Creating a great digital marketing strategy that works from scratch can be an overwhelming task. Over the years I have created a number of digital marketing strategies with an e-Commerce twist for companies, both as a consultant and an employee.
Below I will share 25 proven tips that will improve your digital marketing strategy, bringing new clients and business.
This will be a post that is updated regularly, if you have any tips post them in the comments, credits will be given.
Enjoy!
1. Use Customer Personas
Always start with your customer personas. If you haven’t already defined them, it’s step 1. A good persona should include who, what, why and how. It should breakdown role, demographics, goals of the user, challenges, opportunities and messaging.
2. Define Your Customer Journey
Define your full customer journey, what does your customers go through when buying your product? What do they have to do to start using it? What should they do when and after they are using it?
A customer journey should include all the stages;
Attract -> Convert-> Close -> Delight
3. Validate Your Customer Journey
A customer journey can easily be a corporate product without any substance. Take the time to validate your customer journey by asking real customers, partners, doing surveys, check web analytics data etc to make sure that it corresponds with reality.
4. A Customer Journey Is Not Linear
Gone are the days of the linear customer journey (did they ever exist?). Think of the customer journey more like a wheel, where the last part generate new business when customers are promoting your brand as word-of-mouth, reviews, or through social media.
in Inbound Marketing Methodology
5. Align Your Digital Marketing Strategy With Business Goals
A good digital marketing strategy is aligned with the company’s overall business goals. If your company has identified that they are going to sell blue widgets in Mongolia then your digital marketing strategy should support that.
6. Define Your Channel Mix
Although you will have a good understanding of your channels when defining your customer journey you need to understand what channels to prioritize. Channels that should be prioritized are the ones that brings you the most sales, conversion or customer satisfaction.
7. Connect Online and Offline
Just because a strategy has the words “digital” or “online” in it, doesn’t mean that you do not need to take into account physical interactions with your audience. Make sure you align your digital marketing strategy with what is supposed to happen at events, meetings or at point of sale.
Consumers today expect to move seamlessly between online and offline (O2O).
8. Don’t Deliver the Org Chart
Your audience doesn’t care about your organization and its challenges. If you do not have ability to communicate one message and one experience to your customers it will hurt your brand. This means that all Digital Marketing Strategies have to be developed cross functionally with the whole organization involved. Product, partners, technology, sales, customer service and logistics need to be included. A powerful customer experience has cross functional collaboration in the background to sustain it.
9. Get Support from the Organization
This is perhaps one of the harder parts of creating a digital marketing strategy if you are working in a larger organization. Start with mapping all stakeholders that might be impacted by the digital marketing strategy and understand what their needs are and how you can help them. It helps if you have already validated your customer journey with the organization at this point.
Then set a process for collecting feedback from the organization, and how to evaluate the feedback.
10. Set your KPIs Wisely
The great thing about anything having to do with digital is that it is measurable. Marketing efforts should be measured and evaluated in connection to sales and conversion. The success of your digital marketing strategy will be determined by sales and conversion. There will however be a number of “mini” KPI:s to support it.
11. Recognize the different ways to sell online
If you are selling a product and service through e-Commerce, the good news is that all your marketing efforts can be connected with the conversion and actual sales. However most companies do not have this luxury, in B2B selling a product or solution can take years. In this instance utilize KPI:s such as marketing and sales qualified leads to understand the results your marketing efforts are essential.
Other companies might sell through other resellers, such as online retailers or an offline dealer network. Make sure that you align your digital marketing strategy and sales channels with these types of selling as well. For example with online retailers and dealers, provide them with great content and link to them from your site in order to connect the customer journey from acquisition to conversion.
12. Monitor Trends And Leverage Them
A good digital marketing strategy is not static, it is updated according to new trends with effects on customer behavior. Changes going on in social media, SEO, ad-buying and technology will have effects on your digital marketing strategy, roll with the changes don’t fight them. But most importantly is to monitor HOW the changes impacts your customers.
13. Crawl, Run, Fly
Sometimes it is difficult to know if a change to a customer behavior will stick for the long-run, and the implications it might have. For example a social media platform might be popular for a while, but not in the long-run, how should you then know when to go all in? The answer is a digital marketing pilot.
Always pilot before implementing massive changes to your business, a digital marketing pilot can help you determine:
- Technology platform, do you need to update it?
- Content, do you need to adapt it ?
- Customer behavior, is your customer’s really into use case?
However doing a pilot needs to be done carefully, with the customer in mind. Don’t burn your brand reputation on a poorly executed pilot, a pilot requires as much attention as a regular project. It’s also in the pilot you have the chance of beating your competitor to leveraging new technologies.
