10 Steps to Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy

So you want to create a digital marketing strategy for your business. A good digital marketing strategy helps you to plan your goals, set a business mission then set up your unique selling point (USP). Understanding what you want to achieve and creating a plan to achieve that goal will help you make the right decisions at the right time. 

To help you create a working digital marketing strategy. I am giving you a 10 step digital marketing implementation plan which will help you achieve your business goals:

Step 1: Set a mission statement and USP (Unique selling point) for business: 

A successful digital marketing strategy focuses on your mission statement and USP. A mission statement is a statement of what makes the business important. A mission statement is a declaration of what makes the business important.

It should tell others why the business exists and what makes it different. For example, a mission statement for a blog that provides digital marketing knowledge like mine can be  ‘Our mission at XYZ is sharing our knowledge with honesty, originality, and authenticity. 

The Key Elements of a Mission Statement

You should focus your mission statement on these four elements:

• Value – What value the business gives to both customers and employees?
• Inspiration – What should people work for the company?
• Plausibility – It should sound reasonable
• Specificity – It should tie back to the business

How to create a USP (Unique selling point) for your business?

The USP of your business is what makes it different from the competitors. A good USP can help you attract and retain more customers. You should focus on how you can solve the problems of a customer rather than just selling them.

Use this USP template to determine your company’s USP (I took my blog as an example you can replace the text inside the brackets[] to put your own):

• For [new entrepreneurs/digital marketers/bloggers]
• Who [wants to learn digital marketing]
• [Achal Tomar]
• Is [the best dedicated online digital marketing blog]
• That [provides the digital marketing tips and training from the comfort of your home]
• Unlike [other paid programs]
• [Achal Tomar] is [the digital marketing expert in India that provides digital marketing tips for FREE]

Once you set a good USP you are in the right position in your digital marketing implementation plan.

Step 2: Define your Goals

Every digital marketer should know the importance of this stage. Without goals, your digital marketing strategy is a guitar without strings. So defining them is your first step. Maybe you are looking to increase your blog subscribers by 30% or increase sales by 10%. Digital marketing trends changing rapidly. You must-have digital marketing goals to get success.

Goals should be set as the SMART rule. You may wonder what a SMART goal is? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

SMART goals are:

• Specific: Well defined and clear
• Measurable: With specific criteria that can measure your goal progress
• Achievable: Must be achievable, you can ask questions if this has been achieved in the past by others?
• Relevant: Goals should relate to your company’s overall business goals
• Time-bound: It should have a defined timeline for completion. This is to create urgency.

So let’s look at an example of a SMART Goal:

Goal Name: Increase Blog Traffic Goal

• Specific: I want to increase our blog’s traffic by increasing our monthly blog publishing frequency from 5 to 8 times a month. I/my bloggers will increase the work from writing 5 to 8 blogs each month.
• Measurable: 8% increase is our goal
• Attainable: Our blog traffic increased by 5% when we increased our blog frequency from 3 to 5 each month.
• Relevant: By increasing our blog traffic we will increase subscribers/leads, which eventually will increase sales
• Time-bound: End of this month

So setting SMART goals will help you to know what you are going to achieve, what actions you need to take to achieve that goal, the purpose of the goal, and the time needed for goal completion.

Digital Marketing Strategy Step 3: Create a Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona is a fictional person who represents your target customer. This covers their interests and problems.

Once you know which audience segment you are targeting it makes it easy for you to create a digital marketing strategy around it. Remember the below points for creating a buyer persona for your digital marketing strategy:

• Research your target audience: Identify your current customer database for whom you have created your blog/product. Like age, location, language, interests, buying behavior, etc
• Identify customer pain points: This includes problems or challenges your potential customers facing
• Identify customer goals: You can use social media to check what your target customers are talking about using hashtags. This gives an idea about what motivates your customers
• Identify how your brand can help: Think about how your product/service can solve their problem?
• Create buyer personas: Now you can create a buyer persona by clubbing all the information you had into an ideal customer profile that can be used by your brand to target. To create your buyer persona, you can make use of online tools like MakeMyPersona

Step 4: Digital Marketing Strategy: Focus on blogging

Blogging can be done using a video blog or a written blog like mine. It is needed for an effective digital marketing strategy. Once you created a buyer persona you can write content that talks about your audience’s pain points and provides a solution to them.

This will help you gain trust and repeat visitors to your website. If you need help starting a WordPress blog. You can check my article on ‘How to start a blog and make money. Also, if you are looking to create a News/Magazine blog I recommend you to use Newspaper WordPress Theme.

