7 Steps in Creating a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing Strategy….Yes, speaking those words can cause heart palpitations because of the overwhelming thought of implementing something new.

As a business owner, no matter how small or large your business is, you should start thinking about a marketing strategy. It’s never too late to start implementing a new plan of action for your business. You can create a 30-60-90 day plan and then keep building on a 1 year, 5 year or 10 year plan. If the thought of creating and planning your marketing strategy overwhelms you, then you should be working with a Digital Marketing Strategist.

What’s a Digital Marketing Strategist? Well, I’m a person who can take a peek into your business world and help you create a unique strategy that you can easily implement. As a strategist, I take a look at your business and help you implement a unique strategy to get you started OR I will help you brainstorm your current offerings and decipher where your energy should be focused. Another thing a strategist can do is look at your current business model and create new, unique ideas that could help you grow your business. There may be items you haven’t realized your wasting your time on or maybe you just need to tweak something.

Today, I want to share with you my 7 Steps to creating a successful Digital Marketing Strategy. This is the exact strategy that I have started sharing with my clients to set them up for success!

1. Create a Plan of Action

By not having a plan in place, you do not have a clear vision to start achieving your goals. You don’t know what projects need to be prioritized. You don’t know the true value of your offers. You don’t know who you need to reach in order to start building an email list or engagement on your platforms. Without a plan, you don’t have a strategy to grow your business.

What happens when you have a plan? Amazing things can happen when you actually have a strategic plan or roadmap in place for your business. What are the perks? Well, you will have direction and focus for your business. You’re not creating unnecessary content, funnels, ads, or whatever it is you would be wasting your time or money on.

You will have specific goals and a way to measure the results. If your goal is to build your email list, you will have a goal to have a certain number of email addresses by a certain timeframe. If your goal is to sell a certain number of content offerings or products, you’re going to set a goal so you know how much marketing will need to be done to hit that goal.

With a plan, you are able to create a unique value ladder, discover your targeted audience, and discover the necessary building blocks you will need to implement your plan. Will you need a Lead Generation or Sales Funnel? Will you need online advertising? Do you know where you audience is hanging out at? All these things will become a part of your overall plan of action.

2. Create a Brand that resonates with your business representation.

You want to create an emotional experience for your potential audience. If you ONLY want to work with a specific audience, you will need to narrow down what resonates with them. This is why I recommend always to work with a Graphic Designer or Brand Strategist. This individual can help narrow down what message your branding is trying to tell people. This should include brand colors, fonts, logo, tagline(if you want one), social media headers, website wireframe and whatever else is recommended for your specific brand.

Your brand identity across different platforms needs be cohesive. You are aiming for your business to become a reputable, knowledgeable and professional business. Part of your strategy should be creating a cohesive brand across multiple channels. As you’re growing your business, it’s growing a reputation. As you start to market your business to your audience, you want your potential audience to recognize who you are, what you represent, and what your business is about. You want your business to make a name for itself, but you must give it a face. You want your brand to have a positive and respectable reputation.

The most important thing you need to do while you’re building your website is to place your Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. Even if you’re not running ads, place this little bit of code on your website to help measure your traffic your site is receiving. This will be important in the future when building your audience, so you should go ahead and do this.

3. Building an audience

If only the old approached worked... “If you build it, they will come.” Every business starts out with zero followers and zero subscribers. So let’s start with defining what is an audience:

An Audience is:

• A person that read your content and actively seek out new content created by you.
• A person that subscribers to every content upgrade, purchases everything you offer and followers you on all your social platforms.
• A person that opens every email address.
• A person that engages in your Private group or on other social media platforms.

But how do you discover your audience...To discover your audience, you will need to spend some time researching. Go back to what your business is about, think about how you could serve a potential audience. What content are they searching for? What solution are they needing? Where are they hanging out at? What are they reading? Who are they following on social media?

Once you have a general idea of who you’re trying to connect with, you can then start interacting and engaging those individuals.

