In this blog, we’ll uncover the important parts that make digital marketing strategies work. Our main focus is on breaking down the three key components that help digital marketing succeed.
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Execution
Strategy is about your customers and how best to serve them. Tactics are the specific platforms you are going to use i.e., Facebook Ads, Google Ads. Finally, execution is ensuring everything is in place and you have a plan.
There are 3 important steps to an effective digital marketing strategy, however people usually start at point 2. Unfortunately, that approach is riddled with problems. Before jumping to tactics, you need to first consider the strategy piece as it will best help you understand your customer. This is where all successful marketing starts.
“The best way to grow your business is by putting people first!”
Marketing is a people business. It is about people in business communicating with people who are customers. Jumping to tactics immediately means you are looking at technology before considering people.
You need all three of these strategies to see success not only in your marketing campaign but also in your overall business. It is important to remember that you need to have all three of these strategies in the correct order: Strategy, Tactics & Execution. They all lead into one another.
1. Strategy
We have spent some time boiling down this point to come up with one question to ask yourself when you begin to think about strategy. It includes four elements for you to understand and build a strategy around.
“How do we achieve business goals by communicating with the right people, at the right time, with the right message?”
Usually, a business goal will include wanting more leads or just wanting to grow. Whilst this is great, there also needs to be a bit more detail to that.
Marketing develops unqualified leads; say you get 10 leads and from that only 5 are qualified leads. It is important to remember that marketing can attract the wrong people and there is no real way to perfect that. What can be done is you can hone your message to minimise it. From your 5 qualified leads, you’ll then convert some of those into sales. It is important to know how many leads are unqualified leads that convert to qualified leads and how many qualified leads convert to sales. From there you can figure out how many leads you might need to grow your business.
In our previous blog called “6 Steps to Understanding your customer,” we spent a lot of time diving into the details of those 6 stages. Those 6 points are:
- Tell a Story
- Focus on the Hero
- Write the story out
- Pinpoint your actual customer
- Persona
- Combining the big & little picture for maximum effect
When you have these six things, you begin to find real people in everyday life who need your product or service to solve their problems.
To find more gold in these 6 steps, check out the podcast today.
You have customers out there who have never heard of you, so you need to make them aware of all you can offer them. You also have people who have heard of you but aren’t ready to do business. Then there are people who know you, like you and are ready to do business with you. These people will vary, which is why it is important that you are marketing to your customers in the different stages at the right time with the right message that is going to make the most sense for where they are in conjunction with your business.
Some points to remember would be:
- Raising awareness to people who have never heard of you
- Educate people who know you and like you but aren’t ready to buy
- Simply asking people to buy from you for those who are ready to do business with you.
There are three different messages here with three different timings. So, your campaign needs to take each of these things into account alongside the times.
How you, as a small, medium or large business, market your products or service will need to be completely different to how corporate businesses such as McDonalds do their marketing. Because they are a large, well-established company who have been operating for decades, their marketing is going to look hugely different to yours. This kind of marketing is usually front of mind for many people because we are heavily exposed to it through the media, TV or billboards. It would be natural for us to want to emulate those marketing efforts, however, they won’t be effective for a small, medium or large business.
You also need to consider the pricing of your product or service, as this will also cause the message and timing of your marketing campaign to look different.
2. Tactics
The main roads of the city are where most of the cars are. The internet is essentially the same, there’s only a few websites that have most of the people on them all the time. In order to market to 95% of your customers, you must only choose from a few limited tactics:
Other tactics such as Snapchat, Tik Tok or Pinterest can also apply, but they are smaller roads with plenty of people. However, the marketing within those platforms is a bit more niche.
There are then a few supporting services and tasks that can feed into these platforms such as video and photography. If you want to do social media or SEO, you will need photos. If you want to do emails, there is digital PR or entering competitions. This can then intertwine with social media and showcase the fact that you won a competition. There are chatbots, social media templates, email templates, web design and graphics. There are many tools that work alongside the main tactics.
If you want more information about these options and how to incorporate them into your marketing, contact us today and our friendly team would love to have a conversation with you.
3. Execution
We now know that there are many different tactics we can choose from; it’s simply a matter of choosing the right one, but now we come into the stage of actioning everything.
We offer something called a digital marketing playbook and the purpose of this is to put together a 12-month execution plan answering the question of “What are we going to do over the next 12 months?”
Planning is a big differential between success and failure. We suggest taking a month to do some deep research into what your business truly needs rather than throwing money at anything to just give it a go. By taking a month to properly plan and research you will end up learning so much about marketing, you’ll learn the deeper ins and outs of your business and what it truly needs.
Your plan needs to have a few elements:
- Your Voice | How are you going to sound in the market that is different and unique?
- Your Industry | Look into your competitors and see who is doing what well. You obviously aren’t going to be copying what they are doing, but you can see what is performing well and be inspired.
When it comes to our playbook process, there are two meetings upfront, an exploration meeting, and then the actual playbook presentation meeting. After that we go ahead and do each month’s marketing planning for you, and we execute it all for you. We know what keywords to be targeting, what to be posting on the social platforms and track results. With the results, we film a quick monthly report to show what has happened throughout the month in terms of results but explain it to you in a way that you can understand. From there, if there are any questions you can let us know and we would be more than happy to have a conversation with you.
