Winning the Online Game: Crafting an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for Success

Even beginners know that it is crazy to start a new business without a solid plan. This plan provides the foundation on which a company and its business can then be built, and later grow and expand. It is a curious phenomenon, however, that most people do not pay half as much attention to developing and implementing a marketing strategy for their business. Yet marketing strategy is a cornerstone of a competitive business and should not be taken lightly.

By neglecting marketing you are essentially dooming your company and everyone who has invested money in it. You can’t have a good offer and a good proposition if you don’t have customers. It’s not enough to just set up a company and expect consumers to automatically ask about it (or even know it exists). If you want to have customers, you have to actively make them aware of your company and its offerings, and convince them to choose you over others.

To do this, you need a detailed, thorough marketing strategy, which almost half of companies don’t even have. This means that (theoretically and statistically) you can get in front of one in two companies by developing a strategy for your marketing activities. Without such a strategy, achieving your short- and long-term business goals is impossible, attracting customers and continuing to grow and expand. So the question is not whether you need a marketing strategy, but how to create one for your own company. This article ambitions to reply to that.

Know your target audience

Your target audience is the foundation of your marketing strategy – so the first thing you need to know is whom you want to “market” yourself, your company, or your brand to. This will help ensure that your marketing activities are always focused on what matters and that you get a return on your investment.

Although you can do this in several ways, a common and popular method is creating a customer persona. The idea of such personas is to gather the characteristics of your ideal customer, and thus get an accurate picture of the kind of people your marketing messages should be targeted at.

Outline your ideal customer persona by answering the questions below:

• Where do they live?
• Where do they live?
• What is his or her age or age range?
• What gender?
• What are his interests and hobbies?
• What is your job position?
• What is your income?
• What is your family/relationship situation?
• What language(s) do you speak?
• What websites do you like to visit?
• What reasons would they have for buying your products or services?
• What are their main criteria for deciding which products or services to buy?

Of course, these people don’t only exist on paper, so you don’t have to know them only on paper. You need to get as close to them as if they were your close friends, and you know a lot about them.

Sticking to the friendship example, it’s worth bearing in mind that friends – however well you know them – can be unpredictable. That is why you should not base your customer personas on simple assumptions. You need to have real conversations with real people so that you can slowly build up a true picture of your target audience based on their feedback.

The most reliable source for this is, of course, your current customer base. Ask them to take 5 minutes for a personal (and of course anonymous) interview and/or send them a simple (and also anonymous) questionnaire by email where they can answer a few simple questions. For completing these, you can also offer them a token gift, such as a coupon for a product with a discount of a few %.

Whether you interview or fill in questionnaires (or both – the best option), the aim is to build your ideal customer persona based on real people’s real opinions and real thoughts, to whom (or more precisely, to whom you can communicate targeted marketing messages).

Customer personas provide an excellent foundation for your marketing strategy, so it’s worth the time and effort to develop them. Of course, depending on your offering, you may need to create multiple customer personas to effectively cover your customer base.

Be aware of your competitors’ position

Competition is a feature of every field – even companies coming up with new ideas can only be the only players for so long because sooner or later, competitors will emerge to take over the throne. So it’s important to be aware of what’s going on around you (in the competitive landscape) and what your competitors are (or are not) doing to attract more customers.

Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of competitor analysis is to find out what you could do better or at least differently than your competitors, not to copy all their methods for your own company. This is not only unethical, it is not necessarily useful, because what works for one company is not guaranteed to work for another.

So the goal is to find out what others are doing well and try to do it better and to identify the gaps that no one is addressing and fill them. Part of the competitor analysis is a thorough review of the social profiles of competing companies.

If you want to find out which marketing channels your competitors are using, you should pay attention to what their customers are saying about them. The easiest way to do this is with a dedicated social listening tool, which essentially helps you find mentions of your competitors’ brands online. These mentions will help to shed light on what people think of other brands and how online communities are forming around them.

Look into these conversations and try to find out from them what products and services people want, whom they bought them from, and what positive or negative experiences they had as a result.

There are also digital tools that can help you analyze your competitors’ search engine optimization strategies, or which of their content is most popular. All of this can be useful information for an aspiring company that wants to learn from the success (and damage) of others.

