Curious about how to make your business excel in the digital world?
Strategy is crucial to navigating the online world and ensuring success for your business. Having a digital marketing strategy based on data and clear measurable goals, you will be on the path to drive more business and achieve the planned results.
According to Katadata, internet penetration in Indonesia is up to 76,8% by June 2021, which means that internet users in Indonesia are now more than 200 million people. The market is now online, and you should do something about it.
Understanding Digital Marketing Strategy
But, what is a digital marketing strategy? How is it different from a marketing strategy? Digital marketing strategy is an extension of your marketing strategy. While a marketing strategy is a plan for reaching specific marketing-related goals in a focused and achievable way, a digital marketing strategy helps your business achieve specific goals through carefully selected online or digital marketing channels, such as paid, earned, or owned media.
When you create your digital marketing strategy, you need to ensure that it is aligned with the overarching business goals of your company, and with the overall marketing strategy.
Before digging into the specifics of each digital media channel, let’s define what the strategy is and how it is different from tactics.
Crafting Your Digital Marketing Strategy: What’s Needed?
A strategy is a destination – the realistic and specific plans to get you to your business goals and objectives. Meanwhile, tactics are concrete and definable steps within your strategy.
In the digital marketing world, your strategy sets the road maps, but the campaigns (similar to tactics) will be the vehicles you’ll work with to get you to that destination. Deciding which channels to focus on and why that channel is important, will be a part of your digital marketing strategy, but what kind of activities you will do there will be a part of your digital marketing tactics or campaigns.
There are three components of a strategy.
First, you need to define your business goals and make a diagnosis of your business challenge.
What do you want to achieve?
What do you need in order to grow your business?
What kind of timeline do you have?
These are crucial to setting the right digital marketing strategy, the one that works for your business.
Secondly, create a mission statement to deal with those challenges. Ideally, these include the goals you want to achieve to show that you’re coping well with the business challenges.
Last but not least, set actions that are necessary to accomplish the goals you’ve set out in your mission statement.
Steps to Create Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Business
Have you understood what your business challenge is? Took time and took care of knowing exactly what your overarching business goals are? Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty details of creating a digital marketing strategy for your business!
Research your customer
The strategy works best if they are based on data, and the most important data you will need is one that will help you know who your customer is and understand how, where, and why they would want to get your products and services.
You want to know which digital media is most often used by your target audience.
You want to know whose opinions they listen to.
You want to know what kind of things motivate them to buy products and services.
Find out the public figures they adore and why. It represents their values, dreams, and goals, and these are important words and topics to know when you want to reach them.
Decide on goals and digital marketing tools you need
Your marketing goals should support your business goals. For example, you have a business goal to increase online revenue by 20%. This might mean that your marketing team needs to generate 50% more leads via your online channels than the previous year, to show that the digital marketing efforts contribute to that goal.
The goal will then lead you to determine which channel you need. For example, if you need quick results, focus on your paid channels.
However, paid channels will always require more and more of your budget. If you need something that lasts and brings you more and more customers in the future, you need to invest in organic channels such as Search Engine Optimization for your websites and crafting active and successful social media channels.
Audit your existing digital channels and assets
Your digital channels will be your vehicles, so if these are not great, they won’t make your strategy work, and they won’t help you reach your destination or your targeted business goals. Understand what is paid media, owned media, and earned media, how you are doing now, and what you can do to improve it.
Paid Media
Google Ads, Display Ads, and Social Media Ads are part of paid digital channels. These are sometimes called performance marketing, and that’s because you will immediately know whether they perform or not. Paid media will work if you know who your customers are: their age, locations, devices, languages (do people who set English in their devices are more likely to buy your products and services?), interests (what kind of keywords they will be searching for?) and more. These are great if you need immediate results. However, paid media can be expensive and will always require more budgets to maintain.
Owned Media
Owned media includes digital channels that your company “owns” and can operate on your own, such as social media, email newsletters, YouTube channels, and websites.
These channels are important to invest in if you are interested in both short-term and long-term business goals. The key to succeeding in owned media is getting your content strategy right.
If what you publish can attract high quality interests from the public and media, it can even contribute to earned media.
Earned Media
Earned media is when your business is talked about, mentioned or referred to on other digital channels, not because you pay them but because they are interested in what you are doing. For example, when your CEO is called for an interview at a local news site, that’s earned media. You stand out from the crowd. This requires branding and public relations strategy that understands what the public needs and how you can support it.
Plan your digital media campaigns
Make your strategy stronger by planning the campaigns, the tactics, and the specific steps you need to take. Which media will you focus on? What key messages do you need to get out there? How are you going to make use of these digital channels and ensure they bring results?
If awareness first is what you need right now, the content strategy for the channels will need to be different if what you need is direct leads.
The campaigns will put your strategy to test whether they work or not, and the results will immediately inform you whether you are on the right track or need to shift gear and change your routes.
Ready to start planning your digital marketing presence? Let us know if we can be of any help.
Stucel has helped clients from around the world, from our own home country in Indonesia to Angola, Japan, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland and many more, and has created more than 300 optimized websites for more than 15 years.
Our expertise and detailed technical solutions for clients help them nail down their business goals through well-thought-out, well-executed digital marketing plans.