Digital marketing, digital advertising, internet marketing, or online marketing, whatever you want to call it, is any sort of advertising done on the internet rather than on television or in print. That includes everything from banner ads to sponsored videos to making content that people would love to share with their friends via social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or Twitter. Online marketing also includes email campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO). Any sort of advertising that can be seen on the internet goes through a strategy that falls under the umbrella term of digital marketing strategy. A real case study on how to create an effective digital marketing strategy can be found here.
To make this case study I’m using Kraftshala-which is an Online Digital Marketing/Performance Marketing Training Institute. You can find the Presentation Link of Google Slides somewhere below on this post.
(Disclaimer: Kraftshala is not my client or I don’t work for Kraftshala. This is a dummy project to depict how a marketing strategy is made)
Table of Contents
- Defining The Objectives while Creating a Marketing Strategy
- Identify Your Key Competitors (Competitor Analysis)
- Identify Your Audience (Audience Analysis)
- Mapping Messaging & Formats (Content Marketing)
- Analyze and Adjust
The Problem
You Don’t Know How To Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
If you don’t have a digital marketing strategy or an online marketing strategy you may be missing out on opportunities for branding and customer acquisition. It can be overwhelming to think about the number of channels available for digital marketing activities, but there are three major areas that should be considered: Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and Email Marketing.
Social media which is an ever-changing landscape we have to be creative and innovative in promoting our products and services. With each passing day, new platforms are coming in. Recently the Instagram team has built an app called Threads for sharing text updates and joining public conversations which are directly competing with Twitter. You should be on every popular platform to connect with your customers – and post content frequently. But before that you have to do a lot of research on what to post and how to dump your PPC money and for that I have created a Digital Marketing Strategy which will help you to understand the market, your competitors, from where their customers are coming, how they’re coming and where they are paying the most amount of money. So here we go…I use a 6-step Digital Marketing Strategy Framework where my first step is to clearly Define The Objective of the Client (Your Goals) and What they need out of this deal (The Outcome) followed by Who is our Audience (By defining the Target Audience we can save a lot of money), Where are They and Where we’ll be Deploying our Assets most, what will be our Channel Mix, then comes What i.e. What messages are we going to spread across all platforms and channels to our TA and Finally Is it working (Reporting) meaning is our strategy working (We can find that out through various reporting metrics) So let’s start with our first step:
The Solution
Defining The Objectives while Creating a Marketing Strategy
It’s important to define the objectives when creating a digital marketing strategy or a content marketing strategy. It’s crucial that your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound) and align with your business goals. The next step is figuring out & show them in actuality how you want to reach these goals and set the metrics by which you will measure success. Make sure that your plan includes customer research, website traffic analysis, competitor analysis as well as social media audit so you have all the data you need for this aspect of the process.
Once this is done, come up with the content for each channel in order of priority (it should be based on what will drive engagement). The last step is devising a budget for the project so it can be completed successfully.
The Solution
Understand The Market & The Customers’ Pain Point
In order to create a successful digital marketing strategy, you have to first show them that you understand their market and what’s the pain point of customers. This will help you & your client to know where in the process customers need what kind of information from your company and how they want that information delivered. It will also help you know what kind of content needs to be created and where that content should be posted. Creating this step successfully you will save a lot of money and time.
The Solution
Identify Your Key Competitors (Competitor Analysis)
It’s important to identify your key competitors which you will do while doing competitor analysis, you can include more than two but in my case, I’ve found only one company that is relevant to our business model. Start by analyzing the business model then create a list of your competitors and their USPs. What online marketing strategy are they using, what social media platforms are they using, What campaigns they’re running, and from Where most of their traffic is coming?
The Solution
Competitor Audit (Competitive Benchmarking)
This is an important step while creating your marketing strategy. The first thing you need to do is make an audit of their Social Media channels, for this you can use many social media audit tools some are paid and some are free. A lot of features you will have on the free versions as well so only go for the paid version if you need an in-depth analysis. This will also tell you from which social media platforms their traffic is coming (website traffic analysis). You can easily find this by going through all the social media platforms & searching their names or you can use a free tool which I’m using called Social Blade.
The Solution
Analyzing Social Media Audit “Ads”
After you are done with auditing your competitor’s Social Media channels, it’s time you go deep into the competitor’s ad audit. Analyze what ads they are running and on which platforms, and what content marketing activities are they doing in those platforms. This will help you to know what digital advertising they are doing, which ads are working for them, and what ad formats are working for them. Are they using Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, are they using video formats, static image formats etc. And also you can find out where they’re lacking and implement those loopholes in your campaigns to get new conversions.
The Solution
Deep Dive into (Website Traffic Analysis)
There are a million things you could do for your business when it comes to internet marketing, but if your website or your landing page doesn’t have traffic it means something wrong with it. So it’s important to audit your website as well as your competitor’s website & optimize it for a better customer experience. This also improves your Quality Score while implementing PPC in digital marketing which in turn helps you to reduce the CPC cost. In this case, after doing research I found out that most of Digital Vidya’s website visitors are coming from Google Search and therefore we can invest money on doing Google Search Ads or PPC campaigns to get more traffic to our website and finally increase our revenue. Simply put, you need to know how many people are coming and going through your doors (your website). Once you have this information, you can start making adjustments and do conversion rate optimization based on what you see.
The Solution
Identify Your Audience (Audience Analysis)
In order to have a successful digital marketing strategy, it is important that you analyze the market, your competition, and your target audience. Once you have analyzed the first two factors, do your audience research and lookalike audience, what they’re talking in the internet, what they look like, what are their interest, what events they are attending, etc. This is an important step while creating your marketing strategy. I usually follow two steps: First, Research/Analyze then Second, Create Personas
The Solution
Mapping Messaging & Formats (Content Marketing)
Now it’s time to show our clients what messaging we are going to use and what will be our ad formats. But first, see what people are talking about us and the pain points that’re facing with our competitors. The most common way to find out this way is by looking into Quora, Reddit, or Amazon Reviews. Type ”Review on (Your competitor name)” Then create different ad copies and show your client what their ads will look like. Give some creative ideas too! And how you gonna use remarketing ads in the long run.
Analyze and Adjust
In order to have a successful digital marketing strategy, it’s important that you analyze the market, your competition (competitor analysis) & your customers. What are the current trends? What is popular? Who are your competitors? The second step would be to analyze what type of content (content marketing in digital marketing) works best for your competitors and what’ll work for you. Which formats do people prefer over others. And the final step is to see what is working and what is not (keep the best and dump the rest) and share the same with your client and adjust accordingly.
Tools I have used
- Facebook Ad Library – Competitor Ad audit
- Similar Web-Website Traffic Analysis
- Sparktoro – Audience Research
- Canva-Graphic Designing
- Google Slides-Making Presentation
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