Digital marketing is becoming more and more intertwined into who a company is, what it does, and how it grows. As a result, a company’s marketing strategy becomes more entwined with its digital transformation strategy. Whether it be through SEO, email marketing, social media, or whatever else that approaches the industry, it is important to consider such innovations in marketing.
While all marketing nowadays has a digital component, digital marketing involves much more than what is seen in traditional marketing. It’s important to differentiate the two, and understand specifically how a digital marketing plan is laid out. Especially for new grads and those entering the industry as entry-level applicants, having a grasp on how businesses can optimize the current plan or how they can build a new one is crucial in finding a job. Therefore, we’ve compiled a quick guide on developing a successful digital marketing strategy in 2021.
How does a Digital Strategy Help a Business?
Digital Marketing is defined as
The use of the internet and other kinds of digital communication to promote companies and communicate with potential customers As a marketing channel, this comprises not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia communication.
In today's environment, a digital marketing plan is a necessary because:
- Your clients are on the internet, and you need to meet them there. Targeting your clients where they are is one of the primary rules of marketing. And in today’s digital age, no matter what type of business you run, at least part of your clients are likely to be online.
- Digital marketing allows you to communicate with your customers in a variety of ways. The more techniques you use to reach out to your customers, the more customers will know who you are—and the more customers who know who you are, the more successful your brand and business will likely be.
- The ROI on digital marketing is really high compared to traditional marketing. Digital marketing may be substantially more cost-effective than other marketing techniques when done correctly, as it’s easier to get massive exposure online rather than hoping your physical ads are seen by the right people in person. Brands may reap a slew of benefits from a good digital marketing plan, including increased brand awareness, higher customer conversions, and a goldmine of data on their customers and how to contact them efficiently. Digital marketing doesn’t just focus on the first point of contact, but with digital marketing, you can easily “follow” the people that have interacted with your marketing channels online even after they leave your site regardless of if they provided an email address or other contact information or not via re-marketing. This is something that isn’t available with traditional marketing.
A Few Terms to Know When Building the Perfect Plan
- Conversions: Conversions are when the audience takes the desired action that you want them to take when interacting with your marketing such as giving you their email address, visiting your website, or paying for your product. You determining the goal you’re seeking and then when the audience does that thing, this is a conversion.
- CPC: Cost per Click is a term when you’re running paid ads. With this type of ad, you will only be charged when someone clicks on the ad. The nice thing about these types of ads are that they can be shown to hundreds or thousands of people and you won’t be charged a penny unless someone actually clicks on the ad.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of people who take the specific action that you want them to take. For example, if your landing page from your ad is trying to get people to buy your product, every time someone actually does pay for this product, they are considered a conversion. So, if you have 100 people that click on your ad and go to your landing page and 5 people ultimately purchase, this means you have a 5% conversion rate for that particular ad.
- KPI: Key Performance Indicators, used to evaluate the success of a digital marketing campaign based on the goals set before execution. Common KPIs are CPC (cost per click), CAC (customer acquisition cost), CTR (click through rate), and CLV (customer lifetime value).
- ROAS: Return on Ad Spend; This is very similar to return on investment except this is solely looking at how much money you’ve spent running an ad and how much money you made off of that particular ad. ROAS doesn’t take into consideration all other expenses related to running ads such as how much it costs to hire someone to run your ads. If you spent $500 on ads and your company made $1,000 in sales off of those ads, then your ROAS would be 100%.
- Target audience: The predetermined type of people who are most likely to want your products or services. Before doing any marketing, you need to decide who you want to target (target audience) as you want to make your marketing efforts geared specifically for them. Those who try to sell to everybody end up selling to nobody so go in with a well defined idea of who your target audience is as this will save you a lot of time and money.
- Impressions: How many times your ads are shown. Each time a person sees your ad, this counts as 1 impression. Note, this does not mean that the impressions equals the number of people who have seen your ad. For instance, if 1 person saw your ad 2 times, that would count as 2 impressions. So you could potentially have 1,000 impressions yet only 500 people have actually seen your ad.
- CPA: Cost per action – This is a common metric that is tracked for digital marketers. It’s just a calculation on how much overall it costs for your target audience to perform a specific action. You can track several different actions such as clicks for example. When you run an ad, how much in ad spend will it cost to get one person to click on your ad.
