Foolproof Pointers For An Effective Marketing Strategy

Most entrepreneurs who have been in the game for a few years will agree that there’s a lot of businesses out there which could be taking a more hands-on approach to their digital marketing. A huge proportion of brands don’t have any defined digital marketing strategy at all, and even those that do have one haven’t necessarily integrated it into their actual activities. If you’re lacking a solid strategy that you can follow with certainty, it’s going to be hard to stimulate growth and innovation, and gain any measurable results you’d have otherwise. If you’ve decided to start from scratch, here are some pointers for a highly effective digital marketing strategy.

Learn from your Mistakes

You don’t have to, and really shouldn’t, start drafting a digital marketing strategy if you’re still in the dark about your brand’s position. By analyzing your successes and failures in the past, you’ll find it easier to establish the best KPIs for your business. Choose a time period roughly the same length that you’re planning for the strategy you’re drafting, gather all the hard data you can, and then start having a closer look at it. Look for any major dips in your traffic and conversion rates, then try to determine what it was in your marketing strategy that led to this issue, and what you did to get out of the slump. You can use tools such as Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports to compare the progress you’ve made in a given period compared to your competitors. As you look back through your past performance, you should always be asking yourself if you’ve forgotten any factors. Any post like this: Crazy Things People Forget About SEO will show you just how much there is to overlook when it comes to executing a good digital marketing campaign.

Speak your Audience’s Language

While you’re busy strategizing what your business is going to do in terms of its future marketing, make sure you’re not forgetting about the people who you’re actually trying to reach out to. You already know who your target audience is, but in many cases, they’re the first thing that we forget when we’re too wrapped up in KPIs, channel selection and fretting over the budget. Many of your competitors are going to be making this mistake, so make sure you don’t! Any good marketer should link every step in their strategy back to the audience, striving to cater to their emotional needs, and to satisfy their deepest desires. The best way to do this is through personas. Working from your basic demographic stats, figure out the kind of specific problems that your target audience is facing, and that your product or service can help them to solve. This, in turn, will allow you to delve into their deeper emotional desires, their aspirations, their fears, their goals, and everything else that makes them tick. While drafting these personas, you should also be thinking about the kind of people and forms of media that will be able to influence your target market best. This will allow you to identify the kinds of influencers you should be reaching out to for the best possible results. You can’t just create a strategy and then hope that there’s an audience who fits in with it, so make sure you’re coming back to your target market through the planning process.

Don’t Make It Too Rigid

As your marketing strategy begins to take form, make sure you’re not sticking to it too rigidly. This may sound like it defeats the purpose of the plan in the first place, but in today’s climate, it’s very important to keep your strategy flexible so that you can tweak it according to the course your business is taking. Despite all the data you have access to, and how easy it is to pick out patterns in your successes and failures, you can never really predict how your customers are going to behave, and react to the materials you dangle in front of them. Therefore, it’s essential that you can monitor every little facet of your strategy’s performance, and change them where it’s needed. Form a measurement and monitoring plan that coincides with your KPIs, and check the success of individual elements regularly. If you see a slump in your engagement, traffic or conversions, then get to work isolating different elements, and identifying what is and isn’t working. Whether it’s the time you’re posting or the ad taglines you’re using, you need to be able to pin down the dead weight and then cut it off from your strategy.