Don’t let excitement about marketing your small- or medium-size business (SMB) get in the way of taking time to set a digital marketing strategy for your SMB.
Yes, you can definitely increase branding and awareness with digital marketing channels. But you can achieve and measure so much more. For example, what are your short- and long-term goals? How will you measure conversions?
When executing a digital marketing strategy, you must have goals for the campaign, the brand, the product or service, and the type of engagement you’re looking for.
Identifying Client Personas and Messaging
Who you’re marketing to is one of the most important questions to answer when considering a digital marketing strategy. Defining your prospective clients can be as simple as writing a description of your current best clients. With modern targeting tools on Facebook and other advertisers, you can target age, family size, income, and whether prospects are in-purchase for a number of products, as well as behavior and interest targeting. If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, you can’t deliver the right message.
We’ve all heard of an elevator pitch, right? A succinct description of what you do, where you do it, and why you do it? This alone can be the basis of a good strategy.
Selecting Keywords
What about keywords? Have you executed keyword research for your industry using the Keyword Planning Tool in AdWords? This free tool can help understand how prospects are searching for your business. With concrete keyword search volume data, you can begin to understand what content to create for your website or social media channels. Communicating your product or service effectively using Google AdWords Keyword Planner data can mean the difference between a prospect finding your business or a competitor’s.
Website Marketing Strategy
Best practices in digital marketing are constantly being updated. Website best practices like requiring mobile responsive sites and SSL Certificates are changing rapidly. This can mean the difference between a first page link on a search engine results page (SERP) and languishing on page 2 or beyond.
Are you looking to climb a keyword ladder in SEO? Maybe you’re looking to engage your customers via a retention campaign. If so, how are you measuring these goals? How are you measuring the sources of new clients?
How do you capture prospect information on your website?
Paid Advertising Strategy
A dizzying array of paid advertising options exist—all with different timetables for success. Dropping a few dollars on an AdWords Campaign can create phone traffic almost instantly. Without a proper funnel strategy, you could be stuck paying for leads in the foreseeable future.
Are you remarketing using AdWords and/or Facebook?
Content Marketing Strategy
What do you say once you know your strategy? We’ve all heard “Content is King.“ For over 20 years, that has been the mantra of the digital marketer. How do you translate your offering into relevant, frequently updated content?
There are strategic tools available to find content created for your industry and benchmark high-performing topics. Tools like Google Trends data and BuzzSumo can help identify highly sharable content and data trends to capitalize on.
Making content unique to your brand and providing additional benefit should be your goal. Researching well performing content and creating additional value within existing content should be the goal here. Best in Class Content should be your target, whether you’re creating blog articles, podcasts, videos, contests, quizzes, and/or image galleries.
Share constantly with your audience and measure engagement. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site, you’re missing a major opportunity. Plus, it’s FREE!
Measuring Success of Your SMB Digital Marketing Strategy
In the era of Big Data, there is a glut of information being collected. Analyzing the high volume of data based on your strategy requires a few things, first, a goal to measure against.
A few FREE tools to begin tracking your Digital Marketing Strategy:
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Insights
- AdWords Reporting
- Content Tracking
- E-Notice Reports
With such an incredible amount of information, you can be overwhelmed before getting started. Here is where goals become vitally important. What metrics are you looking at? How is success going to be measured with your digital marketing strategy?
Your goals might include:
- Increased web traffic
- Increased audience engagement
- Increased sales
- Increased store traffic
Putting Digital Marketing Strategy Into Action
Once you have goals written down and a strategy in place to measure and analyze them, you must continue learning and sharing. We take the approach of building an online community. We simply create and share relevant information within the industries of the clients we serve as a way to become a resource for those looking to solve problems.
We foster those relationships by staying in front of people so we can help them again in the future as well as remain top of mind for referrals. There’s a lot in marketing that hasn’t changed, in essence, it’s all about Frequency, Reach and Duration. There are some new delivery tools as well as new ways to track the data, but for the most part, philosophies around communication remain the same.