Before we get into the depth of how digital marketing helps in crafting a digital strategy, let’s understand the difference between digital strategy and digital marketing. When we talk of digital strategy, it is a series of actions that are to be taken to achieve an overarching marketing goal. To move towards meeting that goal, the digital marketing campaigns act as building blocks or can be considered as actions taken within the defined strategy to accomplish the desired goal.
Let us now see how these building blocks help to craft the digital strategy to achieve the goal.
Let us assume that your goal is to increase sales. The digital marketing agency chicago you hire for your job uses a variety of tactics to engage the attention and draw your targeted customers to your website and motivate them to make a purchase. Any good and mature digital marketing company understands the importance of a coherent digital marketing strategy. So, the holistic design of its strategy will include elements like web designing, SEO, social media management and advertising.
Here is how it will proceed:
Situational Analysis
This is the very first step in designing a successful strategy. It includes SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. Unless you know these, you can’t come up with a proper plan. It is a qualitative and quantitative analysis done by the agency to familiarise itself with the ecosystem they need to work in. Only when they are aware of what lies ahead to tackle can they proceed to come up with an appropriate strategy.
Tactical Planning
Once they understand the ecosystem and know the goal of the business owner, they plan. The planning differs according to the goals and the targeted audience. Here they finalize the channels they will work on, the resources that will be allocated on each channel etc. So, the form of marketing they will be focusing on like paid media advertising, email marketing campaigns and social media campaigns are decided.
Digital Advertising
The various digital advertising tools that have been finalized are now applied. The agency knows which channels and platforms to use for advertising based on business needs. They don’t try to be omnipresent. Instead, they pick the right channels based on their research where your targeted audience is concentrated and divert their resources and energy only on those platforms. Most of the companies give importance to mobile advertising, social media advertising, search engine ads and display ads. All these types of advertising have their own pros and they are very effective in engaging and prompting the targeted audience to take the desired action.
When focusing on social media advertising, they give importance to large and established platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Again, it depends on what demographics you are targeting. All these platforms require different types of planning and execution. For instance, if you are using Facebook, then it’s predominantly a pay-to-play platform, but then it’s relatively inexpensive and thus affordable. You can also boost posts here or place retargeting ads, which are very effective in gaining back the attention of those who have already shown interest in the offerings.
Using the right social platforms establishes your visibility and identity among your targeted audience. The strategy here should be to have a regular interaction with them. This includes both the existing as well as potential customers and get their feedback. This feedback helps in improvising the strategy.
Also Read: The Content Marketing Strategies Your Brand Needs
Measure and Analysis of Results
Whatever digital marketing tactics you have implemented, it’s important to measure their success and analyse. The benefit of digital marketing is that there are tools to measure the success or failure of your marketing tactics. The agencies use these tools to gauge their efforts at every step and take corrective action as and when required.
Website Designing
It’s not just the digital marketing efforts that help in achieving the goal. Website designing also needs to be good. Otherwise, the efforts you made in advertising would go waste if the website does not offer a good user experience. The layout of the landing page is extremely important as this is the first place a visitor lands because of your marketing efforts. An average visitor just takes 3 seconds after landing to decide whether to explore a website further or abandon it. Thus, you have only 3 seconds to engage the visitor and motivate him/her to explore further. Your landing page should be designed following an Above-The-Fold and Below-The-Fold approach. The Above-The-Fold space should contain all primary content to engage the visitor.
Planning a successful digital strategy using all the right building blocks is not a novice job. It requires a lot of expertise and only a good digital marketing agency would be capable of doing it in the right and effective manner. They know how to use digital marketing building blocks to craft a successful digital strategy.
Also Read: 8 Steps For An Effective Social Media Marketing Plan
