Breaking Down Digital Marketing Strategy – Where to Start
What is a digital marketing strategy?
OK – this blog is not for those who are well on their way to SEO and marketing success with their brands.
BUT
This blog is perfect for you if:
You don’t know where to start when it comes to digital marketing
You don’t get the link between the different types of online marketing
You want to boost traffic to your site but you don’t know how
You want some ideas on things you can be doing to market your business
So, if you are starting a brand to sell products online or you need to give your current business a kick up the bum – this is for you.
There is SO much content out there on the web when it comes to:
Digital marketing
Social media
SEO
Content marketing
Search marketing
Paid ads marketing – pay-per-click
Email marketing
PR
Branding
Starting an online business, in general
I want to make iteasy to just make a start.
Breaking down digital marketing, this blog can help you to start to create a marketing strategy for your brand. You can also see how all components of a digital marketing plan come together.
It also shows you that you don’t have to do everything all at once. You just need to pick a place to start.
Here, I hope to budge the sense of overwhelm that many business owners feel when they’re ‘not really into marketing’.
Let’s keep it simple.
Although I’ve put these points into a list, you don’t have to do them in any order in particular.
Research
When it comes to digital marketing – or any kind of marketing really – the most important thing is to know and understand your target customers.
How can you ever create something that effectively speaks to your target customer if you haven’t thought too much about who they are?
Even those with very broad products can go through this process to start to narrow down their marketing targets and create targeted campaigns.
What to do?
Start with a day of research.
Research your competitors – who are they, what are they doing, what do they do well and not so well etc.
Research your industry – know the market size, know the opportunities and threats within your niche.
Use your current analytics and social channels or – if your business is brand new – your imagination, to create target customer personas.
We will look at target customer personas in lots more detail in a later blog so keep your eyes peeled if this is something you’d like to look at more.
The personas create a more tangible idea of who your customers are. You can create one or 3 or 4 of these if it helps.
Once you know more about the industry, your competitors and your customers, you’ll start to have a more well-rounded vision of where the company fits into the market.
Branding
Branding is a concept that often gets left behind when starting a new business. This is mainly because it’s very hard to track results as it’s not a ‘do this and achieve this’ action.
However, branding is essential if you want to create a brand that customers notice, trust, buy from and return to.
Branding includes everything from your logo and colour palettes to your tone of voice throughout every piece of messaging. This includes your website copy all the way to a single tweet.
What to do?
Get your brand story down on paper. The history of your brand. Also include your brand vision for the future and your mission and ethos.
It can be helpful to bring a copywriter in here to help you with this if you don’t find it easy to put pen to paper, per se.
Create a tone of voice guidelines document. This will help to narrow down your brand voice.
If you’re not sure what a brand is or what the point is of spending time doing this, check out this blog where I’ve covered this in quite a lot of detail → What Is a Brand Voice?
Your tone of voice guideline document will fit in with your brand bible. TOV will include tag lines, brand personality info and what I like to call ‘do say, don’t say’ messaging.
Your brand bible will include your TOV guidelines, as well as imaging, logos, colour palettes etc.
These documents are used to maintain brand consistency in every way.
SEO
This is a really big topic. And you can read about SEO all over the web until you’re blue in the face.
So, in the interest of trying to keep it short and simple for total beginners, we’ll break it down like this:
On-page SEO & Off-page SEO.
SEO is Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, the marketing tactics you can employ to try to get your website seen on Google when your target customers make searches.
A lot of things come into play with SEO and we can’t talk about them all. So, let’s try an overview.
On-page SEO
This includes the content written on your site and the way it’s optimised for Google. This also includes blogging.
Off-page SEO
This is the things that aren’t happening directly on your website. It includes link-building and social media.
What to do?
Start by conducting some keyword research. We’ll cover this in much more detail in later blogs but you can Google keyword research to find out a little more.
This basically helps you to qualify which specific Google search terms you want your website to appear for when your target customer searches on Google.
