Gone are the days when newspapers and billboards were considered the most effective ways for Brand Promotions. Today’s world is completely digitalized. Digital Marketing has become a need of the moment for all businesses. Competition is increasing day by day. Everybody wants to know about the best Digital Marketing Strategy for Brand Awareness.
As a business owner, it must be very tough for you to decide. Which should you focus more on- PPC or SEO or both? How are you planning to optimize your site for a perfect user experience? What about Social Media channels? These are some of the confusions that businesses face daily.
The primary struggle is where to start, and because of this, many businesses end up not starting it at all; further missing the opportunity to win. The best way to overcome this fear is to create a Digital Marketing strategy for e-commerce brand awareness.
Do you remember the saying, Roam was not built overnight? Do you agree if I say, Roam was not built without a plan too?
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A Digital Marketing Strategy is a sequence of actions that can help your business achieve its marketing goals through a proper plan for selected Digital Marketing channels.
Before coming up with a Digital Brand Strategy, you should consider these two questions first.
- Is the current plan working?
- What is the main intention of creating a new Digital Marketing Strategy?
Here is an outline of what you need to have in your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2023
Set a clear business goal: Think long-term (1-year minimum), and then scale it to half-yearly, quarterly, monthly, and so on.
Determine KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): How will you get to know that you have met your Digital Marketing goals? You need to be realistic here, and the answer may vary. For example, expecting your new Content Writer to work on six high-quality 2,000-word articles per day is tough to achieve.
Create a Digital Marketing Plan: You need to get an idea about which online tool you are going to use and how.
Execute Your Strategy: Implement your goals consistently using your strategy and keep monitoring your progress.
Analyze the Results: You need to analyze now things like what worked well for your business, what changes need to be made, and so on.
Digital Marketing Strategy for Any Brand in 2023
Now that you have got an idea about what Digital Marketing is and what it looks like, here are the steps to follow to create a Digital Marketing Strategy for brand awareness.
1. Evaluate Existing Digital Channels and Assets
Before creating a Digital brand strategy, you should first get a picture of all your Digital Marketing assets and channels. This will save you from an overwhelming situation in the future. You can look into owned, earned, and paid media structures to categorize and classify the channels or assets that you are going to use extensively.
2. Evaluate Your Past and Learn from the Mistakes
When you are serious about your goals, you cannot just plan in the dark. You need to evaluate the past failures and successes that you used in your previous Digital Brand Strategy. It will help you focus more on setting up the best KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your business.
3. Identify Goals and Tools
A strategy without goals simply doesn’t work. So, you need to define your goals first. Every professional marketer understands how important is this stage.
Make sure that your goal follows the SMART formula
- Specific: Vague goals do not work. So, you need to be specific.
- Measurable: If the goals are not measured, you will not know whether you are achieving them or not.
- Attainable: The goal should be challenging but at the same time attainable too
- Realistic: If you set your goals too high for your standard, you may jump into failure soon. This is similar to Confidence is good, but over-confidence is not.
- Timely: You need to set a deadline for the project or the campaign or any such.
Weak Marketing Goal Example
“There should be an increase in the conversions by next year and create three promotional offers.” What is wrong with this? You need to set measurable goals. How are you going to evaluate progress with this goal?
How to Modify It?
“There should be at least a 20% increase in the conversions in the first quarter of this year and need to create three promotional offers. I need to publish two books in May and June 2020 respectively.”Now the progress is measurable.
4. Define Budget
Setting a budget is as important as setting goals. Many marketers overlook this stage. You are going to spend money at almost every stage of the funnel. So, you need to have your budget well planned.
Setting a budget is the basis of your digital marketing campaign as they are only the basis with your marketing efforts. Investing in digital advertising is the most cost-effective form of advertisement. If you are heading towards running your Facebook and Google ads, then it too involves static payment.
For example – If you are planning to run Facebook ads and expecting to generate $10,000 and your margin is about $50, then it needs 200 sales for generating that quantity through this specific ad campaign. All this needs you to have a defined budget.
5. Understand the Digital Sales Funnel
Before developing your Digital Brand Strategy, you need to have a clear understanding ofan important concept, the Digital Sales Funnel. It includes various steps that your buyer moves through to reach up to the purchasing point.
The stages include
Stage1 – Awareness: Create awareness about your product or brand for the first time
Stage 2– Interest: Generate interest in your product or service by letting them know what benefits they get.
