Build your digital marketing strategy in 8 steps
Why and how to implement a digital marketing strategy ?
Because all companies are turning the corner on digital transformation , and need to rethink their Internet strategy in terms of both form and content, and make changes to their marketing communications and the tools they use.
However, contrary to popular belief, having a website and several social network accounts is not enough to define a digital strategy.
Beyond your simple web presence, take advantage of the digital trend to attract, interest and convince your future customers.
In this article, co-written with growth marketing expert Jérémy Lacoste, you'll discover all the steps you need to take to develop a high-impact digital marketing strategy.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
Definition of digital marketing
As a reminder, digital marketing, also known as e-marketing, webmarketing or digital marketing, consists of promoting a product or service on the Internet, to a targeted audience, using :
- numerous media (computer, tablet, mobile, etc.),
- a range of marketing tools,
- methods and strategies (inbound, outbound, etc.).
What is a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing campaign is the coordination of all these elements to serve the actions that make up this strategy.
For example, you may choose to launch a campaign by sharing some of your most interesting or popular content on a particular social media channel, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, to generate more leads.
The objectives of a digital strategy
A digital strategy is nothing more than a series of actions designed to achieve one or more objectives defined in an action plan, such as :
- increasing your brand's visibility on the Internet ;
- generating traffic to your website
- improving user experience;
- reduce your bounce rate;
- generate quality leads;
- acquire prospects;
- improve customer relations;
- develop your content marketing to attract and interest your target audience;
- convert your visitors.
As you can see, to build a successful digital strategy, you need to take care of your online marketing, but that's not all. A complete digital strategy also includes a digital communications strategy.
How do you build a digital marketing strategy?
What are the steps involved in a webmarketing strategy?
Step 1 : Analyze your market situation
This step takes place before any digital strategy is put in place, before any decisions are made. Knowing the current state of the market allows you to better understand your target market and its expectations, while assessing the competition.
Market research enables you to analyze :
- competitors and their practices,
- consumer behavior,
- market trends,
- geographical areas where your brand is present.
💡 Evaluating the competitive context allows you to know how to position yourself against your competitors and fine-tune your audience marketing targeting, so you can see your digital project from both a marketing and communication point of view.
But to be relevant in your strategies, you need a precise and exhaustive analysis. That's why many companies choose to rely on competitive intelligence tools .PriceComparat
Step 2 : Define your objectives
In order to prepare your strategy, bring together the company's teams and executives to set a course in unison. This involves discussing objectives for a given period.
Depending on the needs formulated at the analysis stage, various objectives can be envisaged, including :
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Visibility: development of brand awareness and online presence,
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Traffic: generating traffic,
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Lead: lead generation, conversion,
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Customer experience: improving the customer experience.
Step 3 : Define your key performance indicators
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators ) will help you measure performance effectively. They include, for example :
- SEO ranking,
- traffic generated on your website,
- conversion rate,
- time spent on your site,
- ROI (return on investment).
Step 4 : Define your budget
The budget determines the means you'll use to achieve your objectives.
There are a wide variety of possibilities on the web, all with their own advantages and disadvantages, as well as their own costs.
It's up to you to assess which financial investment best suits your needs.
Step 5 : Identify your buyer personas
By " buyer personas" we mean the target group your offer is aimed at. This means identifying the detailed profiles of your ideal customers, orienting your communication towards them and, ultimately, understanding their purchasing decisions by knowing their expectations, habits and characteristics.
What strategy and medium(s) should you use to identify them? Social network analysis tools are an excellent starting point, instead of a complex study of your customers and their profiles, for example. You can study the characteristics of your audience using Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics or Facebook Insights, for example.
Other actions are also possible, such as drafting questionnaires to be sent to customers using software such as SurveyMonkey.
Step 6 : Think about your website
Your website is your brand's showcase. It must be carefully designed, as it is the first point of contact with your future customers, as well as partners, suppliers and employees.
The domain name must also be taken into consideration, as it acts as the gateway to your brand's universe.
Finally, depending on your objectives, it's important to think about the format of your online presence: showcase site, merchant site, marketplace, blog, etc.
💡 Get free, personalized support with the Solocal Digital Audit, to :
- analyze your entire digital presence, be it your websites, blogs, or business pages (Yellow Pages, Facebook, etc.) ;
- identify your online strengths and weaknesses;
- receive advice via an action plan.
Step 7 : Design your action plan
The action plan must be in line with the customer's journey through the conversion funnel. This involves defining the levers to be activated for each of these phases (acquisition > conversion > retention).
- Acquisition phase
- Your target is on Google? Focus on SEO/SEA if it's profitable for your business model.
- Your target is present on social networks? Focus on developing content on these platforms.
- Does your target ask questions and need information? Focus on inbound marketing.
- Conversion phase
- Want to encourage a purchase? Rely on UX, affiliation, comparisons, marketplaces, etc.
- To generate leads? Rely on a form to be filled out following inbound gains, or a white paper to be advertised on social networks, for example.
- Retention and loyalty phase
- Through newsletters? Focus on email capture.
- By providing a service? Focus on application development.
- Through a sense of belonging to the brand? Rely on social networks.
Which media?
