Digital marketing for startups and corporates has become necessary, especially in the internet and social media era. Whatever your company’s size or the industry you are involved in, you have to create an integrated strategy for your online presence. This article will answer the question: What is digital strategy? We will also mention the top reasons you need it for your business.
What Is Digital Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy includes the plan you should follow to increase your overall online presence. It involves the steps you will take to improve your digital marketing techniques, including social media, organic search on search engines, and paid ads. There are several objectives of taking these steps, such as:
- Increasing your brand awareness.
- Increasing services/ products awareness.
- Boosting sales, thus increasing revenue.
You must not ignore setting a perfect digital strategy to help you achieve your online marketing goals on the most relevant platforms.
You have to know that there are no similar online marketing strategies. It would be best to create a unique strategy suitable for your business needs in the short, medium, and long terms.
These types should serve each other. For example, you should set short and intermediate-term goals that push you to the long-term ones.
8 reasons you need a digital strategy
After answering the question: “What Is Digital Strategy?”, let’s answer another question: What are the benefits of Digital Strategy?
The answer comes as follows:
1- Digital strategy directs you in the right way
Many business owners don’t conduct an integrated strategy to decrease their business costs as much as possible. Not having a clear plan significantly impacts the company’s marketing goals as they don’t know if they want to increase their potential customers or retain the existing ones.
If you seek advice from experts, they will tell you that you should have SMART goals to achieve. Setting SMART goals helps you use the needed resources exactly to accomplish your marketing and business goals.
2- Become aware of your market share
One of the most important benefits of digital strategies is that they help businesses identify their target audience and list the top competitors who provide the same products/ services, thus determining the business’s market share.
Setting perfect digital strategies enables you to identify your target customers, including their interests, age range, demographics, and behaviors.
3- Creating a compelling value proposition
Once you decide to be involved in the online competition, you must provide a compelling value. Providing value makes you unique among other businesses that offer the same services/ products. If you don’t provide a great deal for your customers, they may exclude you.
4- Avoiding time and money waste
Setting a perfect digital strategy help you not to waste your resources and time. Experts encourage investing in clear digital strategies because they prevent you from buying many tools or hiring several digital marketing agencies that can perform the same tasks.
Conducting a digital strategy enables you to create a well-established plan with your team, manage your resources, and adjust the tactics according to the market changes. Therefore, you will be able to achieve your marketing goals and measure your KPIs, consequently calculating your returns on investment later.
5- Understand your target audience
Conducting a perfect digital strategy helps understand your customers; you can achieve this goal by using analytical tools, receiving customers’ feedback, and listening to their needs.
6- Make sure that everyone is in the right place
Setting a clear digital strategy enables you to avoid stressing your employees. For example, if your plan includes search engine optimization and social media marketing activities, it is better to assign each task to a specialized team who has the required experience.
You can hire a professional digital marketing agency in Egypt that provides integrated digital marketing services through teams of experts who aid your business success.
7- Flexibility
Your marketing steps should be clear after setting an integrated digital marketing strategy. You will be able to adjust every tactic according to the market challenges that may impact your business negatively.
8- Boosts your revenue
Building well-designed digital marketing strategies aligned with sales professionals’ goals will result in significant revenue for your business.
What does a digital strategy involve?
There are several digital marketing types. They involve but are not limited to:
- Social media marketing: Directing marketing efforts to social media platforms is considered one of the most applied strategies regarding branding and engaging activities.
- Search engine optimization SEO: It refers to optimizing your website to rank on top of the search engine results pages.
- Paid ads (Social media ads and Google ads): We always advise our clients to allocate a budget for ads that boosts their brand’s awareness and increase conversions.
- Email marketing: We also suggest building email campaigns to reach more potential customers.
- Content marketing: Consider content marketing activities to provide your audience with valuable information which increases brand awareness, boosts traffic to your website, generates leads, and increases your sales.
How to create a digital strategy in simple steps?
Creating a digital strategy should include four main steps:
1- Setting your marketing goals
Setting marketing goals is the first step you need to take at the beginning of any marketing strategy.
It is considered a vital step. You can’t conduct a plan without identifying the main goals you want to achieve. You can ask yourself some questions to determine your marketing objectives:
- What do I want to accomplish in my business?
- Why do I want to conduct these goals?
- When should these goals be achieved?
- How will I accomplish them? And how will I track my progress?
Don’t forget to set SMART goals which are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-measured. Setting SMART goals enables you to develop relevant KPIs that you can measure.
2- Identify your target audience
Another critical step you need to consider while creating a digital strategy is identifying your target audience. You should ask yourself this vital question: Who will buy my products/services?
All brands have a group of clients who want to buy their products or services.
A buyer persona helps you detect the specific needs of these clients.
Thus, we recommend creating a detailed buyer persona for your potential/current clients.
A buyer persona is a fictional character created by professionals that includes all the details of the actual personnel, such as:
- Age range.
- Interests.
- Demographics.
- Job title.
- Location.
- Hobbies.
3- Choose the suitable marketing channel
Choosing a digital marketing channel is vital for your marketing activities’ success.
There are three types of media that you should consider:
- Owned media: It is the channels you own, including social media accounts, your website,
your blog, and any other things you produce. - Earned media: It refers to any media that you gain for free, including word of mouth,
guest posts, and reviews. - Paid media: It refers to media that you pay to catch the attention of your target audiences,
such as google ads and social media ads.
4- Consider building a content plan
It’s necessary to create a content plan relevant to your audience and suitable to
the platforms they are located. We recommend you to:
- Create different content formats (videos, images, podcasts, infographics).
- Add value to your content.
- Create a content calendar.
- Promote your content.
Learn more: Steps for the best social media marketing strategy in 2022
Golden tips for developing a perfect marketing strategy
The following tips may help you to develop an integrated marketing strategy:
- Perform a SWOT analysis for your organization (SWOT indicates strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
- Identify your business and marketing objectives as mentioned above.
- Select the most relevant marketing platforms and identify the goals achieved through them.
- Define your key metrics.
- Perform your analysis and compare your results.
- Optimize and adjust.
Performing successful digital marketing activities need much work and the cooperation
of many personnel. However,
choosing a well-established digital marketing agency that presents integrated marketing services will help you build your online brand in no time.
Also you can read about : Best Ways to Use Facebook for Marketing