- CPL: cost per lead – How much will it cost you to get 1 lead (contact info such as an email address). Your ad will usually take people to a landing page where you’re trying to get the audience to give you their email address. How much in ad spend on average will it cost to get 1 person to not only click on your ad, but then when on your landing page, actually give you their contact info? This is how you figure out our CPL.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of site visitors who leave your site after only seeing one page; the lower the better
Understanding The Funnel
Now that you have an understanding of some key terms in a digital marketing strategy, let’s now take a look at the all important funnel so that you can have an understanding of how a person goes from being unaware of your company to hopefully becoming a customer. You’ll want to use this funnel to build your digital marketing strategy around. The arc of your buyer’s journey from stranger to repeat, or long-term customer is represented by the digital sales funnel. Using the funnel as guidance can help a company with a strong digital presence reach its digital marketing objectives.
How do you use the funnel properly?
By using the right digital marketing tools at each stage of the funnel. You have to understand where your customers are in the buying process and then you have to give them the marketing material that best matches that in order to usher them through the funnel and hopefully become eventual customers. For example, you won’t have much success selling to someone that has never heard of you. Instead, you want to start off by making them aware of you, make them understand how you can solve their problem, and then eventually go in for the sale. This is a very simplistic version of the funnel, but for the best results, the marketing materials that you provide your audience is going to be most effective if it matches where they are in your funnel.
Here's a quick guide on what to do through various parts of the buyer's journey . . .
Awareness
Make sure that potential customers are aware of your existence. For example, through social media marketing or a high search engine rating.
Interest
Inspire people to learn more about your company. Who are you and what distinguishes you from your competitors? Ask yourself what you provide and how the consumer might benefit from having you in their life.
Intent
Make your connections stronger. Sponsored social media postings that answer potential client problems or encourage them to ask inquiries are an excellent strategy for this stage.
Purchase
Do business with the client. A tool for this stage is implementing calls-to-action for the client to make a purchase. For example, incentivizing a purchase by offering discounts in ads or emails for the client.
Key Things to Consider Before Integrating Digital in Your Marketing Strategy
Utilize all 3 Digital Marketing Pillars
Paid media
- any advertisement that you can pay for.
- Social media, Search Engine Marketing (Google), affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, and so on
Owned media
- marketing that your company owns and controls entirely.
- Email marketing, your website, social media, events, and so on
Earned media
- the publicity you get as a result of being a good brand. It’s the most difficult to achieve, but it can also be the most powerful.
- word-of-mouth referrals, reviews, public relations, and so on
Consider the Funnel
- Create a content marketing strategy that addresses each of the marketing funnel’s stages. You need to use the funnel to guide you in creating your digital marketing strategy. This is your framework. The more people know about your brand, the more people look for and consider it, and the more people buy or pick it. Take the effort to educate your target audience on how your brand can help them solve a problem or meet a demand.
Keep Learning About the Industry and Pertinent Trends
- Coming up with a great digital marketing plan will take trial and error for each company as there is no one size fits all approach. Blogs like these will also be a huge tool when it comes to keeping up with the fast paced nature of the industry as strategies will need to be adjusted as digital marketing trends move fast. Take the time to read and research other brands’ tactics that resulted in tailored, integrated, and profitable digital marketing campaigns as you develop your digital marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Getting started in digital marketing and creating a sound strategy requires patience, a willingness to fail, and a drive to search. Use this funnel as your framework though in how to build a digital marketing strategy. Once you figure out what your plan needs in order to succeed, you must search for the resources that will get you that end point. You need to make sure that you are giving companies exactly what they want in terms of engagement, sales, and public relations. It can be extremely difficult to pitch a sound digital marketing strategy during your interviews, but with the right guidance, you can be trained to know exactly what to look for and have a solid understanding of what will likely work before you’ve even implemented the strategy. If you’re trying to get your first job in marketing, feel free to check out JobPrepped as 94.3% of JobPrepped students get marketing interviews or job offers within 3 weeks as we go extremely in-depth with digital marketing strategy and this is a huge reason why our students do so well in their interviews.
