How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy – 5 New Tips

If you’re a small business owner or startup in need of a digital marketing strategy, it can be tough to know where to start. I know this because I’ve been there. Several times, I’ve helped with new digital marketing campaigns as an active company asset to bring in the organic traffic, and it works every time I’m involved. This website, Clickflame, is designed to bring everyday business owners that same success without paying a highly experienced digital marketer like myself.

The digital marketing strategy is the foundation of your business. Without it, you’re just shooting in the dark. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. With some key elements in place, your organization can start to create a coherent and effective digital marketing strategy.

Great digital marketing strategies are the ones that use the right channels to reach your target market. They increase visibility, build credibility, and persuade customers in a way that makes them more likely to buy from you. To develop an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to know what kind of audience you want to target, where they spend time and how you can reach them.

We’ll start by breaking down the 5 New Tips For Crafting Your Effective Digital Marketing Strategy:

1. Set out specific goals to accomplish – Do you want more website visitors, sales, phone calls, or other kinds of engagement from your strategy.
2. Define your customer avatar – who is your ideal customer and what characteristics do they have that you can tap into a target audience.
3. Build your conversion funnel around the people you are trying to reach.
4. What traffic funnels can you pull in your customer avatar from?
5. Incorporate Automation & Customer Personalization.

Within each of these steps, there are very detailed steps you will want to take to craft the most effective marketing campaign for your company.

Specific Marketing Goals

When you are crafting your strategy you’ll need the cornerstone of your campaign to start. This is what you want people to do when you do reach them and get them into your website or branded content. For most service-based businesses, this means they want to receive phone calls. With many more highly qualified leads being generated this may mean an opt-in form for you. Websites like the one you are reading this on now usually just want more people to read and engage with their written content as their goal is to build a loyal readership.

Popular Marketing Goals Include:

• Phone Calls
• Store Visits
• Opt-In Form Fills
• E-Commerce 
• Downloads
• Content Engagement

Whatever your marketing goal is, you’ll want to craft a different approach for each one. Should you build a funnel that wants multiple goals to be met, this just means better segmentation along each portion of your marketing path.

Defining Your Customer Avatar

Figuring out who you want to market your products or services to isn’t as easy as it sounds. While many groups of potential customers may seem like they fit, you will want to exclude some for various reasons. Some popular ways people figure out their customer avatar include: 

• Figuring out their goals and values that will decide whether they do business with you or not.
• Identifying their sources of buying information.
• Filling out their demographics and naming them by separate groups.
• Identifying obstacles and barriers to their purchasing decisions.
• Listing different types of objections your potential customers may have.

You will save yourself a lot of time and headache if you start by simply narrowing down your expectations on who you are selling to.

Building Your Conversion Funnel

Your call to action needs to be repeated. Asking a person once to convert will result in a subpar conversion ratio at best. Typically, the bare minimum number of times you want to ask a potential buyer to convert on one page is at least two to three times. Addressing social credibility is another obstacle. Don’t just tell people why you’re the best option, prove it. Use recent customer orders, reviews, testimonials and prove that you truly are the best option and your conversion rates will start going up more quickly. Lastly, you’ll want to make absolutely sure you have tested each and every avenue to engagement a potential customer has to troubleshoot for any costly errors that will creep up to haunt you in the middle of an expensive paid search campaign as an example. 

What Traffic Channels For Your Potential Customers?

While many businesses do great on social media, this is not the case for many others. Some simple guidelines are that if your product is entertainment-based and something everyone could enjoy, then marketing on social media could be great for you. However, if you’re in a specialized field that needs extremely targeted traffic from people that are looking for what you offer, higher-priced paid search ads may be best for you.

There is also no replacement for the way many companies simply ask people how they found them but also where else they looked prior to finding them online. This will help map out all possible traffic channels and the opportunities they present for your website. 

Incorporate Automation & Customer Personalization

While you could, for example, email every customer that purchased an item from you online, you wouldn’t do so because it’s not an effective way to scale. Email automation is at the central heart of any good digital marketing campaign because the more you grow your email list, the more engagements you know you’ll get every time you send a new correspondence out. 

Customer personalization is also very important to your website’s well-being. For example, on a website selling products for children, you would want to show children using your products. Easier by far to get adults to model your merchandise but it kind of misses the point with your target customer avatar.  

Whatever your methodology is, make certain to model your sales copy, messaging, and media around the target audience you are trying to reach.

What Your Effective Digital Marketing Strategy Should Look Like Now

Now that you’ve nailed down who your target audience is and what it is you want them to do, you are much closer to your final strategy. This paired with powerful conversion optimization, the right traffic channels, and key automation will create a machine you can earn an active income off of for years to come with minimal maintenance.