How to create a digital strategy

Creating a digital strategy is crucial for any business that wants to remain competitive in today’s digital age. With most consumers using the internet to research and purchase products and services, having a strong online presence is essential. A digital strategy can help businesses to identify their target audience, create a strong brand image, and reach their marketing goals.

However, creating a digital strategy can be daunting, especially for those new to digital marketing. There are many factors to consider, such as social media, SEO, content marketing, brand messaging, and more. Fortunately, there are several steps that businesses can take to create a digital strategy that is effective and tailored to their specific needs.

In this article, we will explore the key elements of a successful digital strategy and provide practical tips for businesses of all sizes. From setting SMART goals to identifying your target audience and choosing the right digital channels, we will cover everything you need to know to create a digital strategy that drives results. Whether you are a small business owner or a marketing professional, this guide will help you to develop a digital strategy that works for your business.

Defining a Digital Strategy

A digital strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a company will use digital technologies and channels to achieve its business goals. Before creating a digital strategy, it is important to understand the company’s current situation and identify the opportunities and challenges in the digital landscape.

Let’s start by looking at your Brand. In today’s hyper-connected world, your brand is more than just a logo or a tagline – it’s a story, a promise, and a set of values that resonates with your audience. As the digital landscape evolves, crafting an authentic and captivating narrative that sets you apart from the noise is crucial. This is where the magic of digital marketing comes into play. Embrace the power of building meaningful relationships with your customers, and watch as your brand soars to new digital heights.

The following are some key elements that should be considered when defining a digital strategy:

• Business objectives: The digital brand strategy should align with the company’s objectives. It should identify how digital technologies and social media channels can help achieve these objectives.
• Target audience: The strategy should define the target audience and understand their needs and preferences. This will help in creating a personalized and relevant experience for the audience.
• Competitive analysis: The digital strategy should analyze the competition and identify its strengths and weaknesses. This will help in creating a unique value proposition for the company.
• Channels and platforms: The digital strategy should identify the channels and platforms that are most relevant to the target audience. This will help in creating a focused and effective digital presence.
• Content strategy: The digital strategy should define the content strategy and identify the types of content that will be created and distributed. This will help in creating consistent messaging and an engaging customer experience.
• Measurement and analytics: The digital strategy should define the metrics that will be used to measure the campaign’s success. This will help the marketing team optimize the strategy and make data-driven decisions.

By defining a digital strategy that considers these key elements, companies can create a focused and effective digital presence that aligns with their overall business objectives and meets the needs of their target audience.

Section 3: Conducting a Digital Audit

Before creating a digital strategy, conducting a digital audit to assess your current digital presence is important. A digital audit involves analyzing your website, social media channels, email marketing, paid advertising campaigns, and other digital assets to evaluate their effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.

The following steps will help you conduct a comprehensive digital audit:

• Assess Your Website: Evaluate the design, user experience, content, and functionality of your website. Check for broken links, slow-loading pages, and other technical issues that could negatively impact your website’s performance.
• Analyze Your Social Media Channels: Review your social media profiles and analyze your posts’ engagement, reach, and performance. When doing this social content audit, you will see which social platforms and posts are performing well. You will notice strategies to increase your overall social media performance and where to focus your time. 
• Evaluate Your Email Marketing: Review your email marketing campaigns and assess the open, click-through, and conversion rates. Identify areas for improvement, such as subject lines, content, and frequency of emails.
• Review Your Paid Advertising Campaigns: Analyze the messaging, creatives, ad optimization, budgets, and other aspects of your digital advertising campaigns. Identify the campaigns that are most effective in driving conversions and ROI.
• Assess Your SEO: Evaluate the effectiveness of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Check your website’s ranking for relevant keywords and identify opportunities to improve your website’s visibility in search results.

By conducting a digital audit, you can identify areas for improvement and develop a digital strategy tailored to your business goals and target audience. Regularly conduct digital audits to ensure your digital presence is always optimized for success.

Identifying Objectives and Goals

Once you have established your target audience and examined your existing digital channels and assets, the next step in creating a digital strategy is to identify your objectives and goals. This will help you determine what you want to achieve with your digital marketing efforts and how to measure success.

