5 Ingredients For Cooking A Killer Digital Marketing Strategy
Often I find myself wondering where to start when forming a Digital Marketing Strategy and I always find myself going back to the basics. In today’s digital landscape, it’s more important than ever to have a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Whether you’re just starting or looking to improve your existing strategy, there are a few key elements that can make all the difference. If you are ready to cook a killer digital marketing strategy then read on to find out the 5 main ingredients for it.
Ingredient 1 (The Salt): Understanding The Target Audience
Listen up! It is EXTREMELY important to know your target audience. Who are they? What are their preferences? What are their behavior patterns? What are their interests? Having an in-depth understanding of your target audience and where they hang out online is crucial for developing the correct customer persona for your business. Developing the right customer persona will inform your decisions on where to market online and how. It will help you create the right content that will engage your audience and convert them. You can also customize your content, messages, and products/services for different customer personas (This is the most important ingredient and that is why I call it The Salt of the recipe).
In Aberdeen Research they found that “marketers who use personas and map content to the buyer’s journey enjoy 73% higher conversions (20% vs. 12%) from response to marketing qualified lead (MQL), versus companies not pursuing this approach”.
Ingredient 2 (The Pepper): Content
The quality of your content can make or break your digital marketing strategy. However, just creating tons of content won’t work. The content you create has to be relevant to your target audience (and there it goes. Understanding the target audience informs every decision). It has to be engaging, relevant, and informing of what problem are you trying to solve for them. Simultaneously it also has to differentiate you from the competition. If your content checks all of these boxes, then it can help build a strong brand reputation and result in higher engagement and conversion rates, thus, the optimum ROI. (Nobody likes huge balls of pepper in their food, it has to be finely milled so it's not irritating. Just like that, bombardment with irrelevant content will irritate your customers so crush it and make sure it's finely milled).
According to Hubspot, 83% of marketers believe higher quality content is more effective and helps build brand loyalty.
Ingredient 3 (The Garlic): Data-Driven Insights
By analyzing your website traffic, social media engagement, and other relevant metrics to your business, you can identify what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments to improve your results. Data-driven insights are crucial to making informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy. (I mean if you don’t know what’s not working then how will you improve it?).
According to Forbes, “Leaders in data-driven marketing are more than six times more likely than laggards to report achieving competitive advantage in increasing profitability (45% vs. 7%) and five times more likely in customer retention (74% vs. 13%)”.
Ingredient 4 (The Hot Sauce): Mobile Optimization
I carry my hot sauce everywhere I go and so to me, mobile optimization is just that because, in today’s world, nobody goes anywhere without their phones. This also means Mobile Optimization is no longer an option; it’s a must. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you run the risk of losing visitors. Due to Google’s new mobile-first indexing policy, mobile optimization can also affect your search engine rankings. (If the phone is okay with it then the customer is okay with it so, mobile-first).
According to Statista, “Mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide”.
Ingredient 5 (The Masala): Competition
I am Indian so masala is as essential to my food as keeping an eye on your competition is in digital marketing. Keeping an eye on your competition can provide valuable insights into what’s working in your industry. By analyzing their digital marketing strategies, you can identify gaps in your own strategy and make adjustments to improve your results. You can also get useful suggestions on what you might want to adapt and what you want to absolutely avoid.
Marketing Revolution says according to a Gartner study, 32% of marketers identified competitive insights as one of the most important factors for their marketing strategy.
Conclusion:
There it is. The 5 most important ingredients to cooking up a killer digital marketing strategy. Each and every one of these is very important to make informed decisions and quality content however, nothing would be possible without understanding your customer so that should always be the heart of your strategy. (They are the ones giving you their hard-earned money so it's only fair that they are at the heart of the strategy).
