10 Most Important Elements for Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
We all have heard this old adage, and it is proven true by thousands of businesses that fail to see their 3rd year of existence.
In most cases, this is due to lack of a proper strategy that takes into account all the necessary actions you need to take.
Today, every business is looking at the most effective way to use the internet and the online space to grow revenue.
In this article, I will discuss the most important elements of an effective digital marketing strategy. As I also discuss how you can use the 10X Digital Marketing Toolkit to easily incorporate those elements in your strategy.
I have used this toolkit in my own business and my clients’ as well.
But remember
“Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master.”
~ Phil Kolter
If you’d want to walk with me as your mentor, trainer, and coach, you can join my 6 week SOFT Marketing Training Program.
What is Digital marketing strategy?
Digital marketing strategy is a well-crafted plan for establishing, launching and scaling your business through online channels. These channels may include website, organic search, social media, and paid ads.
10 Most Important Elements for Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
The Table of Content
The 10 most important elements of a digital marketing strategy are:
- Preliminary Digital Asset Audit
- Crafting SMART Goals
- Identifying Your Ideal Customers: Creating Your Customer Persona
- SWOT Analysis
- Establishing Effective Brand Positioning and Voice
- Identifying the Marketing Tactics to Use
- Identifying the Projects that Will Help You Achieve the Set Goals
- Setting a Realistic Marketing Budget
- Identify Content and A Promotion Checklist to Follow
- Setting the Project Timelines
- Planning Your Posts Schedule
Let’s now dig deeper into each of these elements:
1. Preliminary Digital Asset Audit
Whether you are a business owner or a digital marketing agency, the first thing you want to know is the type of digital assets you have at the point you’re creating the digital marketing strategy.
Some of the things you want to take account of include your Social media following, your websites, articles, ebooks, courses, tracking parameters and any other form of material that you can use for digital marketing purposes.
In the 10X Digital marketing toolkit, I have created a section named ‘Preliminary’ that will help you do this audit successfully.
“For every operation audited, know the mission, the purpose and the reason for being.”
–Larry Sawyer
This audit allows you to take into account everything you can use to drive business goals, and understand the opportunities for growth available to you and your business.
2. Crafting SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym that stands for a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
The 10X Digital Marketing Toolkit is designed to help you create a marketing strategy that will help you improve your results by 10 times.
The toolkit is designed to help you set specific goals that are measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
How does it do this? You may ask.
Well, if you are a business that has some previous results, we take the average of the last three months, and then put it on the toolkit.
This toolkit then distributes and sets target for each month over the period that you choose. This allows you to create your SMART goals easily.
It also gives you a system of measuring the goals over the time period.
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals”
-Henry David Thoreau
3. Identifying Your Ideal Customers: Creating Your Customer Persona
The greatest challenge any business has, is understanding their customer.
Most businesses think more about their products or services, instead of thinking about their customers and how they can best resolve the challenges they have or help them achieve their desired goals.
Always think about your customers and how well you can help them live a better life.
In creating the customers persona, you want to think about the issues that plague them.
What is it that keeps them awake at night?
Where are they looking for solutions?
Who is currently offering solutions?
How do they feel about their current situation?
Who influences them at the moment?
Do they want to relieve a certain pain or are they looking to achieve a certain pleasure when they are seeking a solution?
The 10X Digital marketing toolkit has an elaborate section that helps you identify your customers and create a realistic customer persona based on research and real data.
“Buyer personas keep you focused on addressing customer priorities instead of your own.”
4. SWOT Analysis
Now that you have done your audit, you have crafted your SMART goals and created your customer persona, it is time to Audit your business to understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat that you may take advantage of to launch and scale your business online.
Here is the section on the 10X Digital marketing toolkit.
“Try to master the art of turning your weaknesses to strengths and threats to opportunities.”
-Blue Lover
5. Establishing Effective Brand Positioning and Voice
What will you be known for?
How will you communicate your value to your customers?
These are just some of the questions you need to answer as you plan to go online.
The 10X Digital marketing toolkit will help you craft your brand positioning, messaging and the voice to communicate effectively to your ideal customers.
“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time”
-Elon Musk
6. Identifying the Marketing Tactics to Use
Your digital marketing strategy cannot be complete without identifying the tactics you’ll use to achieve the desired results.
These tactics will usually be determined by the results of your digital asset audit, your SWOT analysis and the customer persona you’ve created.
“What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”
~ David Ogilvy
7. Identifying the Projects that Will Help You Achieve the Set Goals
After you’ve identified the tactics, then you will have to identify the projects you need to undertake in order to implement the tactics and strategies.
Will it be website design, social media profile creation, or content creation.
Here you will be able to grade each project with its ability to increase your results by 10X as opposed to those that may make small increments on your results.
8. Setting a Realistic Marketing Budget
All this will need a budget, this section of the 10X Digital Marketing Toolkit allows you to budget for all the projects and the campaigns that you’ll run to achieve the desired results.
9. Identify Content and A Promotion Checklist to Follow
For each project identified, the 10X Digital marketing Toolkit helps you create a checklist you can use to ensure the project is executed effectively.
This is an important element of your strategy as it provides you with a way to understand every single aspect of the project, who is involved, how far it is at any given time and whether it is complete or not.
10.Setting the Project Timelines
Execution of any strategy separates those who succeed and those who fail.
Without a good execution plan a strategy is just an academic exercise that will result to naught.
Setting project timelines can be a challenge, but with this 10X Digital marketing toolkit, you will be able to set this easily.
11.Planning Your Posts Schedule
Once everything is set, then it is time to plan your posting schedule. This will help in knowing what content goes out at what time and what it is meant to achieve.
Conclusion
“Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at precisely the right moment when a buyer needs it.”
~ David Meerman Scott
After doing digital marketing for over 12 years of experience up to the time of writing this post, I have crystalized these 11 elements as the most important in creating an effective Digital marketing strategy.
I have used research and experience to create the 10X Digital Marketing Toolkit that is aimed at helping business owners and digital marketers to easily create an effective strategy for their own businesses.
My aim is to help as many businesses as possible to get started on the right foot in the digital marketing industry.
Feel free to purchase this toolkit here.
