A digital marketing strategy is an important part of the overall marketing strategy of a business. Small business marketing can include many offline local advertising methods but needs to include a healthy portion of digital marketing strategies to be successful and maximize sales in today’s economy.

Whether you have just started a small consulting business, run a local consignment shop, or opened a café, you are constantly looking for ways to attract business without breaking the bank. A small business that is doing most or all of its business online needs to embrace a digital marketing strategy that helps it be seen by online users.

This article contains some essential digital marketing strategies to market your business while ultimately saving you a lot of money on customer acquisition.

• What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• 10 Reasons Why you may Require a Digital channel Strategy?
• Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Business Owners
• How Can I Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• What Are the 5 Key Components to Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy?
• What are the 7 P’s of Digital Marketing?
• What Should a Digital Strategy Include?
• Which Digital Marketing Strategy is Best?

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how your business will achieve its marketing goals via online channels like search and social media. Most strategy plans will summarize which online channels and digital marketing tactics you will use, plus how much you will invest in these channels and tactics.

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Examples of digital marketing strategies include a social media campaign that includes partnerships with influencers, a content marketing strategy that uses online guides to drive leads, or a growth marketing strategy that uses social media and email to build customer loyalty.

10 Reasons Why you may Require a Digital channel Strategy?

1. You’re directionless
Some organizations without a digital strategy (and numerous that do) don’t have clear vital objectives for what they need to accomplish online as far as increasing new clients or building further associations with existing ones. Also, in the event that you don’t have objectives, you likely don’t put enough assets to achieve the objectives and you don’t assess through the investigation whether you’re accomplishing those objectives.

2. You won’t know your online piece of the pie
Client interest for online administrations might be disparaged on the off chance that you haven “t researched this. Maybe, more essentially, you won’t comprehend your online commercial center: the progression will be diverse to customary channels with various sorts of client profile and conduct, competitors, suggestions and alternatives for marketing interchanges. See online commercial center strategy post.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will pick up a piece of the pie
In case you’re not committing enough assets to digital marketing or you’re utilizing a specially appointed approach with no plainly characterized strategies, at that point your competitors will have your digital lunch!

4. You don’t have an intense online offer
An unmistakably characterized online client offer will enable you to separate your online administration empowering existing and new clients to draw in at first and remain faithful.

5. You don’t have the foggiest idea about your online clients all around ok
It’s regularly said that digital is the “most quantifiable medium ever”. In any case, Google Analytics and comparative will just disclose to you volumes of visits, not the notion of guests, what they think. You have to utilize different types of site client input tools to distinguish your powerless focuses and after that address them.

6. You’re not incorporated (“disintegrated”)
It’s very basic for digital marketing exercises to be finished in storehouses whether that is an authority digital advertiser, sitting in IT or a different digital office. It’s less demanding that approach to bundle digital marketing into an advantageous lump. Obviously, it’s less viable. Everybody concurs that digital media work best when incorporated with customary media and reaction channels.

7. Digital doesn’t have enough individuals/spending given its significance
The deficient asset will be dedicated to both arranging and executing e-marketing and there is probably going to be an absence of particular expert e-marketing abilities which will make it hard to react to focused dangers viably.

8. You’re squandering cash and time through duplication
Regardless of the possibility that you do have an adequate asset, it might be squandered. This is especially the case in bigger organizations where you see distinctive parts of the marketing association buying diverse tools or utilizing diverse offices for performing comparative internet marketing undertakings.

9. You’re not sufficiently deft to make up for lost time or remain ahead
On the off chance that you take a gander at the best online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all powerful – trialing new ways to deal with pick up or keep their online gatherings of people.

10 You’re not optimizing
Each organization with a site will have an investigation, however, numerous senior directors don’t guarantee that their groups set aside a few minutes to audit and follow up on them. Once a strategy empowers you to get the nuts and bolts right, at that point you can advance to nonstop change of the key parts of search marketing, site client experience, email and web-based social networking marketing.

Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Business Owners

Take a look at your customers and identify where they spend their time online. Your digital client base might be a different audience than you’re used to targeting. Your budget will be an important factor when deciding which digital marketing strategies to pursue.