In addition, the action plan can be designed taking into account 3 bases and evaluating those that best lend themselves to the strategy you've built so far:
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Paid media: paid marketing levers such as targeted Google Adwords advertising, paid influencers, pay-per-click, social network advertising such as Facebook ads, affiliation, etc. ;
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Owned media: your property on the web, such as your website or blog, your content offering, your social network accounts, etc. ;
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Earned media: that which is shared and allows you to reach your target organically, at no cost: social networks, mentions of your content or offer on external sites, etc.
Your strategy will be built around these different media, according to your needs and budget defined upstream.
Step 8 : Choose the levers to activate
A word from the expert
To build sustainable growth, you need to play on both flow and stock. At the outset, levers such as SEA, Social Ads or Affiliation are formidable sales drivers, being immediately visible to an intentional audience. Over time, they need to be switched to a more profit-oriented approach.
At the same time, we need to lay the groundwork for an organic flow, through strong SEO positioning and an outbound marketing strategy to capitalize on natural inbound traffic.
It's the intersection of these 2 approaches that enables serene growth.
Based on your action plan and the specific needs of your business, choose the actions to be implemented to achieve the objectives you've set yourself.
▷ Opt for an SEO and SEA strategy
When it comes to digital marketing strategy, SEO is a must! SEO, SEA, or both?
🛠️ Search Engine Optimization, or SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, aims to optimize the pages of your website so that they are read by Internet users and seen by Google, which will choose to position them on the first page of results... or not.
The ultimate aim is to increase traffic to your website.
🛠️ Search Engine Advertising, or SEA
SEA, or Search Engine Advertising, is a marketing channel based on targeted advertising in search engines (most often Google).
Each ad corresponds to a keyword, a pre-defined target and the expected number of clicks and leads .
The aim? Give your brand rapid online visibility .
The difficulty? A SEA campaign requires regular, precise monitoring to ensure its success and return on investment.
💡 Have you launched paid search campaigns and want more visibility to analyze their results?
Marketing managers or digital marketing agencies will appreciate Seiso: one connection with your Google Ads account and 3 clicks is all it takes to receive a complete analysis of your campaigns, instantly and free of charge!
Another plus point: Seiso doesn't store your data, so there are no security or confidentiality issues to worry about.
▷ Adopt a strategy for your presence on social networks
Social networks and media offer a multitude of options for promoting your content and brand image, and thus boosting your e-reputation.
As true amplifiers of the messages conveyed by your brand, they promise great benefits for your company. They can help you achieve a variety of objectives, such as raising brand awareness, offering after-sales service, building customer loyalty and standing out from the competition.
They also help you to :
- find new customers ;
- forge new partnerships;
- learn more about your prospects and their habits.
It can be time-consuming to manage your presence and visibility on several channels at the same time. To simplify the task, social network management tools such as Hootsuite, Agorapulse or Buffer offer a whole range of functionalities, such as :
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monitoring,
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interaction
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publication management,
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metrics, reporting, etc.
▷ Developing a content strategy
To interest your personas, it may be a good idea, depending on the type of offer you're making, to put in place a suitable editorial strategy to provide your audience with relevant, high-quality content.
The technique of inbound marketing enables you to attract prospects to your website. It's a lever for both brand awareness and the generation of qualified leads.
In your editorial planning, define the subjects to be covered, when to publish and on which channel.
Adapt the tone and form of the message, and make it attractive by encouraging interaction: polls, contests, questions to your community, etc.
Encourage your audience to react to your publications and leave comments.
☝ Depending on your objectives, you can collect contacts via fill-in forms, for example, hosted on a landing page. The idea is to encourage your visitor to go to the page in question by means of call-to-action devices.
▷ Marketing automation and lead nurturing to achieve your goals
Lead nurturing consists in subtly bringing the prospect to the sales proposal by raising their awareness, then informing them before finally committing them to purchase and thus close the sale.
You can optimize all these processes thanks to marketing automation, which enables you to automate the marketing actions to be undertaken (emailing, social networks, lead nurturing, lead scoring, etc.).
💡 What if you could save time in the prospect research stage, quickly identify the right prospects, and spend your time nurturing them, supporting them, and responding to their objections with relevant sales arguments?
That's what Blacksales offers, making the sales prospecting phase a formality. You save time by automating time-consuming and unprofitable tasks, thanks to the happy marriage of sales intelligence with marketing automation.
💡 To take things a step further, the Mapp Cloud marketing automation platform and its integrated Mapp Intelligence, Mapp Acquire and Mapp Engage modules, maximize the ROI of your marketing actions by giving greater reach and effectiveness to your multi-channel campaigns (email, web, SMS, mobile push, social).
Data from different channels is centralized in one tool, making it easy to exploit: you can extract customer insights, anticipate user actions and behaviors thanks to AI, and ultimately enrich your campaigns and considerably personalize the customer experience.
Final tip: measure your performance
Evaluate the impact...
It's essential to track the customer journey and exploit its benefits.
Using artificial intelligence can be a wise choice for monitoring the behavior of your site's visitors and measuring the ROI of your campaigns in real time.
You can also examine the most visited pages, to discover the content that most interests your prospects, thanks to monitoring tools like Google Analytics (for the website), or Hootsuite (for social networks).
... for better optimization
Depending on the results, you'll be able to see where there's room for improvement. For example, you may decide to better tailor your message to your target audience, or better target your queries.
By keeping a close eye on all your indicators, you'll be in a better position to carry out tests, verify the impact of an action, and so on.
The ultimate goal is the continuous improvement of the customer experience, always following the same red thread: attract, interest and convince.
Updated article, originally published in April 2019.
Article translated from French