How to Build an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses
TechsPlace | Regardless of industries, small and medium businesses do need effective digital marketing strategies to stay relevant in the business. As we move towards digitization, more companies are coming online, and in such tough competition, you need to stay ahead of all by having a robust strategy.
If you have just started out with digital marketing and looking for the simplest way to create one effective strategy, then we have got you covered. In this article, we will have a look at how to build the best digital marketing strategy that will help you thrive online and bring more sales to your business.
First, define your business goals
Digital marketing strategy steps and processes will vary as per your business goals and what exactly you want to achieve from them. It is very to first figure out those business goals that you will accomplish using digital means.
Your digital marketing goals may vary from your peers, and that is the reason you need to have a custom strategy. Your ultimate goals from digital marketing strategy may be related to generating more traffic, or generating more leads, or doing more sales. Whatever the goals are, first you need to figure them out and then begin creating the plan. By doing this, you will have clarity throughout the life cycle.
Creating a buyer’s persona
The biggest lead you can take from your competitors by knowing the customers in a better way. By creating a buyer’s persona, you can drive a lot of sales and traffic to your site. In the buyer’s persona, you need to list down all the characteristics that your ideal customer will have – their age, interests, preferences, business domains, and so on.
Once you figure out the buyer’s persona, creating a digital marketing strategy would become more straightforward and accurate for your marketing team. This is an ideal practice that every big company follows, and you should also do this to stand yourself apart from the rest. This might be a time-consuming process for many, but it will help you achieve your business goals faster.
Understanding & designing sales funnel
Don’t feel overwhelmed after reading the word sales funnel. It’s nothing but strategy or a path that defines how a customer sales journey will look like. What will be the steps included in the entire process that will assist the audience from becoming a visitor to a permanent customer?
The simple sales funnel will look like this – getting in contact with your brand, visiting your site, reading blogs & knowing about your services or products, and then finally making a buying decision. You need to think about all these aspects while you create your digital marketing strategy. And, you need some platform or a way to detect at which stage your visitors are so that you can pitch them accordingly.
Identify where to put marketing efforts
You need to understand the fact that not all social media or marketing platforms are for your business. For getting the maximum results from your efforts, picking the right platforms will help you a lot. With the data collected from the buyer’s persona, you can identify the social networks easily.
You can also run a quick competitor’s analysis to check on which social media platforms they are working the most. Once you figure out two or three marketing platforms, it will help you create custom marketing plans for each platform. By creating custom marketing plans, you can cater to customers’ needs in a much better way and drive more revenue from them.
Personalization & Automation
For scaling your marketing efforts and bringing more sales, you need to have automation platforms that will allow you to do more in less time. There are several free and paid automation tools available to manage emails, social media, customer reply and more. Depending on your requirements, you can pick one or more tools to make your marketing efforts more scalable.
Along with automation, you will need to provide a personalized user experience to all the customers and potential buyers. Personalization brings drastic changes to your marketing campaigns as customers can relate to them with more affinity.
Audit and improvise
Lastly, you need to gauge the performance of all the digital marketing tactics that you or your team is performing. If some marketing tactics are not working, you need to improve them and test their impact again. By iterating and refining the marketing efforts, you will get an effective digital marketing strategy that is highly effective for your business. You can keep the audit frequency on a weekly or monthly basis to check the overall performance.
These were the top important tips that small businesses should follow to create an effective digital marketing strategy and thrive online. If you don’t have an in-house team, then it’s better to opt for SEO packages and get started with online branding.
With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings – Online Reputation Management Company. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.
