4 Beginner Tips For Carefully Crafting Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The modern business landscape is more competitive than ever before. In order to succeed, you need to have a strong online presence. That’s where digital marketing comes in. Digital marketing is the process of promoting your brand and products/services online. It’s a broad term that covers a variety of marketing activities, including SEO, social media, email marketing, and more.

Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, we’re here to help. In this blog post, we’ll give you some tips on how to create a successful digital marketing strategy for your business.

*These are the basics and should be used to help guide you to further deepen your knowledge. Use this as a simple guide, and then get searching over the internet for more tips. There is an abundance of free knowledge regarding digital marketing.

1. Define Your Goals

Before you can start developing your digital marketing strategy, you need to know what you want to achieve. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Drive more traffic to your website? Generate more leads? Once you’ve identified your goals, you can start putting together a plan to achieve them.

We take on a broader set of goals, and then with a granular approach map out our goals into segments. For example, today we wrote out our 2023 goals for our agency (yes, w know, it’s already the 18th of Jan, and only getting around to this now). We started with our overall goals for our creative branding agency and then moved into splitting these goals for each quarter so that we have a map to follow and to accomplish.

With branding or marketing goals, you can take on the same approach — always start with the end goal in mind and work backward. Also, goals should have a time limit and a value to them. For example, if I was a DTC wine library selling wine online, I would start with my overall goal — to grow sales by 200% in 2023. Next, I would break that up into each quarter — Q1, and grow by 50% by the end of March ‘23. Easy right?

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach with your digital marketing efforts? Knowing who your target audience is will help you determine which channels to focus on and what type of content to produce. For example, if you’re trying to reach middle-aged women, Facebook would be a good place to start. However, if you’re targeting young adults, TikTok or Instagram might be better suited for your needs.

When we help my clients with this task we always start off with a casual brainstorming session. We like to make our clients feel at ease, as we believe that is when the best ideas come to mind. We start wide, naming all the various types of customers that they get. We then narrow this down to a handful of groups. Usually, the rule of thumb is that most businesses have 3–5 types of customers that they target.

Once we have narrowed these segmented customers, we then give them a name — for example, one client of the online wine library store could be a wine enthusiast who collects vintage wines; another could be someone buying wine for a once-off special occasion. Let’s name these customer types ‘Wine Enthusiast Wendy’ & ‘Once-off Ollie’. The above-mentioned can be summarized into a process of marketing that the industry calls ‘persona mapping’.

A persona map allows you, the strategist, to get into the mind of that said customer profile/persona.

You begin wide (again) with their demographics then move into psychographics and then the real fun starts — you plot out how they make decisions, what are their frustrations regarding the category that your business is in, how they gain information or knowledge — is their role of search via wine magazines and online publications or do they attend a private wine club. All of these questions that you ask yourself help you paint a pretty picture of ol’ Wendy.

Persona mapping is a ball game in itself and requires another article to be written in due course.

3. Create Compelling Content

Once you know who your target audience is and what channels they’re using, it’s time to start creating content. Your content should be compelling and relevant to your audience. It should also be optimized for search engines so that people can easily find it when they’re looking for information related to your products or services. Not all about selling! Sure, you want people to buy your products or use your services, but that shouldn’t be the only focus of your content. You should also aim to educate and entertain your audience so that they keep coming back for more.

Creating great content is essential if you want people to actually read (and share) what you’ve published. But it’s not always easy coming up with fresh ideas that will resonate with your audience. That’s why it’s important to have a solid content marketing strategy in place before you start publishing anything. Once you have a plan in place, stick to it!
Consistency is key when it comes to driving results with digital marketing.

For example, you could publish a short article on ‘best wines in the Cape Winelands 2022’ from which ‘Once-off Ollie’ who is not so clued up on wines will benefit from. However, ‘Wine Enthusiast Wendy’ will most likely have formed her own opinions of which wines were the best as she could feel that her knowledge is greater, and at the end of the day, a product like wine is subjective to the palate of the drinker. Wendy would most likely like to read an in-depth white paper on the effects of sulfur on long-term wine drinkers by a reputable guest writer. So make sure that you have a solid and diverse content strategy.

4. Analyze Your Results Regularly

Last but not least, don’t forget to analyze the results of your digital marketing efforts on a regular basis so that you can fine-tune your strategy as needed. Which posts are getting the most engagement? What type of content is driving the most conversions? Use data from analytics tools like Google Analytics and Social Insights to inform your decisions going forward and make sure that each penny you’re spending on digital marketing is working hard for your business. By regularly analyzing the performance of your campaigns and making adjustments accordingly, you can ensure that your digital marketing budget is well-spent and that you’re getting the best possible return on investment (ROI).

For example, we use 3 platforms to measure the success of our client's websites for SEO purposes — Google Analytics is the stock standard platform which we visit about once a week. We then use SEMrush on the daily basis to measure the growth of my client's keyword positioning & also not to mention SEMrush provides me with great tips to grow my SEO overall score. Lastly, we use Ubersuggest by Neil Patel just like we use SEMrush as a second analysis of my SEO score, just to make sure that our results are correct. Disclaimer: we are not affiliated with either of these platforms.

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So to summarize, there’s no denying that digital marketing is essential for businesses today. If you want to stay competitive, you need to have a strong online presence. Luckily, there are plenty of resources out there that can help. By following the tips outlined in this blog post, you’ll be well on your way toward developing a successful digital marketing strategy for your business. It is an ever-changing landscape, and an interesting one at that, so enjoy the ride.

We have written a white paper on the importance of a purpose-driven marketing strategy. Purpose-driven marketing is becoming more prominent in brands today from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Access the paper below, we’d highly recommend it.