When identifying your objectives and goals, it is important to consider the different stages of the customer journey, from awareness to retention. Some key objectives throughout a digital marketing strategy are:

• Conversion/sales: This is a key objective for any business. It involves driving traffic to your website and converting them into paying customers.
• Consideration: This objective involves evaluating if the product or brand meets the customer’s needs. It is about building trust and credibility with your audience.
• Awareness: This objective is about reaching a wider audience and increasing brand awareness. It is particularly important for businesses just starting out or launching a new product or service.
• Retention: This objective is about establishing customer engagement and building long-term relationships with your audience. It involves keeping customers returning for more and turning them into loyal brand advocates.

When setting your objectives and goals, it is important to make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This will help you stay focused and track your progress over time.

For example, if your objective is to increase website traffic, you might set a goal to increase traffic by 20% within the next six months. Or, if your objective is to improve customer engagement, you might set a goal to increase social media engagement by 50% within the next quarter.

Identifying your objectives and goals is critical in creating a digital strategy. Setting clear goals and measuring your progress ensures that your digital marketing efforts align with your overall business objectives and drive real results.

Create a Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona is one of the most important steps in creating a successful digital strategy. A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It includes demographics, interests, goals, challenges, and channels. By creating a buyer persona, you can better understand your target audience and create a strategy that resonates with them.

The following are steps to create a buyer persona:

• Research your current customers and ask questions. Knowing your current customer can help you target potential new customers with similar wants and needs for your product or service.
• Gather all of your research and start looking for common characteristics. As you group those characteristics together, you’ll have the basis of your unique customer personas.
• Give your buyer persona a name, a job title, a home, and other defining characteristics. You want your persona to seem like a real person.
• Identify your persona’s goals, challenges, and pain points. You can create a strategy that addresses their needs by understanding what motivates and frustrates your persona.
• Identify the channels your persona uses to gather information and make purchasing decisions. This includes social media, search engines, email, industry publications, and more. By understanding where your persona spends their time, you can create a strategy that reaches them in the right place at the right time.

Once you have created a buyer persona, you can use it to guide your content creation and digital strategy. You can increase engagement and conversions by creating content and campaigns that resonate with your persona. Remember to update your buyer persona regularly as your business evolves and your target audience changes.

Developing a Content Strategy

Creating a content strategy is crucial to building a successful digital strategy. Content is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign, and it is essential to have a plan for creating and distributing it effectively. Here are some steps to developing a content plan:

• Define your goals: When building a digital strategy, you will want to look at your current content, competitor content, and keywords. Set a goal for what you would like to achieve with your content. Are you interested in increasing your brand’s awareness or educating your audience? Or maybe you need your content to help generate more leads or, my personal favorite, create content that adds a lot of value and thus will drive more traffic to your website. Clear goals will help you create content tailored to your specific objectives.
• Conduct research: Before creating content, you need to understand your audience. Looking at the persona research, we conducted can help you identify your target audience, their pain points, and what type of content they are most likely to engage with.
• Choose a content management system: A content management system (CMS) is essential for organizing and publishing your content. Choose a CMS that is easy to use and can handle the type of content you want to create. 
• Determine content types: Decide what types of content you want to create. This could include blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media posts. You will want to create a number of each to test on the various digital platforms. Testing lets you quickly see which content and messaging resonates with your audience. 
• Brainstorm content ideas: Once you know what types of content you want to create, it’s time to develop ideas. Brainstorm topics that align with your goals and will resonate with your target audience. 
• Plan content distribution: Determine how you will distribute your content. This could include social media, email marketing, or paid advertising.
• Create a content calendar: A content calendar is a schedule of when you will create and publish content. Having a calendar will help you stay organized and ensure that you are consistently creating and distributing content.