Stage 3 – Desire: Now, you need to create a desire through an emotional trigger, letting them get an idea about your brand personality. Here, you are moving the user from ‘Liking It’ to ‘Wanting It’.
Stage 4 – Action: Finally, you need to create a Call to Action (CTA). Here, you will encourage the user to take action like Buy Now, Download the Brochure, Call Now, Join Our Newsletter, Chat Now, and so on.
6. Create a Buyer Persona
You have understood how the stages in the funnel work for your buyer. But who is your buyer? Remember, if you are considering everyone as your buyer, you are going to have nobody as your buyer. To know who your buyer is, you need to create a buyer persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is nothing but an imaginary profile of your target customer you are going to create based on research. It describes your ideal customer, their demographics, interests, needs, challenges they face, purchase goals, how they make decisions, and so on.
Why Is It Important to Have a Buyer Persona?
Buyer Persona gives you a clear idea about your target user’s desires, requirements, pain points, and so on. It can even help you in identifying potential buyers and thus improving your Digital Marketing Strategies to grab the attention of quality leads.
Whenever you plan personalized Digital Marketing campaigns for those buyer personas, you can see a high quantity of potential buyers.
How to Create a Buyer Persona?
It is very simple. You can simply give an educated guess on how your potential buyer would be. Or, you can create a Buyer Persona form and ask your existing customers to fill it. Once you get the results, analyze the maximum relevancy of the people who are making purchases from you such as their – age, gender, highest qualification, job, where they live, and so on.
Give him or her an imaginary name. So, finally, you have created a buyer persona. So, next time onwards whenever you are planning to create a service or product or a campaign to reach your potential customer, think about this persona. It brings you more successful results.
You can even get a free template online to define your audience or buyer persona.
Example: Buyer specific needs to be very specific. You cannot just say “Young Moms”. It would be more like, “A super mom, Linda, age between 29 and 35, with at least one kid above the age of seven, who goes with a middle-class budget and lives in a rented flat.
7. Find Out Where to Find Users at All Funnel Stages
Finally, you have got an understanding of who your target audience is, so what next? You should know where and how to reach them. You need to research your analytics and then cross-verify the results with your buyer persona.
For example, let’s assume that you are running a Home Renovation company. You take care of everything from fixing water-damaged floors to building their dream kitchen. Here, you can expect diverse audiences at different stages of the sales funnel who are trying to reach you.
Here are some of the possible scenarios.
- Someone who has been planning a royal and expensive-looking bathroom remodeling for a long time. They have discovered you through a specific phrase “bathroom remodeling ideas”. If they can find relevant pictures on your blog, there is a chance of them hiring you.
- Someone’s house was flooded due to a leaky pipe, and he started looking for the right person to fix the flooring. The best bet to reach such consumers is through Google Ads because they would search for such services on Google.
- Someone has a run-down bathtub but doesn’t have a budget to fix it. Now you have got their attention through your Facebook Ad that shows how affordable your services are.
So, that is how you reach your target customer.
8. Implement Specific Guidelines to Reach Your Goals
You have got an idea about how mixed your audience could be, and where and how they might react. Now, it’s time to tie everything together to create specific guidelines that can help you reach your goals on a clear path.
Some of them include:
- Place lead magnets and lead generation widgets on the sides of all your blog posts. Additionally, place a CTA at the end of each post to help your target buyer reach you.
- Share influencer content on your Social Media channels so that you can build your brand awareness and increase your visibility in the market.
- Encourage testimonials and reviews with emails or on your Google Business page. It helps in your local SEO score.
Again, you need to be specific about what your goal is and plan things accordingly. The above is mentioned just to give you an idea.
9. Determine Digital Marketing Channels
You cannot use all the platforms for all your goals. To increase your brand awareness, you can use different Digital Marketing channels according to your goal. You can promote the content too on a specific platform considering the frequency of your audience.
Initially, you may find it difficult to decide which channel to use for what. Here is the list of 6 Digital Marketing channels that any business can make use of:
- Choose SEO and Content Marketing to help you generate traffic to your website.
- Choose Social Media Marketing to find diverse groups of audiences that use Social Media frequently.
- Choose Google AdWords offers to-measure tools as well as budgeting options that help you stay balanced with your Digital Marketing goals.
- Choose Email Lists to engage your users and gain action from them, usually within a given time frame.
- Choose display Ads like video ads, banner ads, interactive ads, and so on to place on any third-party websites.
- Choose affiliate marketing when you don’t have enough time or manpower to market your products online.
