More than 28% of marketers have reduced their traditional advertising budget to fund more digital marketing efforts. That’s because if you own a business in the present day, you need an online presence. But, with so many digital options to choose from, you first need a plan. This is where an effective digital marketing strategy can help.

A digital strategy is a blueprint of how you will build out your business’s online objectives. And we all know how important blueprints are when it comes to building something that’s profitable and expected to last.

From your website to your email campaigns, creating a digital strategy keeps you from throwing ideas on the wall and crossing your fingers that they stick. With a digital strategy, you can connect your business objectives to measure your successes and failures.

To help, here are six steps to creating an effective digital strategy that meets your company’s needs.

1. Define Your Goals

Before you get started with any plans, first define your goals.

While every company’s goal is to be profitable, you will need to dig deeper to define your digital marketing goals. It could be that you want to increase online sales by 25%. Maybe you would like to aim for 100 social media shares or increase your email subscription list by 500. Once you define your goals, prioritize them and take your top three. Now, ingrain them in your head because these goals will be the guide of your digital strategy.

2. Know Your Key Channels

Omnichannel marketing is good for all businesses. However, the reality is that there are few businesses that actually need to use every digital marketing channel. In this step, you’ll weed out what’s not needed for your company and focus on your audience and the channels they use. For instance, if your business caters to adults that are over the age of 50, Snapchat doesn’t belong in your digital plans. Instead, it may be better aligned that you focus on email or Facebook.

Knowing your key channels helps you trim the fat by reaching your target audience more efficiently and cutting any unnecessary spending.

3. Develop a Content Strategy

According to Business2Community, brands now spend 25-43% of their marketing budget on content marketing. Whether it’s emails, social media posts, blogs or visual content, content is what the internet is built from. Therefore, your content should be the driving force of your digital strategy in order for it to be effective.  

When developing your content strategy, pinpoint your audience’s wants and needs. For example, if you notice the same FAQs coming from your customers about your product or service, develop an email drip campaign that educates. If you’ve figured out that email isn’t the best channel for your target audience, try another avenue like social or a business blog. Just make sure the content you create is useful since people share what they find interesting. And the more they share, the closer you will get to achieving your goals.  

4. Create a Calendar

Once you know the type of content that will work for your business, build out a calendar or a timeline to stay consistent.

You will likely use more than one marketing channel and have multiple pieces of content to manage, so let this calendar act as the lifeline of your digital strategy. Include details like content formats, deadlines, benchmarks, deliverables, and channels in your calendar.

Keeping everything in one place will help simplify the process as your workload increases.

5. Put Everything in Motion

Now that the planning is done, it’s time to put everything in motion.

Step back and take a look at the strategy you’ve created with a realistic mindset. Make sure you have enough resources, money and time to properly execute the items in your digital strategy. If you think you’re not fully equipped at the time, it’s perfectly fine to trim your list down a bit. If you feel you’re all set, let the fun begin.

6. Monitor and Measure

After all systems are a go, the last step is monitoring and measuring the results of your digital strategy. Since practically every major platform has its own form of analytics, accessing this info is easy.

This is also the time where you get to check and balance those goals created in step #1 to help you determine what was successful and what wasn’t. By learning this information first hand, it will help make your future digital efforts even stronger.

And there you have it! Six simple steps you can use to develop a digital strategy for your business that is easy and effective.

Are you unsure of which key digital channels your business should be using? Contact Belo Media Group today to get personalized help from our digital marketing experts.