Creating a Social Media Strategy

Social media is an important, if not the most important, component of any digital strategy, as it allows businesses to connect with their audience more personally. Here are a few general steps to think about as you create your social media strategy:

• Define your goals: As with our content goals from above, you will want to look at what you want to achieve through your social media efforts. Are you looking for your social media to help increase brand awareness, educate and entertain your followers, drive more traffic to your website, or generate leads? Make sure this aligns with your overall business strategy. You don’t want just to jump in and start posting. You want an effective marketing strategy on your social platforms.
• Identify your target audience: Understand your audience on each social media platform and what interests them. This will help you create or repurpose content that resonates with them. For example 
• Choose the right platforms: Not all social media platforms are created equal. Choose the ones that align with your goals and where your audience is most active. I would also add that you want to be everywhere your customers are.  You may need to create content for each platform as you test the engagement. Then focus your time on the platforms that deliver the most return on investment for your company, whether that investment is your time or money. 
• Create a social media content calendar: As mentioned in the article, plan your content in advance to ensure consistency and relevance. This will also help you avoid last-minute scrambling for content ideas. You must be strategic and strive to add value to attract new followers and keep current ones engaged with your content. 
• Engage with your audience: Social media is a two-way conversation. Respond to comments and messages, and actively seek opportunities to engage with your audience. Some of my best partnerships and business opportunities have come from engaging with others on social media. 
• Analyze and adjust: Regularly review your social media analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. Adjust your strategy accordingly to optimize your results. Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, TicToc, and YouTube all offer analytic tools to help you understand how you are doing and will give you a clear idea of what is working. 

Designing a Website Strategy

When creating a digital strategy, having a website that aligns with your goals is crucial. A website strategy outlines the pages and posts necessary to guide visitors toward the primary end goal of your site, whether it’s lead generation, making a purchase, spending time learning through your articles, researching your product, or something else entirely. Here are some key steps to designing a website strategy:

• Target your ideal customer persona: Understanding your website visitors is crucial to designing a website that meets their needs. Ask yourself, what are my ideal customer’s demographics, their interests, and what kinds of problems are they experiencing that my company would help them solve? What information are they searching for that I can provide through my content? Analytics will show you where your site visitors spend their time and give you actionable strategies to increase your visitors. For example, if a topic resonates with your visitors, you would give them additional articles around it. 
• Conduct a competitive analysis: Analyze your competitors’ websites to understand what they’re doing well and what could be improved. Look at the keywords they are ranking for, their backlinks, their top-performing articles, and where their web traffic is coming from. Some tools will help you see all of this. There is no hiding on the internet in this day and age. 
• Outline your website’s goals: Consider what actions you want visitors to take on your website, whether filling out a form, signing up for your email, making a purchase, or time spent on your content.
• Create a sitemap:  A sitemap outlines the pages and posts necessary to achieve your website’s goals. Consider the user journey and how visitors will navigate your site. I use a tool called Rankmath for this and other technical SEO requirements.
• Develop content: Create content that speaks directly to your audience and guides them toward your website’s goals. Always aim for SEO best practices to improve your search engine rankings. I could write entire articles on this section alone as it’s one of the most important areas of your website. Content could save you thousands of dollars in advertising costs to acquire customers and is a very effective strategy for your business. The right content strategy can even deliver another revenue stream to your business. Invest in new quality content, and over time, you should see a terrific return. 
• Design and develop your website: Once you have a clear plan, it’s time to design and develop your website. Consider the user experience and ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Ensure your site loads fast and your images and video are optimized for loading, especially over mobile devices. 

Following these steps, you can design a website strategy that aligns with your digital strategy and helps you achieve your business goals.

Create a Digital Advertising Strategy

Digital advertising can be an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. It allows your business to reach its target audience faster through various channels, such as social media, search engines, and display ads. Here are some steps to create an effective digital advertising strategy:

1. Define Your Target Audience – Do you see a pattern here? 

Targeting the right audience is one of the most important considerations when designing your advertising campaign. Consider factors such as age, gender, interests, location, and maybe even the company they work at.

2. Set Your Advertising Goals

Look ahead at the results that you would expect from your advertising campaign. Create some projections.  Is your goal to drive more traffic to your website faster than what you could do organically, increase sales, or build brand awareness? Setting clear goals will help you measure the success of your campaign and help you make necessary adjustments.

Customers typically need multiple touchpoints with your brand before they purchase, and advertising will help quickly deliver these impressions. 