14. Content Is The Primary Traffic And Sales Driver
Today content is the driver of visitors and conversions, yet many businesses focus on the activation part only and expect the same old content to do the job over and over again. When buying keywords or advertising pointing to a landing page, always put as much into content as advertising and technology.
Always put as much effort into content as advertising and technology
15. Don’t Stop At Acquisition
Sure, a digital marketing strategy should drive new leads and customers. But don’t forget that it takes less effort to get more business from an existing customer, than a gaining a new one. The core question is, what can you do to improve conversion and sales with your current customers?
16. Adapt Your Digital Marketing Strategy To Local Needs
It’s easy to think that strategies on how to acquire customers are universal and works in every market you put your foot in. After all many businesses have global campaigns where just the actual speech or text is translated, and maybe a few images replaced. Be sure that you understand what channels are relevant in each market and how they are used.
For example in Brazil people use MercadoLibre and not Ebay. In China people use WeChat or Weibo, not Facebook. Here on Malta Facebook is extensively used in a business context. Germany has a strong history of data protection and reluctance among consumers to hand over their personal data online etc.
All these markets need adaptations to your Digital Marketing Strategy, otherwise you will fail to activate.
17. Your Staff Is Key
Digital Marketing changes quickly, there are constantly new changes in SEO, social and online advertising. Training and encouraging your staff to experiment and learn more about digital marketing is essential in order to achieve great results.
Remember that there are almost always different levels of knowledge in an organization, make sure your lift the not so knowledgeable ones to a basic level. While catering to the specialists and stars, making sure they evolve further.
19. Keep Track Of Your Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be complicated but also very easy. An easy way to get started is to ask your customers to rate on a scale 0-10 the likelihood of recommending your company or brand to a friend or colleague. Do not do this once per year, instead do it in a survey online periodically during the year, so your organization can take action quickly.
20. Execution Doesn’t Eat Strategy For Breakfast
There is a common saying in the digital marketing world, “Execution beats Strategy for breakfast”. Strategy and execution is not an either-or-affair. You will need both. Executing in the wrong direction can cost you time and money, while putting too much emphasis into strategy can make you lose the opportunity.
Almost all successful digital marketing campaigns happened because their creators did some thinking (strategy) before executing.
Once you have a blue-print of your digital marketing strategy and is fairly sure on where you want to go, it’s time to execute. A good rule is that about 20% of the time should put into creating a strategy and aligning behind it, 80% should then go to execution.
21) What If You Would Quit Tomorrow?
Consider what would happen to your digital marketing strategy once you quit. Would the organization continue it? Or would they abandon it? This is a good indicator how far you have come and how relevant the strategy is.
If the organization would continue towards the same path on their own you have succeed in rallying other people in the organization to help you, and also created a relevant blueprint. If not, then the organization might still be afraid of change, not thinking that the strategy is anchored in the business goals, or need further time to mature. Keep at it.
22) Partnerships Beats Going Alone
Rome wasn’t build in a day, but what if someone already built Rome and all you need is to partner with them? The type of partnerships you are looking for may include affiliates (other blogs, influencers or website that can feature your brand and content) or platforms (within your own niche or larger global platforms).
23) Define Your Marketing Technology Stack
Tools are a big part of digital marketing today, not using the correct tools impact your online marketing progress negatively, especially from an efficiency standpoint.
A digital marketing strategy for any organization cannot be supported by myriad of different tools doing the same thing, it will be to expensive to scale and to train staff to use them. Instead define and evaluate the tools that is needed to support the various stages of the customer journey.
Only change tools when you have safely established that a new tool does the job better than the previous one.
Don’t forget to add tools for planning purposes, such as tracking progress of your digital marketing strategy and creating roadmaps for where it’s going in the future.
24) Deliver On Brand Promise
If you are already working for a strong brand executing your digital marketing strategy will be easier, at least from an attention perspective. However be sure to align your strategy and messaging with the brand making the customer experience delivering on par with the brand promise.
If you are strong brand within your niche, then there is no excuse having a mediocre experience in digital channels.
Digital channels is where most of your customers will interact with your brand on a daily basis.
25) Don’t Benchmark Your Competitors
It’s never wrong to check out what the competition is doing. But online your customers will not compare you with your competitors. They will compare you with other leading online platforms and companies regardless of industry sector. For example it means that your app will be compared with Uber and Spotify.
Thanks for an excellent article! I appreciate your insights and agree with what you wrote.