Your website. Your marketing materials. Your sales process. What do these have in common? They’re all very important elements of your digital marketing strategy, and they should all be reflected in your marketing automation tool. Whether you use HubSpot or not, you need to have a clear idea of how things work together so when something is off, you can easily find out where the problem is.

1. Create a digital marketing plan

The very first step in the road to effective digital marketing is creating a plan. This plan should set out exactly what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, and how you’re going to do it. It should also include an objective, measurable metric to determine whether or not your efforts were successful. The better your plan, the better your execution. Without a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve, creating digital marketing content such as blogs, articles, or social media platforms is pretty much a waste of time.

2. Measure the results of your plan

To ensure you’re delivering the results you’re aiming for, you need to measure the results of your plan. This means collecting data on the activity of your website or blog (more on this later) and analyzing it to determine whether or not your efforts were successful. The better your measurement, the better your understanding of whether or not your plan was effective. A/B testing is one of the simplest tools for getting accurate data without too much effort. Remember: you can’t improve what you can’t measure. This step is all about establishing a baseline and tracking changes retrospectively. You can use tools like Google Analytics to get started.

3. Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve established a baseline, you can start to measure the results of your plan. The first step is to identify the key performance indicators (known as KPIs in marketing). These are the statistics that you’ll track to determine the effectiveness of your plan. The better your grasp of these numbers, the better your ability to determine the success of your plan. You should also consider what makes these numbers important to you—is it the number of clicks on your website’s landing pages, the amount of time users spend on those pages, or the number of orders your product has generated?.

4. Choose the right content

The second step in the road to effective digital marketing is choosing the right content. This could be anything from a blog post to an e-book, a sales letter, or even a social media campaign. As a general rule, the more informative the content, the better. Vague, banal content doesn’t attract readers—it may even have the opposite effect. A good rule of thumb is: the more you can educate your target audience on the issues and topics your product or service addresses, the greater your chance of converting them into paying customers. Your content should:

• Be concise.
• Be to the point.
• Be easy to understand.
• Be interesting.

If you’re struggling to come up with content ideas, look at the types of articles your competitors are publishing and try to find a way to give your articles a similar vibe. What do successful blogs and websites do? They publish helpful, how-to guides and articles on a wide range of topics usually related to their niche. If you can emulate their style, you’ll be able to brand yourself as an expert in your industry.

5. Distribute and promote your content

The last step in the road to effective digital marketing is distributing and promoting your content. You can do this through traditional methods such as publishing articles in popular magazines or using social media to send out an alert when your content is shared or liked.

However, today, content marketing isn’t restricted to traditional methods. Thanks to the rise of the digital marketer, people are much more open to new ideas and ways of doing things. If you want to be successful in today’s digital marketing world, you need to be flexible and willing to try new things. This means you’ll need to distribute and promote your content using online marketing methods.

The better your content, the greater your chance of attracting and retaining customers. Good luck out there.