3. Select Where to Advertise

There are various channels for digital advertising, such as social media, search engines, display ads, and video ads. Consider your target audience and advertising goals when choosing the right channels for your campaign. Testing is the key to your digital success with advertising. Keep your focus on the analytics and run a number of test ads before spending larger amounts on any campaigns. 

4. Create Your Message and Call to Action

Creatives are one of the most important pieces of your advertising campaign. Your ad copy should be simple, clear, educational, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. It should also align with your advertising goals. Test different images with your ad copy and create short videos to make your message more engaging. Whether you target senior executives, business leaders, or everyday consumers, keep your message short, engaging, informative, entertaining, and on point. Again the best way to do this to test various creative pieces to see which ones perform the best and give you the best return on investment. 

5. Set Your Advertising Budget

Digital advertising can be costly but also very rewarding when done right, so it’s essential to set a budget that aligns with your advertising goals. Consider factors such as the cost per click or impression, and allocate your budget accordingly. But again the best action is to create a number of ads with a smaller spend to start and test test test 

Implementing and Measuring the Strategy

Once a digital strategy has been developed, it is important to implement it effectively. The following steps can help ensure successful implementation:

• Assign clear responsibilities to team members for executing the strategy.
• Set realistic timelines and milestones for achieving goals.
• Ensure all necessary resources, including technology and personnel, are in place.
• Regularly communicate progress and challenges to all stakeholders.
• Continuously evaluate and adjust the strategy as needed based on data and feedback.

Measuring the effectiveness of a digital strategy is crucial for determining its success and making informed decisions about future efforts. The following metrics can be used to track and evaluate the performance of a digital strategy:

Metric	Description
The percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as purchasing or filling out a form.	The number of visitors to a website over a specific period of time.
Conversion rate	The percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
Social media engagement	The level of interaction and activity on social media platforms, such as likes, comments, and shares, as well as click-throughs
Search engine rankings	The position of a website in search engine results pages for specific keywords.
Email open and click-through rates	The percentage of email recipients who open an email and click on a link.

By regularly monitoring and analyzing these metrics, businesses can identify areas of success and areas that need improvement and make data-driven decisions about their digital strategy moving forward.

Let’s Review the Key Components of a digital marketing strategy. 

1. Write your goals and objectives: Identity what you want to achieve with your digital marketing efforts.

2. Know your audience: Define your target customers and understand their interests, behavior, pain points, and preferences.

3. Content Marketing: Develop a content marketing plan to align with your business goals, attract and retain your audience, and move them through the buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to purchase. Remember that the buyer will need multiple touchpoints before purchasing or spending time with your brand.

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Optimize your website and content for search engines to increase visibility and attract relevant traffic. Optimize each content page utilizing the right keyword research and value-added articles 

5. Social Media Marketing: Develop a presence on relevant social platforms and engage your audience through organic and paid social media strategies.

6. Email Marketing: Build an email list and engage subscribers through regular and relevant email communication. Track your analytics and test different headlines and copy. 

7. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising: Develop effective PPC campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, YouTube, or other relevant platforms to drive more traffic and conversions.

8. Measure and Evaluate: Measure your digital marketing efforts’ effectiveness using a set of metrics and analytics tools and regularly evaluate and improve your strategy to achieve your goals.

Creating a digital marketing strategy is crucial for your business to achieve its goals. A well-planned and executed digital marketing strategy can help your business reach its target audience, increase brand awareness, boost sales, and save thousands of dollars over traditional marketing.

When creating your digital marketing strategy, remember to start by looking at what is currently working and your goals; make sure you create your ideal customer persona for the best-personalized experiences. You will want to understand who your ideal customer or website visitor is.  You want to create a content calendar with the right content to attract and retain your potential customers. Remember to select and test your content on all social media platforms and digital marketing channels to see where to spend your time and money to reach your ideal audience. It is also important to measure the effectiveness of your strategy and make necessary adjustments to improve results.

Following the steps outlined in this guide, your business will create a digital marketing strategy tailored to its specific needs and goals. With the right strategy, you will stay ahead of your competitors and achieve long-term success.

Follow me on social media or here at www.gvacci.com for more tips on using digital marketing to grow your business.