what are they looking for from you or your competitors?  What is your product and/or service proposition to them?  How do your customers use digital technology, what channels do they engage with and how do you use this knowledge to engage in a productive long term relationship with them?

 2.       Your Competition  - who are your main competitors online and are they the same as your offline competitors?  Try to experience their online customer journey and understand what they are doing well and emulate them.  Understand what they are not doing so well and learn from their mistakes.  Is there anything they are not doing or offering and could this be used as your USP or differentiator against their offering?   Lastly, don’t limit yourself to looking at local competition, after all, your competition now could be anywhere in the world!

 3.       Your Business – take an honest look at yourself and your business.  Are you ready to completely embrace digital marketing?  Do you have the right skills and infrastructure in place?  What are the risks and contingencies for online downtime?  Can you cope with a sudden upsurge in business transactions?  Do you have the right insurance cover to protect you and your businesses liabilities for example if you begin selling your products globally you may need wider products liability insurance, professional indemnity if you are providing advice or if you are storing customer data online you may want insurance protection against damage caused by viruses, hackers and electronic ID theft (if in doubt consult your insurance broker)?

4.       What you want to achieve – knowing this is a key part of your digital marketing strategy.  Are you looking to generate online sales, develop a source for online leads, improve your brand awareness, all of the above or something different?  The choices you make can become your online goals used for measuring the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

 5.       How you can measure your results – you will recall that I said everything online is measurable in real-time.  You can track your traffic and compare your progress against your predefined goals and key performance indicators (KPI’s).  So at any point in time, you will be able to see how your digital campaign is progressing if certain channels are delivering more traffic than others and what your conversion rates are.   You can also understand how much of the traffic you generate provides tangible value to your business.  With this incredible depth of understanding, you can measure, tweak, refine and continually reappraise how your digital marketing strategy is doing.

In my next post, I shall touch on how to build an effective website.