Don’t be afraid to test out a few different methods when deciding which digital marketing strategy is best for your business. Take a look at the results to see which methods are the most effective with your client base, and make sure you’re getting a positive return on investment (ROI).

Some strategies can be difficult to measure, but be consistent with your method of measurement—one suggestion is to compare the company’s revenue during certain marketing efforts to the revenue generated while running other marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Marketing

This portion of marketing is critical for a small business. It gives you a chance to compete with larger companies by being more visible in search engine results. Since people use search to find products both online and locally, it is important that your company place high in search results for words that relate to what you are selling.

Professional internet marketing firms offer this service through search engine optimization (SEO), which can help your website rank higher on search engine results pages through methods such as:

• Keyword research and volume
• Internal link building
• Optimizing content to produce high-quality, relevant information

Local Search Marketing

Location-based marketing includes website optimization for search results but also integrates a search engine’s maps function. This is especially true with Google, where your business can be listed with mapping and address information, giving the prospective customers what they need to visit your establishment.

Your phone number and website address can also be listed. Customer service will often be available to help someone decide if they are interested in your product or service.

Content Marketing

This strategy revolves around giving prospective customers information about your product or service, as well as information in general. Everyone is trying to sell, but those that can inform are more likely to get sales. People will attribute a certain level of expertise to a company, and this instills confidence in the consumer. 

In the past, content marketing was often executed through printed brochures and guidebooks. Today, however, the strategy relies on delivering valuable, relevant articles and information on your company’s website that advises and attract potential customers and serve as a call to action.

Social Media Marketing

This type of marketing can be tricky. Everyone talks about social media, but the truth is, it can be difficult for companies to integrate social media into their business. The type of media used, as well as how it is used, is dependent upon the type of business you have. For some companies, being in touch with their customers and giving them breaking news can be an important element of success.

Other businesses, such as a local restaurant, have seen success using social media by letting customers know of the latest specials and new additions to their menu. The most important aspect of social media is to use it to strengthen your customer base to achieve repeat sales.

Trying to spread yourself across a wide net of social media platforms can be difficult for small business owners with limited resources. Instead, figure out which online channels make the most sense for your business and the customers you’re trying to reach. Are you targeting professional clients? LinkedIn might be your ideal tool. Does your marketing have a strong visual aspect? Instagram could be the best fit for your business. 

Email Marketing

This form of marketing can be crucial to a small business’s online or offline success. Essentially, email marketing is promoting products and services electronically—through newsletters, updates, promotions, or general messaging—and is reliant on building a list of existing and prospective customers.

This list of names and emails consists of people who are interested in your business, and you know this to be true because they have opted into this list themselves.

Perhaps they were offered future updates on products as well as coupons to sign up. As this list grows, it becomes more valuable. Many marketing professionals consider this a very important, long-term small business marketing strategy.

Mobile Marketing

A consumer’s experience nowadays is largely driven through a mobile device—whether they’re searching for the product or company, doing a price comparison, or actually buying a product.

Mobile marketing is aimed at reaching customers through their smartphones or tablets by using mediums such as text messaging, social media, website, email, and apps. Businesses can take advantage of technology that can target clientele based on time or location, like sending customers a discount code when they enter a store. 

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is running online advertisements where the business only pays if the ad has been clicked on. There are many different types of online ads including the ones featured at the top and sides of a search, promotions that run before videos, or ads that show up in mobile apps or while browsing online.

Some benefits of PPC marketing are that the business only pays for results and that ads can be targeted toward a specific geographic location.

The cost of PPC marketing can vary significantly depending on how much the company is willing to invest in advertising. Pricing is based mainly on keyword competition—popular keywords that have high competition will cost more. 

How Can I Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Are you curious about how to create a digital marketing strategy?

