I hope you’re enjoying these last few months of the Summer holidays — whether you’re enjoying the long days of the UK’s hottest season or you’ve just returned from a quiet vacation. Either way, it’s time to get back to work!

If your business doesn’t have a digital marketing strategy yet, then it’s time to develop one. Otherwise, you’re risking falling behind your competitors who have prospered thanks to digital marketing.

So how can you make sure you create a successful online marketing strategy?

Firstly, you need to approach the task with integrity. The best strategy will be based on the results of diligent, objective analysis rather than subjective opinion. Furthermore, a successful digital marketing strategy needs to be developed with the end-user in mind. With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the different components of a digital marketing strategy.

What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Put simply, a ‘digital marketing strategy’ is a plan of action designed to achieve a specific marketing objective, within a defined period of time. The goal is to grow your business through digital channels. To achieve this, you need to integrate your digital marketing strategy into a larger marketing plan. This will include benchmarking the performance of your campaign, analyzing market trends and measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Only then can you determine what changes you need to make to achieve your goals.

Key Components of a DMP

So, what do you need to include in your digital marketing strategy? Well, you need to start by defining your target audience. This is a group of individuals who have expressed interest in your product or service and are therefore more likely to be influenced by your marketing messages. Next, you will need to establish the goal of your campaign. This is likely to be either growth marketing or profitability. Finally, you need to consider the metrics you will use to measure the success of your strategy.

Growth Marketing

If you’re looking for quick wins in your marketing strategy, then growth marketing (or growth hacking as it’s also known) might be the answer. As the name implies, this type of marketing strategy focuses on increasing your business’ reach and/or sales as quickly as possible. Most notably, growth marketing includes the use of digital marketing to grow your audience, social media to engage with your audience and SEO to drive traffic to your website.

Growth marketing is popular among businesses who want to make quick headway in a saturated market. Due to its emphasis on performance, growth marketers might not always align with the interests of your customers. However, if you utilize the right metrics, you should be able to determine whether or not growth marketing is right for your business.

Strategic Online Marketing Plan

So, how does one create a successful digital marketing plan?

Well, you need to start by identifying the goals and objectives of your online marketing campaign. This will form the foundation of your plan and serve as a reference point for measuring the success of your efforts. Next, you need to establish the target audience for your campaign. Once you have this, you can craft the right message to attract the right audience to your website.

Key Takeaways

A business’ primary marketing objective is to sell as much of their product/service as possible within a defined period of time. However, if you’re looking to develop a successful brand, then you should consider branding strategies that go beyond marketing. To grow your business, you need to be mindful of the strategies adopted by your competitors. Furthermore, how you position yourself within the marketplace can influence the success of your campaign. For instance, if consumers associate your product with negative connotations, then marketing your brand might not be the best strategy for securing brand loyalty. An example of this would be Coca-Cola’s recent ‘Frutta Martini’ campaign. The campaign aimed to position the brand as a purveyor of health and wellbeing. However, the drink was named after a nightclub in Milan where people drink fruit juice cocktails. This led critics to question whether or not the drink was in fact healthy and whether or not the brand was playing with its consumers’ minds. If you’re looking to promote a healthy lifestyle, then developing a branded product might not be the best route to take. Instead, you could look to associate your brand with positive connotations and reap the benefits.

Profitability

If your business’ primary marketing objective is to make a profit, then a marketing strategy that increases your sales is probably the route you should take. However, to be able to calculate the exact returns on your investment, you will need to consider the rate of sales you can expect to make, versus the amount of expenditure required to achieve this. Like growth marketing, the emphasis in this strategy is on performance and the use of metrics to track the results of your efforts.

To create a successful online marketing strategy, you need to consider the performance of your plan, versus the plan of your competitors. So, if your goal is to outperform your competitors, then this might not be the best route for your business. Instead, you could look to define a niche and invest in an advertising platform that targets a specific audience. Most notably, you should look to target audiences on the basis of geography, as well as other demographics, such as age or gender. Defining your target audience and establishing the goal of your campaign will provide a solid foundation for your plan.

For those interested in reading more, here are a few external links that might interest you: