Building An Effective Digital Marketing Strategy: A Beginners Guide  

Your digital marketing strategy acts as a roadmap for your business, helping you outline the tasks you need to complete in order to generate results and giving you an indication of what your business should be aiming for. Without a strategy it can be difficult to determine exactly what it is that you’re getting right and if the results you’ve produced are effective or not. 

If you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your marketing results then a marketing strategy matters and essential for all businesses, working to help you identify audiences, determining how much you’re expected to spend and also helping you keep your marketing channels consistent across all channels. 

Here’s our guide to building your digital marketing strategy, ensuring that your digital marketing efforts create a huge impact online. 

Set Your Objectives 

The first thing you should do when starting to build your marketing strategy is to define your overall objectives, making your marketing mission fit into your overall business plan. You should aim to know what you want to achieve from your marketing efforts, your mission should be to achieve this goal through setting and measuring specific KPIs. By getting specific with your KPIs and identifying just what it is you should be achieving you can ensure that you are aiming for positive results. 

Do Your Research 

The next step in creating your plan is to carry out research within the industry, through research and analysis you can develop more of an understanding of current trends and gain a fresh insight into audience behaviour. Through carrying out this research you can learn from consumers and ultimately use this information to define the right audience for your business, helping you discover a number of opportunities that can give real value to your business and marketing strategy.   

Engagement Plan

Engagement planning allows you to determine how you can best communicate with your audience, helping you plan the best ways to communicate, connect with and engage with the best audience for your business. Engagement planning is important as it allows you to create engaging messages that are not only compelling but also tailored to your specific audience and their wants and needs, something that plays a huge role in your digital marketing strategy.  

Think About Budget 

It’s important for your business to be aware of and keep track of it’s marketing budget, something that needs to be included in your marketing strategy. Don’t forget to define your overall marketing budget, determining what exactly you’ll be using your budget for, allocating where specific portions of your budget will be going and giving you a rough idea of how much certain marketing channels are likely to cost in the likelihood you’re using paid promotion.  

Make Your Plan Flexible

It’s likely that your digital marketing strategy won’t be perfect from the start and that’s not a problem, not every assumption you make about your plan is going to correct as you can’t predict what exactly how your business will run and your audience will behave. This is why it’s so important that you think about your plan as flexible, making changes where and when necessary, based on your measurements and results, rather than viewing it is a structured document that can’t be changed. 

An insufficient online presence can cause huge problems for your business and can hinder the impact your brand has online. With a well thought out digital marketing strategy that supports your plans and your business mission, you can increase the chances of reaching new audiences, as well as strengthening your relationship with your current audience. 

Whether you’re a new business or an established business looking to improve it’s effectiveness, you need a strategy that can help your brand achieve it’s goals, rather than wasting time and money on tactics that don’t have a proper foundation. 

To learn more about the benefits of marketing strategies and digital marketing techniques, why not speak to an expert today?