Follow these eight steps:

1. Define your brand: Outline or use your brand guidelines to define your brand and how it’ll come through in your online campaigns. Think about your unique selling points (USPs), brand voice, and value proposition.
2. Build your buyer personas: Determine who your business wants to reach with custom buyer personas. Think about user demographics, as well as the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services.
3. Create your S.M.A.R.T. goals: Use specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals (also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals) to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.
4. Choose your digital marketing strategies: Pick the best strategies for your business. Focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business and industry, versus trendy strategies.
5. Set your digital marketing budget: Research digital marketing pricing to build a realistic budget for your business. For reference, most businesses spend $2500 to $12,000 per month on online marketing.
6. Brainstorm your strategy: Guide your strategy to success by planning your strategy. If you’re advertising, determine your ad spend. If you’re publishing content, build your content calendar.
7. Launch your campaigns: Following your planning, launch your campaigns across channels. Ensure all your channels feature the appropriate tracking information. Your website, for example, should feature your Google Analytics tracking code.
8. Track your results: Monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. Use Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads to keep a pulse on your strategies and their return on investment (ROI).

With these eight steps, your company can launch its first online marketing strategy. If you need help creating your online marketing strategy (or want to create the best one), consider online marketing services.

What Are the 5 Key Components to Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Below are 5 key components to crafting a winning digital marketing strategy. What follows are additional components you may want to consider when creating a well-rounded, complete digital marketing strategy.

1. Goal Setting: Decide Where You Want to Go

When creating an itinerary, you have a destination in mind. When creating a digital marketing strategy, the destination is a set of defined marketing goals you hope to achieve from your efforts. These marketing goals should be tied back to the fundamental goals of your business.

For example, if the goal of your organization is to increase your clientele list by 20%, then your marketing goal should be to generate viable leads to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your goal may be, you also must ensure you are measuring your results. Maybe your goal is to boost email subscribers. In this case, your key performance indicator (KPI) would be increased sign-ups.

2. Understanding Your Target Audience

When traveling, you know the importance of understanding how locals interact – you don’t want to seem like an odd tourist. The same rings true for digital marketing campaigns. This means understanding your target audience, demographics, and the psychology of existing and new customers. 

There are several steps a potential buyer must move through to get to a point of purchase, and ideally become a long-term customer. The stages may vary, but they generally begin with brand awareness and education, then move to the consideration phase, and finally end with a decision and sales conversion.

Effective Content Marketing

You can’t simply write just any content, or follow a “spray and pray” method. You need to be strategic about what you write about, what words you want to own, have an SEO keyword strategy in place, and think about continuous optimization of your content.

3. Establish Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas

Meeting new people is one of the best parts of traveling! But it wouldn’t be beneficial to try to communicate with someone who has no desire to speak with you, right? Perhaps there is a language barrier, or they simply aren’t interested in who you are and what you do.

This also goes for marketing. As a digital marketer, you need to develop your buyer personas so that you know exactly who you want to speak with, knowing that they will have a mutual interest in speaking with you.

Keep in mind, the personas you develop should be based on research. Have you had proven success with a certain group of individuals? Great, target them! It is beneficial to be specific. Skip the stereotypes and look into factual insights through readily available tools like Facebook Audience Insights and Google Analytics.

You can begin to identify these personas with basic background information such as job title and location. You also want to determine what this person wants, such as a solution to a specific problem (a problem your business can solve)! Next, determine the best way to reach this person, which leads us to step four.

4. Pinpoint Effective Marketing Channels and Buying Stages

If you want to meet local beer connoisseurs, you might choose to visit the local pub. In turn, if you want to meet decision-makers in a specific industry, you need to choose where to find them, and also what messaging to use given what buying stage they are at in their buying journey.

The awareness stage may be focused on education and establishing expertise while targeting decision-makers in ideal client verticals. The KPIs for this campaign type could include reach, impressions, and engagement.

The consideration stage would influence and incentivize by targeting those that engaged with your awareness campaign with a promo or value proposition. The KPIs for this campaign might have to do with lead generation.

The conversion stage would drive salesby retargeting past website visitors. The KPIs for this campaign could be a meeting booked through a contact form or a signed contract/proposal.

By structuring your campaigns to meet the buyer where they are at in their journey, you will move toward your marketing and business goals more strategically.

Keep buyer personas in mind. You have a good understanding of your audience and how they buy, but now you need to understand where to connect with them.

For example, if your buyer persona is a 35-year-old journalist who reads the news online, then Twitter might be the best channel for you to communicate with them.

Choosing the right digital channels will help you increase ROI. There are more marketing platforms than ever before, so be strategic by determining where your buyer personas are located, and connecting with them through those channels.