Another easy way to subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters is to see what they send out to their prospects. Not only will this give you a clearer picture of their email marketing, but you’ll also learn about new developments through these emails that can provide additional useful information about their overall strategy.

Use the right channels for you

There are many ways to get your marketing messages to your target audience, thanks in large part to the internet and the increasingly digital world. Traditional forms of marketing (TV, newspapers, radio, posters) still have their place in the advertising world, but it’s worth investing serious resources in the digital side of things. As people spend more and more time tapping away on their smartphones and browsing the internet, fewer and fewer people will be reached through traditional channels – younger people are less and less interested in television, let alone radio and print.

Of course, targeting all channels at once is no solution either, as it is usually no more than a labor-intensive waste of money. If you want to get the most out of your marketing budget, you need to find the channels that are worth spending on, i.e. the channels that reach the people you want to target with your marketing message.

The different marketing channels can be divided into three categories – owned, earned, and paid. Each of these three categories is a unique and important part of your marketing strategy, and all three need to work in concert to be successful. To start, you should choose two “own”, one “earned” and one “paid” channels for your marketing strategy. We’ll go through what these three categories are in more detail below!

My

Channels that you have full, unlimited control over are considered your own. This could be a subscription list, your website, or your blog. As we just mentioned, it’s a good idea to start with at least two of these, so you don’t have to rely on external platforms to promote your brand. Your channels are the most important and stable part of your marketing strategy.

A well-designed website and a regularly maintained blog with quality content are perfect examples of dedicated channels.

Earned

Earned media is your content that other, external sources bring to people’s attention. This includes guest blog posts, search engine optimization, influencers, and press. Earned channels exploit the “word of mouth” nature of news. Essentially, you are using the influence of others to get your brand name in front of your target audience.

Paid

Perhaps the most obvious category – this includes all channels and media that you pay to reach more people. These include Google ads, Facebook campaigns, Instagram ads, and so on.

Paid media helps you attract more attention to your channels and helps you reach more earned media. You don’t have much say in paid media, as you also have to adapt to the format and regulations of the platform. Still, with a well-crafted ad and the right targeting options, you can earn several times more money on them.

It’s worth starting with just one to get the hang of it and avoid wasting money on campaigns that don’t meet your company’s objectives.

Outline the levels of your sales funnel

To outline your marketing strategy in more detail and help you decide which channels to use, you should sketch out your sales funnel. Whichever sales funnel you look at, they all follow the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action process – these four layers are what every customer goes through before they buy your products or services.

At the top of the funnel are the prospects who don’t know your brand exists, so you want to grab their attention and then pique their interest. Once you’ve got that, you need to convert them into active enquirers by creating or arousing some kind of desire. Once that desire is present, the last step is to get them to act and take the action you want them to take. This step is also called a conversion and can be anything from a product purchase to a request for a quote to a restaurant reservation.

The goal is to outline the channels through which your ideal customer will “slide” down the conversion funnel to convert from an unknown to a customer. By outlining the customer journey, you can identify the weaknesses in your funnel and then correct them. Once you know your sales funnel, it will be easier to decide which marketing methods to deploy at which levels.

Set goals for your company

It’s time to formulate what success looks like for your company or business. Of course, most of us want more customers, more products sold or even more followers on Facebook, but you’ll need to be a little more specific than that, as it’s hard to monitor progress if you don’t know which direction you should be going in.

It’s not enough just to aim to get a better position in Google results or to get more people to sign up for your newsletter. These are too broad goals to be effectively monitored and evaluated.

So goals need to be specific, measurable, practical, relevant, and timely. This is the so-called SMART target model. SMART goals are easier to implement and the whole team can be involved in their achievement.

So, based on this, the top examples could be formulated using a SMART model as “I want to be in the top 3 positions for the keyword entrepreneur by the end of 2018” or “I want to grow my email list by 50,000 subscribers in the next 6 months”.

By setting goals like this, you know exactly what you want to achieve and by when. So, for example, a month, but it may take longer to see if the strategy is worth continuing or if changes are needed in certain areas to make your marketing activities more effective in serving your goals.