What You Can Expect to Cover in a Digital Marketing Strategy
Many business owners recognise the need to create a digital marketing strategy and learn how to use the digital world better for their marketing.
While we are strong believers that marketing is not just about the digital world, that it has become more and more important to effectively advertise and market yourself using online platforms. It’s cheaper, often more targeted, and it’s easy to learn, adapt and alter once you understand the analytics and what it’s showing you.
This is What You Can Expect to Cover in a Digital Marketing Strategy
First decide, is it a social media strategy or is it a digital marketing strategy? A social media strategy will just look at the social media platforms and how to use them. A digital marketing strategy will take it a bit deeper and look at how your websites are performing, what your SEO looks like, whether you understand Analytics and social media. You’ll take a look at all the activity that you’re doing online, how it all fits together, and work out a way to make it better, more effective and have activity that you can do on an ongoing basis to build and grow. It will include organic (which is free activity) and paid. We will help you work out which parts you need to outsource, which parts you can do in-house and which bits you might need help setting up and then do in-house.
What Social Media Platforms are Covered
Some agencies will cover all social media platforms including snapchat and tiktok.
We don’t. Mainly because people are struggling with what they already have and not nailing it. We’re a huge believer in getting the basics right, and making it manageable for you.
So, when we do a digital marketing strategy, we cover the basic marketing platforms in terms of social media. We cover Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn especially.
This isn’t just about your feed. It is all about using stories, building audiences and using influencers (if appropriate)
It’s a good idea to understand how each platform works, and why it’s good for different audiences, even if you’re not going to use it. It allows you to make decisions on your activity, and a choice against a platform can be just as powerful as the choice to use another.
We tend to also take a look at Pinterest and YouTube (depending on the type of business)but the top three are the core ones that we work through because those are the ones that clients tend to need the most.
You need to know how to create posts for them and plans. You should be shown how to prep and how to schedule. You need to understand, and read the results and know how to grow your audience using these platforms.
Understanding what sort of content works best on which platform is vital — as well as having some structure and guidance about how to create inspiring and effective content.
Making it all manageable for consistent action is essential as it means the training and strategy is not wasted!
Take a Look at Your Website
It’s important to understand how your website is functioning and whether it’s converting visitors. How is it managing to capture data and capture leads? Are those leads are getting fed through to a CRM or something that’s going to store that information?
Your website is a powerful machine. The usability, content, layout and call to actions are all super important. If you’re not getting leads (or getting the wrong ones), this needs to be remedied or any other marketing leading people to your website will be wasted.
For us, taking a look at marketing automation and CRM is normally outside the scope of a strategy, but it doesn't mean we don’t consider steps you may need to take to make more of your website leads. It’s an important part of the big digital marketing picture.
SEO
Take a look at your search engine optimization (SEO). This includes looking at your on-page SEO (that’s the stuff on your website) and your off-page SEO. (See if are you linking up with the right websites to help build your visibility on the very crowded space that is the internet.)
If we’re doing your strategy, we’ll give you some advice on how to do some of it yourself, and what to look for in a specialist if that’s your preference. There are some very simple actions you can take to improve your SEO.
We also spend some time looking at Google My Business, especially if you’ve got a business targetting locals.
How to Maximise the Benefits of Digital Advertising
If you’re running Adwords, you can receive some advice about whether they’re working well. Getting an audit of what’s working and not working can be really helpful (and save you thousands!).
We’d personally advise you on whether you should run them yourselves or not and how you should set them up if you’re going to. If you’re working with an agency, you’ll be able to go back with the right questions to get the changes you need.
You also may need a plan and support with your Facebook ads, both for retargeting for traffic ads (to get people to your website) and conversion goal ads. Options depends on whether you’re an e-commerce site or B2B business. (We prefer to set them up for you, make sure they’re working really well and then train you on how to use them yourself. We’ve found otherwise you’re still struggling after training!)
(Just to clarify — facebook ads and hitting the BOOST button on a facebook post are not the same thing. )
Why consider Identify?
If you choose to work with us on your strategy, our whole focus is to find ways for you to grow your business more confidently, operating with resources you’ve got internally, be it you or someone else in the team so you’re not having to outsource. Lots of clients may then choose to come back to us on a monthly or quarterly basis just to read their information, optimize and maybe take over some of the bits that they don’t love doing, or don’t have the capacity for.
It’s easier than you think to run your digital marketing if you have a really effective user-friendly digital marketing strategy. If it looks at everything that you’re doing online, and how it works best together and how to get your leads, get people to your website to become leads, get people interacting and building a community with your online behaviors and then getting those translated into sales, you are set.
Rachel Klaver is the marketing strategist for Identify Marketing, an agency specialising in strategy, training, digital sales funnels, marketing automation and CRM. Identify are Active Campaign Consultants and Zoho Partners
