The world of digital marketing is ever-changing. To survive, you need to be adapting and evolving with the times, or at least, using the tools and techniques that are trending.

If your goal is to grow your online marketing program, it’s important to consider what approach will be most effective for your business. There are several popular models that you can follow, but you need to pick the one that will provide the best chance of success for your business.

The 4 Step Process to Find the Winning Strategy

Traditionally, marketing departments have been in charge of creating and managing marketing plans. However, with the rise of digital marketing, individuals within the departments have been tasked with the responsibility of creating marketing campaigns. While this was a good initiative, it has not always streamlined the process of finding a winning strategy.

To ensure that you’re making the right decision and selecting the best possible approach, you need to follow a defined process.

Step 1: Create a Vision and Mission Statement

The first step in the process is to create a vision and mission statement for your business. A vision statement provides the overarching framework for your marketing plan. For example, if you’re a financial firm, your vision might be to provide customer confidence by ensuring the security of their investments. Your mission statement is narrower in scope but lays out the details of what you will do to achieve your vision. In this case, your mission statement might read: “By 2020, we will have established a safe and secure environment for our customers to invest.”

Your vision and mission should be concise and easy to understand, yet specific enough to give your marketing strategy a clear direction. If you can, write down the purpose of your business and why you are in business. This will help you find your unique angle and provide a better understanding of your target audience.

Step 2: Research Your Niche

Having a clear vision and mission can help you narrow your focus when conducting research. You can use SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media to identify your niche and gain valuable insight into what approaches and strategies will be successful for your business.

For example, if we consider SEO, we can see that people are searching for “financial planning,” “accounting,” and “investment suggestions” and that these are all somewhat related concepts. If we look at Content Marketing, we can see that people are often searching for how to become a financial planner and reading content authored by CPAs or Accredited Investment Analysts (AIAs).

With your vision and mission in mind, you can target your niche with a solid SEO strategy and generate leads for your content creation.

Step 3: Create Keywords and Content Plans

The next step is to create a list of keywords and content plans. Keywords are words and phrases that people use to find information on the internet. If you’re searching for information on dog grooming, you might enter the following key words: “dog grooming,” “best shampoo for dogs,” and “how to bathe a dog.”

Your keywords should be chosen based on your vision and mission and should be closely related to what you are marketing. If you’re creating content to reach potential customers, your keywords should reflect what people are looking for. For example, if you are creating content about mortgage strategies, your keywords might include “mortgage,” “refinance,” and “home loans.”

The terms “Content plan” and “Keywords” are always used in conjunction. A content plan is a list of all the content you will create to reach your ideal target audience. For example, if you’re creating customer education content, you might have a content plan titled “Educational Content” that includes a blog post about why credit cards are important, a how-to guide about using credit cards, and a FAQ post about credit cards.

A content plan should be concise yet comprehensive. You should have a rough idea of how many pieces of content you will produce (e.g., a monthly blog post) and what you will call the pieces of content (e.g., “Why credit cards are important” might become the lead article on your blog).

The last step in the process is to create a top-level marketing plan. Your top-level marketing plan serves as the blueprint for your entire marketing program, including your SEO strategy, content marketing plan, and social media marketing plan. While it might sound odd to create a marketing plan at this stage, you need to do so to ensure that you’re not missing anything. If you have a team of people (e.g., an agency or in-house staff), you might want to create a top-level marketing plan that includes all the plans created by the team or individual marketing contributors.

Step 4: Determining the Production Values

Once you have a top-level marketing plan, it’s time to determine the production values. These are the things you’ll need to have in order to make your content accessible to the masses- e.g., platforms, format, length, and distribution. You’ll need to set a target audience for each piece of content and decide how you will reach them.

For example, if you are writing for an online audience, you might decide that a weekly blog post will be the best way to reach your audience. If you are speaking at a conference, you might decide that a short (four to five minute) video will be the best way to share your message. You might also want to consider using an infographics to display complex information in a simplified way.

The production values you choose will depend on your target audience and what methods you will use to reach them. Remember, your content will serve as your core marketing message so choose items that will make your message easily accessible to your audience.

The Evolution of Digital Marketing

Traditionally, marketing departments were in charge of creating and managing marketing plans. However, with the rise of digital marketing, individuals within the departments have been tasked with the responsibility of creating marketing campaigns. While this was a good initiative, it has not always streamlined the process of finding a winning strategy.

To ensure that you’re making the right decision and selecting the best possible approach, you need to follow a defined process.

Marketing plans used to be very static. They were created once, and then, for the most part, remained unchanged. However, with the evolution of digital marketing, marketing plans have become much more agile and evolve with the times.

This is a good thing! It means that you’re not being left out of the loop because someone else is making the decisions- you’re being involved because you’re an integral part of the process.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is an ever-changing field. Marketing departments used to create static marketing plans, but now have the job of updating these plans regularly as new strategies and techniques are implemented. This ensures that you’re always making the right decision and using the best possible approach for your business.