5. Get Your Messaging Right

Let’s say you’re traveling solo and you pop into a local restaurant to sit at the bar. You see someone you want to speak with, and you know there is an art and etiquette to approaching them. The same goes for your marketing campaigns!

Craft your messaging to resonate with who you are trying to speak with. The voice and content of your campaign should speak to them in a way that they understand. This is where your research and planning from the previous steps comes full circle. 

If you’ve identified where they are in the sales funnel, you should know where to kick off the conversation. If they know nothing about you (prospecting stage), then you begin by establishing your expertise and building trust.

If you’ve identified their buyer persona and are selling a service, you should know their pain points and can tell them how you can solve their problems. If you are selling a product, you should know their interests.

By taking the time to get your messaging right, perhaps even personalizing it, your audience will be far more receptive to what you have to offer.

What are the 7 P’s of Digital Marketing?

We will now explore the 7 P’s through the opportunities that online marketing presents.

Product

In an online marketing mix, the product has to be 100% online, meaning the product has no physical features. For example, selling traditional products on an online store won’t be good enough.

We have to look at the online product as something scalable in nature, which processes all revolve around being online such as:

• The creation and management of the product
• The pricing of the product
• Distribution of the product

If every step is online, you have achieved a genuinely scalable online product.

When creating an online product in an online marketing mix, we need to think about all the aspects that surround the product itself. Let’s think about the subject through questions that potentially helps us deliver a better online product.

• What is the online brand of the created product?
• Does the online product have a product line or a set of products in a range?
• What are the extra services around the product?
• How would the end cycle of the online product look? Is it upgradeable, or is it update-based, for example?
• What are the guarantees of the said online product?
• How to design your online delivery?
• How to design an online product?
• What features to include?
• The quality of the online product?

Answering all the questions above, you’re closer to producing a high-quality online product to modify your business model.

• Online product Ideas

When looking at what types of online product ideas, we could include in the product section of our marketing mix. There are a couple of choices we can explore.

A prominent place to start is producing software with online distribution. Then there are product ideas that revolve around content: such as building downloadables (eBook, online courses) or creating high-quality content that functions as the product itself like a set of articles and blogs.

Digitalization of services also enables them to some extent being an entirely online experience for your customers, for example, online consulting services. At the same time, while distribution is online, it still would require the physical presence of the personnel as of now, making scale harder to achieve.

One way of innovating new online products and business models is by redefining existing physical products into a digital space. For instance, music and video streaming changed from a physical experience into a completely digital product.

When transforming into new online products, the combination of the decisions in the online marketing mix helps you develop for better outcomes. A critical defining factor of your online products would be its place of distribution or a pricing strategy.

Price

Price in an online marketing mix refers to the cost of a product your customer will pay. In the price, we need to include secondary factors, for example, what is the customer’s perceived value of an online product and consider how much time it takes for a customer to acquire a product.

Including customers, time spent on acquiring your products in the pricing strategy helps you develop more accurate pricing for your products. We associate online products with being instant in the acquisition, but in most cases, there are multiple steps involved for the customer.

For example:

• Pre-registration and registration
• Onboarding
• Checkout and purchase process length
• Download times

A long acquisition time increases the cost for the customers, which leads to a loss of sales.

Pricing online products the right way is the method of increasing revenues with scale. Inefficient pricing strategies will, in the end, become the end of the product. As with more scale, the smaller issues scale too.

An excellent pricing strategy includes the use of discounts, payment terms, and has opportunities for allowances.

• Pricing Strategies of Online Marketing

If we look at the price with three typical pricing strategies like:

• The SaaS (Software as a Service, model, where a subscription gives access to an online product)
• Single purchase model (One price for one product for a one-time purchase)
• The free model (The product itself is free, and the monetization is through other means) both have their pros and cons to consider in your pricing strategy.

A subscription model for an online product is beneficial if the product itself is not static, meaning it has updates, levels of complexity of using it, or its upgradeability.

A one-time purchase is beneficial for finished products. When using a one-time purchase pricing strategy, you will have to include that even a finished product requires levels of customer support and onboarding.

A free model is beneficial when the product offers a precise problem-solving capability as free products that don’t have real purposes won’t work. The most common way of monetizing free products is through advertising.

