How To Nail Your Digital Marketing Strategy

As a startup founder, you have to wear many hats – office manager, head of HR, sales director, marketing manager, payroll administrator and everything else in between. That means you don’t have much time, for anything really.

Each day presents a new challenge, so it can be hard to focus your time on any one thing. But given that, according to Hubspot, 81% of buyers conduct research online before making any purchase, it’s pretty crucial that nailing your digital marketing strategy is a priority. After all, if you’re not where your customers are, how can you expect to sell to them?

So, if you’re looking to raise brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and ultimately increase inbound leads, here’s how to go about developing your digital marketing strategy:

#1 Know Your Audience

You can’t market effectively to your target market if you don’t know who they are, what they care about or where they hang out. So, the first step towards getting your digital marketing strategy right is to develop target personas – a profile of your typical customer. This involves a comprehensive exercise to understand everything from their main day-to-day challenges, their motivations, how they digest information, what social media platforms they are active on to what they read, where they live and even how old they are.

Find out more about how to identify your audience.

#2 Review Your Website

Your website is your shop window and if no one is coming in through your front door, there is a problem. The chances are your website is pretty invisible to the search engines and not set up to drive inquiries. Is it quick and easy to navigate? Is the content well written and concise? Is it solutions led? Do you have any large images that are slowing down the site? What keywords is it currently optimized for?

#3 Conduct Keyword Research

Think about the kinds of words and phrases a potential customer would type into a search engine to find your business. You’ll then need to conduct some keyword research (use tools like Google’s keyword planner or Moz) to identify which terms your site should be optimized for to ensure your prospects can find you. Not only does this exercise help inform which sales pages you need on your site to capture that traffic, but it helps inform blog content based on what your customers are actually searching for.

#4 Plan Your Content

Once you have determined who your customers are, where they hang out, what they care about and what sort of terms they are searching for, it’s time to plan your content. This will involve a series of landing pages designed to rank for specific keywords, blog posts designed to move prospects onto your sales pages, videos and images for social media, as well as media angles that’ll have journalists eating out of the palm of your hand.

#5 Measure Your Success

Once you’ve got your strategy in place and you are clear on who you are targeting on which channel, with what content, be sure to measure its effectiveness and optimize accordingly. If certain blog topics are not generating the traffic or engagement you had hoped, revisit your keyword research. If you are seeing an increase in organic traffic but that is not converting to inquiries, review your landing pages. Or, if you are securing coverage but your prospects aren’t seeing it, review your distribution tactics. A digital marketing strategy is continuously evolving so be sure to measure its effectiveness and adapt activity accordingly.

It can be hard to find the time to develop a digital marketing strategy, but if you can ensure you are targeting the right audience, with the right message, on the right channel, it will be worth it when you see the leads rolling in.

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