So, assess your requirements first and plan accordingly. Focusing on two or three channels maximum creates wonders than trying to be master on all the channels.
10. Do Keyword Research and Analysis for SEO and PPC
If you are planning to rank higher either organically or through paid campaigns, you need to have your Keyword Research ready first. In simple terms, a keyword is a word or set of words users use in the search box of a search engine to find relevant results.
Keyword research is an important part of Digital Marketing campaigns both in SEO and PPC. You don’t need to run ads in SEO, the keywords help you rank according to their score. In PPC, you will be running ads to achieve rank for a specific keyword.
Nowadays, there are lots of tools available online such as Uber Suggest, Answer The Public, Keyword Planning, and more to help you with keyword research. You can also take the help of the Google Search bar auto-suggestion feature.
11. Content Creation
What is Content? Everything we consume like Tweets, Feeds, Videos, Blog Posts, Stories, Images and all is Content. Here is the plan on how to build content that suits your Digital Marketing plan.
Research: Go and find where your ideal audiences are, and research and analyze the types of content they are looking for.
Brainstorm: Generate a list of ideas from your research. Now, look into your competitor’s content. You can make use of tools like Ahrefs and Buzzsumo.
Conduct Content Research: Search for trends, reports, videos, white papers, images or any other relevant information that can support your topic.
Plan: Find out how and where you want to use the content. A video to post on youtube? Infographic or article to post on your blog? Record a podcast? Or something else? Decide on the plan.
Headline: Create a headline that grabs the user’s attention instantly. The same applies to hashtags too.
Create: Now create the actual content by going through the content you got through your research as well as by using your ideas or knowledge on the topic.
Review: Review the content by yourself first, and then ask your friend or colleagues to help you with that.
Implement and Asses: Present the content to the target audience through your blog, YouTube channel, Social Media feed, or whatever and see how their feedback is. Make changes accordingly or implement the changes in the next content.
Why is this important?
You will become an authority as your audience will start considering you as an expert in your industry. You will also start gaining trust as an authority.
12. Content Repurposing
The different audience has different needs and styles. Some may like to read while some may like to watch it as a video. So, the basic idea of Content Repurposing is using the same content in different formats. You can create a blog of the same content to post on your blog, convert it into a video upload on YouTube, and upload the podcast for those who love to listen.
It is always suggested to repurpose your popular content to expand your audience base and offer them alternative channels to stay connected with your content.
More Content Repurposing Options
- If you are interviewing an expert, you can compile all the insights shared, into an eBook.
- Either you can convert PowerPoint presentations into videos or embed them simply and post them on your blog.
- You can create tutorials from a series of your old posts.
- Create checklists from webinars, videos, or long-form content.
13. Co-Create Content
Creating content is no more a 1-way journey anymore. Of course, it’s an art too. Welcoming users to create content with you is an alternative approach to brand loyalty.
- Invite your customers to share their memories that connect to your product or service.
- Create a campaign encouraging your existing users to showcase your product uniquely.
- Invite your Social Media followers to share pictorial or lyrical or visual expressions of your product, and compile the whole data into an ad.
UGC (User Generated Content) is the best way to understand what your audiences are craving from you. Reviews and recommendations from your existing customers hugely influence consumer behavior.
14. Content Sharing
When it comes to reaching your target audience, you cannot ignore the Content Sharing opportunity. You can incorporate Content Sharing into your marketing plan in different ways as follows.
Blog Posts
- Add social sharing buttons on your website or blog.
- Create catchy Instagram quotes or GIF tweets for your readers to share in one-click
Social Media Sharing
- Make it a habit to schedule your posts to appear on selected platforms
- Create share-worthy content using publishing software or apps
- Send emails to your subscribers regularly. However, make sure it is either informative or useful for them. The content should be so compelling that they would keep forwarding the mail.
15. Establish Profitable Traffic Sources
Most of the sites receive traffic from different sources as there are so many channels today through which one can access a website. Fortunately, you can use Google Analytics to establish how your consumers arrived on a specific page on your website. Here are some of the different traffic sources.
Organic Traffic: Search Engines like Bing and Google
Referral Traffic: Sources outside search engines such as a backlink from another website
Social Media Traffic: Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Paid Search Traffic: Search Engine Ads
Email Traffic: Email Marketing Campaign
Direct Traffic: Website URL
You can log into Google Analytics and go to Behavior, then choose whether you want to view all the traffic or specific source.
