Gone are the times when newspaper ads and billboards were enough to promote your brand. Today, digital marketing is as important as breathing. And in this post-pandemic era, it would be more important for you to have a proper digital marketing plan in place to be able to reach more customers in less time. Digital marketing strategies would include search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, digital ads, digital content creation, and much more. And each of them represents a different specialty with a unique set of practices and requires diversified skills. Simply put, what happens in social media marketing is absolutely different from that of SEO.
When it comes to building a digital marketing plan for your business, there are a lot of options to look into. However, it can be extremely stressful if you do not know what to choose and what not to. Also, starting a small business digital marketing plan could be downright stressful. In this article, however, we are going to reveal the steps of creating digital marketing strategies from scratch for businesses that haven’t yet joined the bandwagon.
1. Determine Your Goals
What do you want your digital marketing campaign to achieve? Do you wish to launch your brand and use it for creating brand recognition? Are you on the lookout for generating leads? Getting more sales or getting more email subscribers? Once you have a goal in mind, you can start incorporating a plan to meet that. Having solid goals matters as you will have to take specific steps to finish each one of them. For example, suppose you are going on a bunch of blind dates with no idea of whom you are going to meet. This might make you settle for less or choose the very first person that you meet. However, if you know in yourself what you need in a partner, you are more likely to find the perfect match.
2. Recognize the Digital Sales Funnel
The digital sales funnel is as vital as having an actual digital marketing plan in place. And you will need to recognize this even before building a digital marketing strategy for your business. The digital sales funnel is made of different steps and your prospective buyers would move through it to get to the point of buying your products/services and/or becoming your long-term customers. This funnel includes the discovery of your brand by your customers for the very first time. Then the research related to your brand by the customers who might even consider your products for purchase. The next point would be to purchase your products and the last stage is customer loyalty, where they would become the advocates for your brand.
3. Create a User Persona
The next step would include creating a strategy and then getting a solid understanding of who your target audience is and what will motivate them. This step is essential as it will help you to gauge which marketing platforms you can use to find them, how you will interact with them and what they would like to get from you. Buyer personas should be absolutely specific. This will help you to understand the needs of your audience better and you will learn more about their pain points and how you can relieve them with your products/services.
4. Focus on Blogging
Creating good-quality content is vital for any kind of digital marketing strategy. Blogging is all about creating unique content for your website as well as guest suites and reaching your target audiences through specific keywords. This will not only bring more traffic to your website but will also reinforce your social media presence and position you ahead of your competitors. The long-tail keywords will allow you to rank your website higher on the search engines.
5. Consider Mobile-optimization
It’s a mobile-first age and you should improve your site accordingly. For a more engaging mobile experience for your customers, you should optimize your site for all mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This step will include page speed, website design (responsiveness), and a lot of other search engine optimization practices which will ensure that your users who visit your site even on a mobile device will have an engaging experience. Review your responsive website design in order to ensure that you are making use of all the latest trends and provide your customers will only relevant and the most recent data.
Wrapping it Up,
While it may seem that digital marketing is easy and you can get started anytime, you are probably starting it wrong. There are a lot of things that you should consider while coming up with a plan for digital marketing for business. And if you are able to consider the above-mentioned points, it would be easy to create one from scratch.
For more amazing tips and updates related to small businesses in Canada, do not forget to subscribe to our monthly CanadianSME Small Business Magazine.