Place

Place in the online marketing mix means the place where and how you provide your customers access to your products. In online marketing, there are many options for you to sell on a wide range of platforms and methods.

The best place for your customer comes down to what is the best place to reach and is convenient for your target audience. If we look strictly at online products, what solutions for selling you have? Many such as:

• Social media platforms (Either by selling directly (Facebook Shop) or by referring traffic to another owned channel)
• Dedicated online store (Shopify, WooCommerce), landing pages with purchase features.
• Online marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, other niche marketplaces)

The goal of a place in the online marketing mix is to consider the convenience factors for your customers. Enabling the most convenient places for your customers to access your online products is crucial for the overall experience.

Your target audience should guide your decisions on your places, and the product’s online distribution comes down to what is the best distribution model within your chosen place.

When deciding place opportunities in your online marketing mix, the need for figuring out how much market coverage you’re able to reach within that place.

For example, marketplaces (like Amazon or eBay) have more initial coverage due to organic views, although lacking control otherwise. An online store can potentially have broader coverage if there’s a budget available for reaching your audience.

All in all, an owned channel (website, online store) will come necessary for every online business, and the need to expand for other platforms increases the more global your reach and how targeted audiences are.

Promotion

Promotion in the online marketing mix is the use of online marketing communication tools to reach your target audiences. Promotion includes the use of online advertising, public relations, direct communication, and sales promotions to reach and influence an audience.

Online marketing offers many effective strategies to choose from to include in your marketing mix. Every business and its online products require different approaches when reaching their customers.

Some methods revolve around directly advertising on a variety of platforms, while other strategies revolve around building authority with the content or gaining a following on social media.

You can’t invest in every channel out there, just because it exists, the need to understand your audience first is crucial for producing and executing an effective marketing strategy online.

Are you restricted by budget, time, locations, technology, or something else, every business can find and utilize effective methods of online marketing to boost their results.

Your initial marketing strategy will have to include your restrictions to avoid plans that you can’t implement properly.

For example, investing in website content to boost your search engine positions takes time, when your business requires revenue today, the strategy won’t help you keep on the lights.

An excellent online marketing strategy includes your business goals with practical methods of gaining them. Innovation in your marketing decisions is essential for keeping growth achievable.

If we look again at the example of search engine positions, while not increasing your business today, it will in the future, by combining it into your online advertising flow is beneficial in the long run.

Methods Of Online Marketing Promotion For Consideration:

• Search Engine Marketing (Google, Bing)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Content Marketing
• Online PR
• Social Media Advertising
• Youtube
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Email Marketing
• Partnership

The benefits of online marketing are the ability to track the results used strategies in real-time with the use of web analytics. Web analytics in online marketing allows for constant optimization of strategy.

Online marketing develops fast, and new ideas on how to improve your tactics arise often, and improved methods of collecting data helps you find new opportunities all the time.

In promotion, it’s essential to have clear strategies on how your brand and its messaging display across platforms. A wide range of platforms can lead to ununified experiences for the customers, and that leads to worsened brand awareness.

Controlling your brand and its communication in online marketing promotion is essential.

People

People as a marketing decision in the online marketing mix is crucial. Great products and businesses require people that are involved in online distribution and personnel who are in direct contact with customers.

To accurately answer the question of people in your marketing mix is to measure and evaluate the interactions between a business and it’s customers and the interactions between personnel and customers.

In the end, it’s the people involved in the company that represents the values of a brand.

How we do, customer service is vital in an online setting when interactions are not physical. Designing better customer support systems where your customers and your employees can interact with each other seamlessly and scalably, enables us to produce a more consistent experience for both.

There are many options and combinations of online support you can introduce into your business workflow. For example, at the most basic, you can integrate social media as a channel for customer support or utilize online reviews (like Google My Business) as well.

Depending on the place in your marketing mix, you need to get the most appropriate way of support that functions effectively in that place. For example, an online store or online consulting firm can use chat software to connect support personnel with customers directly on the website.

How we plan our responses and our strategy of keeping our customers happy at all times is a critical marketing decision that, when unanswered will seriously harm any business when they reach a critical mass.

