Digital Marketing Strategy Part 1

Marketing is the process of ‘identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs profitably’ according to the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing.    This blog will look at the 5 S's of digital marketing and goal planning, focus on setting SMART goals for your strategy and / or campaign, and identifying your target market through creating customer personas.

Image Credit:  Chaffey (2018).

Clearly Define Your Goals

Setting digital marketing goals that align with your business objectives is an important first step in digital marketing.  The 5 S's of digital marketing from Smart Insights  include sell, serve, speak, save, and sizzle, which work together to achieve success.

Goals should be S.M.A.R.T. 

Specific - What do I want to achieve?
Measurable - By what measurement?
Attainable - Can this goal be reached?
Relevant - How will it help?
Time-bound - By what date?

Objectives and goals become the key performance indicators (KPI's) by which to measure success in your digital marketing efforts.  Below is an example of goal setting along with the metric that measures results (KPI's).

Image credit:  Hootsuite (2019).

Image Credit:  Hubspot (2019).

Serving the customer through data and personalisation

Multi-channel analytics and Customer Relationship Management systems from a company such as Hubspot are helpful ways to track digital marketing activity to check if objectives are being met through marketing efforts and maximising return on investment (ROI).  They also enable the brand to better meet the needs of the customer with technology that can identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs, and deliver personalised service that will greatly enhance digital marketing results.  

Image Credit:  Hootsuite (2019).

Serving the customer through communication

Social listening platforms keep track of social conversations surrounding your brand across multiple media channels to enable you to join in the conversation and better respond to customer needs.   Below is an infographic of the methods most companies use to communicate with customers. 

Image Credit: Hootsuite (2018). 

Identifying your target market

The unique offerings of your brand will meet the needs of specific customers.  Identifying your ideal target audience and their preferred digital platforms is a vital part of digital marketing, and will save your brand time and money.  By creating a persona of the perfect customer for the company offerings, a company can tailor content and advertising that resonates with the customer's needs.  See MarketingSherpa's case study on how Personas improved their performance.

Image Credit:  Patel, N (2018).

Make detailed personas of your perfect customers that look like the one below through an App called Xtensio.  On Neil Patel's blog on personas you can also find excellent information about how to glean analytics about various target groups through social media to help create data driven personas.

Photo Credit:  Patel, N. (2018).  

Competitive analysis 

It is helpful to conduct a competitve analysis to see what your competition is doing well or not so well. How does your social media presence compare to theirs? Look for opportunities and ways you can improve. Perform a SWOT analysis on your own brand. 

Check out the target market of competitors and find a niche group to service whose needs are not being fully met by competitors.

Conclusion

To be successful, the digital marketer must identify, anticipate and satisfy the needs of its target market. 

Successful marketing efforts and campaigns result from setting SMART goals that measure KPI's for success.