Sun Tzu, the famous military strategist wrote ‘Every battle is won before it is fought’. You can bet he’d have never thought that it would apply for businesses hundreds of years later. Only in a slightly different way- what we call the ‘digital battle’. As more and more businesses are plunging into the digital battlefield, it’s crucial that your digital game plan is well laid out. So how can you craft a digital marketing strategy that even Mr. Sun Tzu would be proud of?
Create your customer persona
Understanding you customer goes beyond surface level identification factors. By putting in the work to create a buyer persona, you will not only be able to understand your customer on a deeper, intrinsic level, but also to create a strategy that would hit the bull’s eye. Apart from quantitative information like age, sex, location and income, make your persona creation more detailed with psychographic data. His/her goals, challenges, hobbies, interests and priorities will help you a long way to concoct a strategy that relates strongly to your customers’ desires, needs and wants.
Time to define your goals
Whoever your customers might be, your marketing strategy must be in line with your overarching business goal. Your marketing goals could be long term or seasonal and should reflect the brand journey. And another important aspect of goal creation is to make sure that the results are measurable. Find out what digital marketing tools you need to measure the results produced by your digital marketing.
Identifying key channels
If you’ve gotten the first step of creating customer persona right, this is going to be easy. For instance you wouldn’t be marketing to a 45 year old single dad about life insurance on Instagram. Facebook might a better option. While carrying your digital marketing efforts on all digital channels on all mediums, by being judicious you will be able to target more accurately and trim costs spent on your digital budget.
Content is king
No arguments there. It’s what the internet is built on. Content can mean anything from emails, blogs, images, videos, social media posts- literally the things that your brand thrives on. Ensuring that you have a better content strategy is crucial for a strong digital strategy. However the type of content that you create must either add value to your customers or just interesting enough that your customers want to share in social media. It builds trust and positions you as a thought leader among your customers. Also working on the content will lend a helping hand in SEO for your website as well.
Create a content calendar
Not the one that gives you dates. But the one which organises when and how your created content gets distributed. You could take advantage of life events, important occasions, dates around which you could proliferate your content. Keeping customers engaged and interested in your brand requires two key things- consistency and frequency. Creating a content calendar is a sure fire way to just achieve that. Creating a content calendar will also help you to plan, audit content from your owned, earned and paid media platforms.
Execute the strategy
A strategy comes alive in execution. Now is the time to make sure one last time that you’ve got the time, money and resources to make your strategy go live. If you find a glitch, don’t fret, it’s also the time to step back, relax and solve the issue before you go bang on. A perfect strategy cannot have an imperfect execution. So treat this stage as important as the one where you created the strategy.
Monitor and measure progress
You might wonder, what does monitoring and measuring the efficiency of a strategy has to do with crafting the perfect strategy as this blog title suggested. While still you can make changes to your running campaign or strategy (if your strategy was flawed), learning from mistakes in the current strategy help you craft a better one the next time. Enough said. And with the benefit of digital marketing tools at your expense measuring the strategy’s progress, efficiency and results are easy.
We have been partners to various types of businesses and start-ups in helping them craft perfect digital marketing strategies with high ROI. If you’re interested in taking your business to the next level with digital marketing, get in touch with us at +91 44 4266 0601/ +91 90251 13344.