The Complete Guide In Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy In 2019
If you want to dominate the business or niche in 2019, you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy for your business.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
According to Hubspot, digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help you achieve your company goals through carefully selected online marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a particular line of business.
What makes a digital marketing strategy important?
Digital marketing strategy is important because it helps the company, employees and shareholders get align with the company’s missions and visions, through strategic goals.
Instead of trying to generate leads and sales from all platforms, digital marketing strategies provide a proper guideline for everyone in the company that they can focus on.
Now, let’s get started with ways to create a digital marketing strategy for 2019 and beyond.
1. Determine the goals
Goal setting is important when it comes to creating a digital marketing strategy.
A few common questions that you can ask yourself are:
- How can you incorporate digital marketing with your business strategy?
- What do you want to achieve using digital marketing?
- Who is going to get involved with digital marketing strategy?
- What are the intervals you are using to analyze the effectiveness of the marketing strategy?
- How much budget do you have (or have in mind) for digital marketing?
This is the biggest misconception on digital marketing
Creating social media profiles is free — but not digital marketing. Effective digital marketing strategy involves many moving parts and the ‘oil’ to ensure everything is moving correctly is by allocating sufficient budget for digital marketing.
Digital marketing is not a magic wand that allows you to achieve wonders in just 30 days. As a matter of fact, it is an ongoing effort to build brand visibility, lead generation and trust on digital platforms before you can finally put sales generation on autopilot.
2. Layout the list of ‘weapon’ of choice
I’m not asking you to arm your business.
What you need to know is that digital marketing is huge. To be exact, digital marketing is enormous.
There are many platforms that allow you to run your digital marketing strategy. For example:
- Search engine marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Social media management
- Influencer marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, there is no one size fits all. Each industry and business is different — thus, you need to work out a solid plan to get it right for you.
If you have limited staffs — focus on just a few platforms of choice. You wouldn’t want to drive your team crazy by giving them too much work to do (since digital marketing is very time consuming).
If you have more staffs — engaging with more digital marketing strategy will help leverage the true power of digital marketing, as well as getting wider coverage.
3. Allocating a workable budget for digital marketing
Most business owners I worked with are more than happy to engage with digital marketing. However, they often back down once they see the costs or the investments required to get digital marketing work for them.
Digital marketing is only effective when you have enough budget to run. More importantly, whoever has the most money to acquire a lead wins!
How much money should you allocate for digital marketing?
It varies depending on the type of digital marketing solutions and strategies you have in place.
Typically, I would say a safe bet is anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 (based on your local currency) per month if you are going outsource. If you are doing in house digital marketing, it should be anywhere between 1,000 to 2,000 (based on your local currency).
4. Analyze and reconcile
Digital marketing is not a magic wand … where you will get tons of traffic, leads and sales over night.
Instead, digital marketing is a continuous project to help your business with lead generation and revenue.
To get this right, you need to analyze the results from digital marketing to really understand what works and what doesn’t.
Analyzing involves data and tracking the response rate you get from your digital marketing efforts. It will give you important information to help you determine the effectiveness of the selected digital marketing efforts.
Business owners should analyze their digital marketing efforts at least once every month while taking the opportunity to make change/tweaks to the marketing strategies.
5. Tweaking digital marketing solutions
Digital marketing is all about tweaking the strategies. A good digital marketing marketer will focus on tweaking the strategies from time to time.
If you are business owner, encourage your team to voice out their crazy ideas. After all, there is no idea not worth mentioning and considering.
If you are a digital marketing consultant like me, don’t be afraid to share new ideas with your clients (with some facts and stats).
Things you can tweak:
- Changing from one platform to another
- Changing the approach (different content etc.)
- Use different forms of media instead
- Increase/reduce the budget for paid advertisement
- Use different form of paid advertisement (Google ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn ads, Pinterest ads, Instagram ads, etc.)
- Change/tweak the different type of target audience
There are way more things you can tweak (compared to the above) and the only limit you have is the sky!
6. Seek for digital marketing professionals
Here’s the thing.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn make online advertising so easy. But why do most business owners fail when they try doing digital marketing on their own?
Because digital marketing is complicated.
If you ever need help, don’t be afraid to seek for help especially from digital marketing consultants. There are many agencies who are providing free quotations and consultations — in which you can take opportunity off!
Even my own digital marketing agency is doing that. Fill up this form and we will get back to you with free consultation!
7. Plan your strategy in advance
Last but not least, do you know that you shouldn’t jump into digital marketing simply because everyone is doing it?
Digital marketing requires planning — and you need planning to do it right.
This means that you should focus on choosing the right online marketing strategy with the expected date of launch.
This will give you and your team a size-able time to prepare and take sufficient actions to make sure the goals are met.
On average, it take anywhere between one to four weeks to plan a digital marketing strategy for the next quarter. Taking any longer than that means you are either overthinking or simply not focused enough to implement digital marketing into your business strategy.
Summary: Create your digital marketing strategy today
Digital marketing is required and it is important for your business success in 2019.
Get started right now and start planning your digital marketing strategy using these seven tips above.
