What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Your business is a building somewhere in your local area. How much foot traffic do you get? We’re willing to bet that your online sales dwarfs what you sell in your brick-and-mortar shop. Not to mention that with the prevalence of e-commerce these days, people are often turning their houses into businesses, running a store completely on the internet and just shipping out of a spare room in their house

Pretty much all businesses have an online store because that’s the social climate we live in. Everything is on the internet, and if it’s not it doesn’t exist. Marketing was always an important component of business, but now that businesses have moved online, marketing has likewise migrated to the digital sphere.

Click Here – Free 30-Minute Strategy Session

Be quick! FREE spots are almost gone for this Month

Free Quote

Yet that begs the question, how do you market in cyberspace? How do you make sure you’re reaching the right people, the ones that will buy your products or engage with your content? The answer is a digital marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Strategy Definition

It can be said that there are two definitions or kinds of digital marketing strategy, and they’re sort of complimentary sides of the same coin. Digital marketing strategy can be said to be how you approach marketing on the internet, what your demographic is, the kind of content you intend to release, as well as when and where to post it. However, the second definition refers to what you use to carry out your strategy. For example, Search Engine Optimisation is a strategy, as is Email Marketing and Conversion Rate Optimisation.

To put it simply, one refers to the plan of marketing, the other refers to the platform.

This blog will talk about the former which is the art of strategic digital marketing.

The Strategic Approach to Digital Marketing

Sun Tzu was a Chinese general who is most famous for penning The Art of War, a treatise of precepts to adhere to during times of warfare to offer a greater chance of victory and minimise loss of life. One of these precepts is:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy, nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Now, while Sun Tzu was obviously talking about things like military strength, arms and armament, offensive and defensive fortifications or positions, supplies, etc., the quote offers a strangely apt metaphor for the importance of digital marketing.

In this scenario, let’s assume that you have two “enemies’ as Sun Tzu puts it, your existing or potential clientele, and your competitors. Knowing these “enemies” as well as your own strengths and limitations is the most important thing when beginning a digital marketing strategy, because then you know what kind of workload you can handle, as well as what you can feasibly offer your potential audience.

Now we deal with the two enemies. The strategic approach to marketing is always begun with research, and although this may sound obvious, the number of people who begin a marketing campaign without doing their due diligence would shock and amaze you.

But what exactly are you researching? Your target market. These are the people you want to attract to your business, and the people you want to generate sales from. Google is rife with stats and testimonials from all kinds of demographics. Use this information to form a strategic digital marketing plan. The key pieces of information you want concerning your audience are:

Age/Life Stage: The age range of your audience allows you to design your products, advertisements, and content appropriately. Different levels of maturity engage with different kinds of marketing in very different ways, and it’s important to understand this baseline requirement.

Occupation: What a person spends their time doing will be a huge determiner in what marketing they engage with, and when. These are two distinctly important sets of information as they tell you what kind of marketing platform to use, and when to make your ads go live.

Pain Points: What does the customer want that they’re finding it difficult to get? If you scratch the itch they can’t, then your success will follow, because you’re offering something no one else is.

Goals: Where Pain Points are defined by what a demographic can’t do, their goals tell you what it is they want to do.

Interests: Why are interests important? Because they give you a richer idea of who the people in your target market are. Single parents will have different concerns to nuclear families. If you can tap into the concerns and interests of your audience, you can deliver a product that caters to it, making you all the more appealing.

Brands they like: This is a crucial piece of information. It’s often said that “imitation is the highest form of flattery.” Well in marketing it’s more like “follow the leader” than flat-out imitation. If there’s a specific brand that your audience keeps coming back to, it’s fair to say that whatever they’re doing is a good standard to hold yourself to. Look at what your main competitor(s) is/are doing and do that in your own way.

If you want to compete with the big names you have to offer a service that is, at a minimum, equal to theirs. Make sure you’re taking note of what brands pop up across your customer research because that’s going to be the base for the next phase, researching your competition.

Knowing who your competitors are, or your second enemy is the best way to develop your business. Look at what marketing they’ve done throughout the years and analyse what has worked well and what hasn’t.

Remember, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

After Research

Once your research is done comes the time to strategise. Collect all your data into an easily readable format. Once you’ve arranged all of this, you can form a single cohesive buyer persona that neatly collects all the information you need about your audience in a neat package. This should tell you at a glance, who exactly your audience is. Using this information you can form a basic release schedule. You can make a forecast of the following months, plotting out when you’re going to either:

• Make social media posts
• Upload content
• Promote products/services
• Deal with customer posts on your socials.

As for what you post, this depends on what your audience likes to consume, but is also where your competitor research comes into it. What forms of content has your competitor used in the past? How often do they create a full campaign? What media channels do they use? How often? What kind of imagery do they evoke?

And the biggest question.

How can you improve upon it?

Remember, online marketing isn’t a question of standing on the shoulders of giants, it’s a question of climbing to the top of their head.

That’s a lot of Work

If you’re reading all this and your head is spinning, that’s completely normal. It’s a lot to take in, and as we’ve stated previously, most professional marketers attend university to know what they know. To the uninitiated, this can all sound rather intimidating. But don’t fret! There is a way you can market without you actually doing it!

There are many digital marketing consultants and companies in Australia, and Traffic Radius is one of the most experienced and dedicated. We are a marketing company in Melbourne, currently servicing hundreds of clients with a stellar team of creators, managers, consultants, developers, and designers. When you hire us you get friendly, professional service, but most importantly, guaranteed results. If you’d like to know more you can contact us here, or call us on 1300 870 901.