Remember, a perfect audience isn’t created overnight, instead is takes time and research to narrow down.

Also, one small word of advice, don’t start advertising on Facebook without having some idea of who your audience is. You will only be throwing money down that drain.

4.  Interacting with your new audience

Now that you have narrowed your audience, you now want to start focusing on giving them an experience. With any business, you need to start reaching these individuals and start interacting. The BIGGEST thing you should focus on is building valuable content and resources.

You don’t want to start off with a salesly funnel or offer. You haven’t created nurtured this audience enough YET, but you can offer them your blog/vlog content. You can offer them your free content upgrade in order to get them on your email list. You want your audience to develop a relationship with you and trust the content you’re putting out there. Eventually, you can offer a personalized marketing experience to encourage these people to purchase your largest most valuable offer.

Make your audience want to consistently come back for more. Create a blog or vlog, utilize Facebook Live, invite your audience to interact with you in a Facebook Group, YouTube Channel or whatever platform you’re already comfortable with using, just start using it.

5.  Engaging your new audience

Have you ever sat through a seminar or webinar and you just couldn’t keep your eyes open or you would rather draw on your notebook. That means the speaker wasn’t engaging you. Probably was mundane, nothing exciting, nothing really of great value, nothing that kept your attention.

Do you see a pattern?

In order to engage your audience, you will need to build and nurture your community. You should engage your community with live videos, exciting content, responding to their comments or whatever else you feel is necessary to retain community loyalty. Your content upgrades should be full of valuable information without giving them the kitchen sink. Your email subject line should make them want to open their email and read whatever you’re sending them. Provide them with a private group where they get an exclusive opportunity to interact with you. Show them your everyday crazy life. It’s real life. Be Real!

Build excitement, Build Valubility, Build a Community

You’re still working on these followers to convert into purchasers.

6.  Converting your new audience

Now that you’ve nurtured your audience, it’s time to convert them. A conversion can be defined by a couple of different things: 1) You can have them opting into your email list or 2) They purchased an item from you. Essentially it means performing a desired action. Converting into Buyers is what your goal should be. There’s a couple of ways of converting these individuals into buyers.

The first is through a valuable blog post. Whatever topic you’re blogging about, you always want to provide a content upgrade. Through this content upgrade, you can direct their direction to a sales page where you present them with your offer.

If they decline, you can hit them with an email sequence AND potentially a Facebook Ad.

Another direction is sending traffic straight to your sales page. This can be done through online advertising which includes Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn. You can also advertise on Snapchat, but you must make sure your product is intended for that market.

You’re sales page must provide valuable content and must solve whatever your audience may be searching for.
You also want to make sure you have your terms of service, privacy policy, contact form and any other legal requirements on all your sales pages, landing pages, etc.

7.  Management

Wow! You have managed to build your business and attract an audience. You did this all because you started with a Digital Marketing Strategy.

How do you measure your growth? There are several items to take into account:

• Remember when I told you to install your Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics on your site? Go into your ads manager or google dashboard and look at your traffic.
  • You’re not going to break your ads manager! I know it’s an intimidating tool, but go in and explore! It really does have some neat and nerdy features!
  • If you’re running online ads and you’re not seeing what you’re asking for, you need to locate an expert.
• Go into your website host or wordpress dashboard. You can gain a lot of insight from looking at your site stats. You can tell which page is getting the most traffic, which would be important to view if you’re running ads to certain blogs.
• Look at your list of subscribers in your email service provider. Do NOT even look at the unsubscribe list.
• If you’re selling a service or product, keep a spreadsheet of monthly activity. This income can inspire you to keep going!

Building a Business isn’t easy. It doesn’t happen overnight, but you have to keep building! You have to keep creating content. You have to keep creating those email bursts. And you still have to embrace social media and videos.
If you’ve read thru this blog and realized you need digital strategy or need to revamp your strategy, I would love to help set this up for you! Sometimes an outside view can lead to amazing things!