Process

The process as a marketing decision in the online marketing mix defines the needed procedures and its optimization of delivering online products and the core experiences of it. What tasks are necessary for a product to provide its core experience for its users.

Process optimization relies on collected data and measuring the data with key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind. To have an optimized process, a constant need for tracking the success of your operations in your marketing mix is essential.

The better the process we have in place, the more ready we are at scale, and documenting every step we take, increases our chances of understanding the health of a business through the online marketing perspective.

Tracking processes and the performance of the overall system enables us to find critical errors at best before they happen or, at the very least, find them very early before any significant failures have occurred.

Contextualizing online marketing processes in everything we do in our strategies helps us understand the core principles that make our approach viable at any given time.

Physical Evidence (Online Evidence)

In the extended marketing mix, physical evidence refers to the different elements of service experience, such as facilities, interior designs, livery, and post-purchase artifacts (souvenirs).

In an online setting, these pieces of evidence will not have a physical element to them. However, the digitalization of this physical evidence is still possible, and an important marketing decision to have.

Online brand awareness across multiple channels is an excellent example of online evidence. How well these channels expand service experiences, for instance, through the number of followers, likes, and other social engagement metrics.

A website’s design is essential online evidence as, in most cases, it’s the most important channel for an online business. The elements of your website’s design crucially impact the non-human service experiences your customers will face when interacting with your online business.

A controlled and complete multi-channel online experience enables us to enhance our online evidence in a way that improves our marketing decisions significantly.

What Should a Digital Strategy Include?

Here are some processes for creating a digital strategy that isn’t overwhelming or complicated, and meets the needs of most organizations.

1. Define Your “Why?”

It all starts here. Why does your organization exist? It sounds like a simple question, but you have to go deep to get at the answer. This is not just the 10,000-foot view of your brand, but the 100,000-foot view. What is the meaning behind what your organization does?

Simon Sinek’s landmark TED Talk expertly lays out how to find the “why” in your organization using his golden circle methodology. He connects the dots between exceptional leaders, exceptional brands, and the notion that people don’t buy “what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Once you can identify the core “Why?” of your organization, crafting an effective brand story, authentic messages, and engaging content will come much easier.

2. Create Your Brand Story

Studies have shown that consumers encounter up to 20,000 brands every day, only 12 of which leave an impression. If you have any hope of being among those 12, you must have a brand story that matters to people, which is what 73% of consumers want. Whether you are for-profit, non-profit, or for-purpose, compelling stories-not sales pitches are what cut through the noise.

Another way to think about your brand story is to simply articulate your brand promise – the statement you make to your audience that identifies what they should expect for all experiences with your organization.

Let’s look at Apple’s brand promise: “Think different.”

So, what’s your organization’s brand promise? What’s your story?

3. Define Your Goals

Goals must be achievable and measurable in the short and long term if you’re going to have any idea if what you did worked.

Do you want to increase online donations by 25%? Do you want to get 10,000 new signatures for an online petition? Do you want to engage more members, adding to your e-mail distribution list?

Remember to be SMART: your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Identify your top three goals. Write them down. Repeat them over and over again. This will guide your strategy.

4. Develop Audience Personas

If you want to tell a story that resonates with your audience, you first have to understand who your audience is. Doing this requires a little more than brainstorming.

You should aim to create 3-4 personas based on the types of people you attract and want to target. A complete persona will contain the person’s background, career, values, goals, reservations, and decision-making tendencies.

If all of that sounds overwhelming, rest assured that you don’t have to come up with this out of thin air. An often-ignored method for creating audience personas is to interview your audience. This can include one-on-one interviews and online surveys to get a pretty accurate portrait of who you are marketing to.

Create your personas. Post them on your wall. Name these fictitious individuals. Talk about them like you know them. Because you do.

5. Create a Journey Map

Once you’re clear on your target audience, creating a journey map is the next step in the process. Having a journey map will help you understand the ways people are already interacting with you online as well as the potential for more or different kinds of interaction.

You’ll want to start with these questions:

1. Where does a user first encounter your organization online (or offline)?
2. What touch-points are the most important when a user makes a decision?
3. What makes them leave and what makes them come back?

The better you understand your audience and their habits and behaviors, the more detailed your journey map can be. The more detailed your journey map, the more agile your digital strategy.