You can use cheap WordPress hosting for your blog or website.

Check my article on the best WordPress themes for blogs. You can also check Articoolo Review to know how to automatically create content for your blog.

If you want to create stunning videos for your blog I would recommend trying Camtasia. It is an excellent video editing software. You can read my Camtasia Review to know more about the Camtasia video editor.

You can check my article on ‘Top 10 Important Search Engine Optimization Tips For Your Website’ to learn about doing SEO for your website and boosting search ranks.

Also, you can use tools like Accuranker and Long Tail Pro for your SEO success. You can check my Accuranker Review and Long Tail Pro review for the same.

You need to make sure your website uses correct spelling and grammar. You can use punctuation checker tools like Grammarly to improve grammar mistakes while writing online.

Step 5: Identify digital marketing channels

This is where most people get confused. With so many digital marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), and SEO which channel to choose to increase traffic to your website or blog can be confusing.

S,o to choose them you need to first define your goals and the target audience that we have already seen previously. Once you know your target audience it is easy to identify which channels are most used by them.

Simply put, you need to match each of your target audiences to the digital marketing platforms that are most used by each of these audience groups. Then you need to create a campaign around these channels as per your objectives.

Step 6: Create a content strategy for your target audience

Once you identify your digital marketing channels you need to think about what type of content should I produce which will drive traffic to your website?

Now to know what people are sharing online you can use a tool like a buzz sumo to know what content is trending on the internet. You can use it to create content around keywords that people like and share.

You can create ‘how-to’ articles focusing on solving a problem or information which your target audience is looking for. For a blog, the main focus should be creating blog posts around keywords and topics which are trending so that you gain more traffic with time.

You can also include more topics in your already created blog post (reuse content) which is an excellent content strategy to rank for keywords that you are not ranking for. You can do keyword research and use Google Search Console to check which keywords you are getting impressions and not clicks and add to your content

Step 7: Create a content calendar

Now once you know what to publish for your blog. The next thing is to determine at what time you should produce it. You can use a calendar in the following ways:

1. Create a content calendar for your digital marketing strategy using Google Spreadsheet/Excel
2. Add timelines for each blog post like time to start and finish the posts
3. If you want to advertise or promote any of these blog posts mark them so that you remember them when you use them in your promotions
4. Determine the digital channels like sharing on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn for your different blog posts

Step 8: Resource planning

Now you need to determine who will work on your content plan. If you are the single man running the show you need to do that hard work on your own.

But if you have a team you can assign people to take over different parts of the digital marketing plan. Like content creators, marketers, and analytics teams to maximize your efforts.

Step 9: Use the right technology

Now you need to equip your team with the right digital marketing tools so that they can maximize their productivity. A few tools you can use for various marketing activities listed below are:

• Social Media: You can use a tool like Buffer to add and schedule your social media posts. Learn Facebook Marketing from my Facebook Ads Guide. Also, focus on increasing social media share for your blog.
• Email Marketing: To get people subscribed to your blog/website you can use Mailchimp
• SEO: To boost your web rankings you can use Semrush for running site audits, competitor research, and a lot more. Check the Semrush tutorial to learn how to use this SEO tool. Also SEMrush free trial is a good way to get this tool free for 7 days.
• You can also make use of SEO keyword monitoring and keyword research like Accuranker and LongTailPro. Take a looks at Accuranker Review and Long Tail Pro Review to know more about these keyword monitoring and keyword research tools for SEO.
• Content calendar: You can use Google Spreadsheet or Microsoft outlook
• Advertising: You can use Google Ads to run campaigns on Google. Also, you can run campaigns on social media platforms as well
• Spelling and Grammar check – Make sure your website uses correct spelling and grammar. You can use punctuation checker tools like Grammarly to improve grammar mistakes while writing online
• Graphic Design: See Canva Pro Review and learn how Canva can be used by bloggers, marketers, businesses, teachers, photographers, graphic designers, and anyone who wants to create stunning designs.

Step 10: Analyze your digital marketing efforts

This is important if you are serious about your digital marketing strategy. You need an analytics tool like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your entire marketing and SEO efforts.

Set up KPIs like Return on Investment (ROI), Visits, Conversions to track how much you gain from your marketing efforts. Keep on optimizing your website to achieve your business goals. For Affiliate Marketing and to make money online I recommend using ShareASale.

Check ShareASale Review to learn about ShareASale. I hope this digital marketing strategy will work for your business. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section.