Create or update your web copy so that you have rich, high-quality, relevant and unique content on every page of your site – including product pages.
This includes writing with headers, linking, adding optimised images and more.
Think about adding a blog to your site. Blogs can be a great way to engage your visitors but also gives you endless space to compete for relevant keywords. If you’re not sure if your website needs a blog, I detailed 17 reasons why you do, here.
Link-building is a complex but important part of any SEO strategy. This means getting credible high-authority sites to link back to your site, preferably with a dofollow link.
We could talk all day about link-building but in the interest of keeping this simple, wait for our later blog on the topic or get Googling.
Social Media
You’ve all heard of social media. And you’ve probably already set up your brand’s accounts. But what to do next? Post aimlessly as often as you remember/can be bothered and get disheartened by the little to no results?
Yeah, don’t worry, that’s pretty much what all brands do to start with.
But it’s ok, you just need a plan.
What to do?
Firstly, go back to your target customer personas and work out which channels they’re using the most. Focus on one or two channels to really get good at rather than trying 4 without real focus.
Next, create a monthly content calendar for each channel. This will outline what you’ll post each day. Here you can add images, captions, hashtags in advance so you don’t have to think about it every day.
Your daily posts might include FAQs, new announcements, competitions, daily tips, blog post promotions and so many other things. And it’s important to use your very own tone of voice for every one.
Use something like Buffer.com, Monday.com or Loomly.com to help you plan and schedule posts in advance.
Get consistent with your content. That’s the only way to pick up the pace and get it moving organically.
Email Marketing
So, for email marketing, you need to have an email database. If you don’t, this is really valuable so start today. Make sure you’ve got a CTA on your site in several places to join your mailing list and also do social media competitions etc. to encourage people to join.
What to do?
When you’ve got people to email, send out weekly, branded newsletters. Again, create a content calendar for this so that you stay focused.
Paid Media
So, this is the type of digital marketing that you pay for to get people to click to your site.
You need a budget for this so it’s definitely something to think about first.
You can pay for ads on places like Google and Facebook and target these ads very specifically to get shown to your niche target customer. Because of this, people find more instant returns than organic SEO. However, it requires a decent budget to compete.
What to do?
If you don’t know about paid media, you can learn and experiment yourself. But this can be a quick and easy way to spend a lot of money and yield no or little results.
Unless you have the willingness or time to really learn how this works, it’s going to be worth considering a paid marketing specialist to create, manage and optimise these campaigns for you.
PR
PR in its most traditional sense is creating press releases and sending them out to publications in the hope that they will talk about your brand.
Most brands will hire a PR company to take care of this for them due to their invaluable contacts.
When it comes to digital PR, it works in a very similar way.
What to do?
If you plan to do your own PR – especially to begin with – start making a list of online publications that might be interested in your brand or product.
Create a press release that announces the brand or product. And get it sent out.
Remember to monitor your results too.
Influencer Marketing
Lastly, I wanted to make a quick mention of influencer marketing. Not new anymore, influencer marketing will be a part of your social media strategy. It links your brand up with relevant influencers online.
What to do?
You might give influencers free products to post about your brand or you might pay them to post. They will then create content and post to their social media to get you new followers, more online engagement and – hopefully – more sales.
You might want to outsource someone who does influencer outreach for this part of your plan as it can be a time-consuming process and needs to be well-managed.
And, breathe.
Ok, that’s it.
Digital marketing strategy broken down.
We’ve not included even nearly everything. But we’ve made a start and that was the point.
I hope this is helpful to those who are not sure where to start. Or those who are overwhelmed with the order of things and how they all work together.
I would be more than happy to chat in more detail with you about any of these aspects of digital marketing. And I can let you know what I can help with, who I would recommend for things I can’t help with or simply just lend an ear and offer some advice. Get in touch at kate@lifestylecopywriting.co.uk.
We’ll cover all these topics in more detail on the blog as the weeks go on.
Until then…