6. Identify Key Channels

Here’s where we start to get into the nitty gritty of digital strategy. The number of social and digital channels out there is immense, and new ones pop up every week.

A lot of organizations think you have to have a toe in each, but the reality is you should only be where your audience is. If they’re not on Snapchat, you can likely leave that app alone for the time being. If your target audience primarily uses Facebook to connect, part of your strategy should focus on organic and paid reach on Facebook.

Simply put, match each of your target audiences to the platforms that are most used by each of these groups. Then overlay these engagement channels onto your journey map. It will pretty it up and give you clear direction on the types of content to create.

7. Develop a Content Strategy

We’re squarely in the age of content marketing, and we’re there because users in the digital space engage most with what’s useful for them. Is your content useful?

Craig Davis, Founder of Brandkarma said, “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to content. Find out what your audience wants and needs, and creatively provide it for them. People share what’s good, follow what’s regular, and respond to what’s appropriate. Think quality, consistency, and customization and you can’t go wrong.

Create a content strategy tapestry – sketch the content types that would work for each of your target audiences and then categorize accordingly. There will likely be some overlaps, which is okay; the result will be a beautiful tapestry of content.

You can build this out for a specific month, quarter, or season depending on the robustness of your campaign, and the resources you have available.

Which Digital Marketing Strategy is Best?

The many businesses experiencing significant success from online marketing campaigns do so because they have found the most effective digital marketing techniques, learned everything they could about them, applied them, and did not quit until they found success. Here are some of the most effective digital marketing techniques:

Paid Search Advertising

This could be anything from media buys to display ads. These are usually pay-per-click where you pay for every display or click that your ad gets.

To get the most from this advertising and marketing technique, you need compelling ad copy—usually, a powerful headline and curiosity-filled snippet with no more than 20 words—and the right search engines or market-relevant websites.

Paid search advertising has the potential to skyrocket your profits or leave you in considerable debt. So, study and master it, or better still, hire an expert to handle this for you.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still considered one of the most powerful advertising media on the Internet. The truth is that if you can take advantage of email marketing, you can transform your fortunes.

The keys to a successful email marketing campaign are rapport plus value. Email is an excellent medium for building relationships with your clients and customers by offering value—free reports, white papers, excellent tips and newsletters among other things. Email marketing can be very profitable and highly rewarding, but take time to build good lists to make the most of your time and effort.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There’s no better way to get free advertising online than through search engine optimization. If you can master this digital marketing technique you will see a huge increase in site traffic.

It is not surprising to see e-commerce sites start making tens of thousands of dollars in sales and revenue every day by simply ranking on the first pages of Google, Bing, and Yahoo for relevant keywords and search terms.

SEO is about optimizing your website and earning links and citations. The more relevant and abundant these are, the better your chances of ranking high on the search engines.

Social Media Marketing

For all e-commerce stores and sites, this is a necessity. Engage with your audience and customers on the various social media networks. The more common and popular social media sites that you should focus on include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (perfect for B2B clients), Instagram, and Pinterest.

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These are the most powerful social networks, so it’s in your best interest to learn to use them. Discover how to engage and connect with your audience here, and you could profit from this marketing technique big time.

Video Marketing

YouTube has become the most powerful video distribution service on the internet. The good news is that you can harness the power of YouTube by taking advantage of its massive exposure to advertising your e-commerce store and small business.

Look for ways to create compelling infomercials and distribute them on this platform. You can also create valuable and informative videos and upload them there. Another fun option is to host a Google Hangout with your clients and customers. You can answer their questions live, and deepen your engagement with them. There’s really no limit to how you can use it!

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Bottom line

Many online marketing strategies are outsourced, because unless you have time to dedicate it’s difficult to stay on the multiple changes that transpire when it comes to strategy. With content and email marketing, you can do much of it yourself, but it never hurts to ask experts for strategy advice to help get you started. 

If you have a small business, you need to take the above areas of digital marketing into consideration. Formulate a plan and combine it with your other marketing efforts. Some of these areas of marketing will be more important and effective, depending on your business. You can have professionals help you or outsource if you don’t have the manpower to handle marketing obligations in-house.