Establishing a digital marketing strategy for your business doesn’t have to be a daunting task! If you’re a small business owner looking to attract a paying client, having a strategy is a vital place to start in order to devise an effective digital campaign.
Ask yourself these questions:
Who are you?
Define your brand.
Define your values.
Define your mission.
Define your vision.
Define your goals.
Define your target market, audience and customer profiles (e.g., age, sex, income level, location).
Where do go from here? Defining your target market must be the next step in defining a strategy.
Your target market is the group of people you want to work with. It's important to define your target market by clearly articulating who that group is, what problems they have, and how your business can help solve those problems.
Defining your target market can be the first step in defining a strategy. If you don't know who you're trying to reach, there's no way for anyone else (including yourself) to understand what makes sense for them.
If you cannot properly answer these questions or are unsure about where to start your digital marketing strategy, maybe a brainstorming session is needed to get started. This is a great way to get input on who your target audience is. If you don’t know who this person is, then how can you sell them anything? Defining your target market can be the first step in defining a strategy for what kind of content will be successful for them (and thus, what kind of content should go into the development process).
From this session, you will then be able to identify:
Who are my customers?
Who are my influencers?
Who are my partners and allies (i.e., other businesses that we collaborate with)?
What digital channels are they most likely to frequent?
What kind of content are they consuming? For example, if you're targeting millennials, maybe video or GIFs will work best. If your main goal is to get traffic back to your website, then creating social media content that links back might be the way to go. A great tip for deciding what type of content would be best for you is looking at what works for other companies within your industry. This can help guide which types of platforms might work well for one business but not another (and vice versa).
Now that you've got an understanding of who you want involved in the development of your digital marketing strategy, it’s time to move onto the next step...
Who are your competitors?
Now it’s time to research the competition. Who are they? Where are they located? How does their website look? How does their social media presence compare with yours?
You want to make sure all of your resources are going towards attracting new customers who fit into your industry. If you notice there are two businesses in the same town offering the same service and one gets more likes on Facebook than the other, then try to find out why.
Conclusion
Once you have your target market defined, and your competitors identified, you can start planning for what kind of strategy will work best for you. It may be worth talking to a professional at this point, but don’t worry too much if you don’t have the budget right now – we’ve got some tips on how to get started with digital marketing yourself!
From there, the next steps involve figuring out what kinds of tools work best for reaching this audience and where they are most likely to hang out online so that we can reach them effectively!
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