By analyzing traffic, you will get an idea of which one is working well or which source you need to focus on.
16. Improve User Experience
Online or offline, customer satisfaction should be one of the primary goals.
Chatbots
Install chatbots on your Website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Business, and wherever possible. They save you a lot of money by avoiding the need for more staff. You will save time too. Chatbots are becoming more human-friendly day by day. Consumers love the personalized and unbiased attention they Get through Chatbots. The best part about chatbots is, they respond 24/7.
Private Messaging Apps
WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat are some of the popular brands in private messaging services. They help your consumers for – chatting, shopping, or communication. Their reach is too high and expected to grow more in the coming years. So, install them according to your requirements.
Social Media Channels
Social Media is still evolving. There may be a replacement for the platforms, but social Media is not going to die soon. So, make sure you are making proper use of Social Media and understanding all the features associated. Showcase your storytelling and creativity and create a brand impression among your users.
Respond to their queries either through automation or manually, but make sure you are not ignoring them. It can highly impact your business.
17. Monitor and Measure Digital Marketing Plans
When you want to monitor and measure your Digital Marketing plans, make sure to divide them into two categories
- Buzz: Retweets, Likes, and Shares
- Impact: Comments, Views, Clicks, Comments, and Downloads
While the buzz is important, the impact should be considered more. But, how to measure the impact? You can measure it with the level of engagement they are creating.
- Comments and the conversations generated from your content
- Email list metrics
- Visitors’ path to your website
- Visitors engagement on your website
18. Keep Searching for Opportunities
Everything moves fast here in Digital Marketing. To remain up-to-date with the changes, you should never stop searching for new opportunities.
For instance, according to the recent changes, the ongoing opportunities are:
- LinkedIn for B2B marketing requirements
- Facebook for larger companies with a good number of Digital Marketers
- Snapchat for quit updates
- Instagram for those businesses that can attract customers with their product display from time to time.
19. Troubleshoot Digital Marketing Strategy 2020
Now that you are following everything as per the strategy. But, there are a few things that are learned through practice and experiences. Your strategy doesn’t need to be working exactly as per the plan. There will be times when you need to revamp your strategy or fix a part of it.
So, keep evaluating it from time to time, to understand how your strategy is working. It can be tricky as there are usually multiple platforms, campaigns, and elements involved.
If you go to Google Analytics, you can find out everything from native analytics of all the networks to the channels you are using. You can evaluate how users and leads are responding to the campaigns and how it is helping you travel towards your goals.
The whole point here, for instance, it doesn’t matter if your blog post was shared 2,000 times in a day, but you didn’t get even a single lead or a sale. You can set up and review analytics on almost all platforms. Accordingly, you can troubleshoot your plan wherever necessary.
Final Words
If you are looking to learn digital marketing, check out the online and offline courses offered by Digital Scholar, India’s premium digital marketing training institute. At Digital Scholar, we adopt the agency-based training methodology, providing students with on-field, real-time experience.
Having a Digital Marketing strategy for brand awareness is essential. Though it may seem very tempting to get into every platform you see, you should figure out whether or not that platform works for your Digital Marketing goals.
For instance, if you are a Toys retailer, you should not waste your time on LinkedIn. You should try Facebook and Instagram more.
Overall, without a Digital Marketing Strategy for 2020, you will not be able to see effective results, because, without a strategy, you do not have a proper idea of which platforms to use, what to post, whom to focus on, and so on. With the right digital Brand Strategy, you will see great success. Obviously, that is the last thing you would want to experience with all the money and time you have invested.
FAQs
1. How do I begin creating a digital marketing strategy for my brand in 2023?
Start by defining your goals and objectives, identifying your target audience, and conducting thorough market research. From there, you can develop a comprehensive plan that includes tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising.
2. What are the key components of a successful digital marketing strategy?
A successful digital marketing strategy includes a clear understanding of your target audience, a strong online presence through various channels, a consistent and cohesive brand message, engaging and relevant content, effective use of data and analytics, and a focus on continuous improvement and adaptation.
3. How do I measure the success of my digital marketing strategy?
The success of your digital marketing strategy can be measured by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, social media engagement, email open rates and click-through rates, and return on investment (ROI). Analyzing these metrics and adjusting your strategy will help you achieve your goals.
4. What role does content marketing play in a digital marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a crucial component of a successful digital marketing strategy. It involves creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and engage a target audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action. Content marketing can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts.
5. How often should I review and adjust my brand’s digital marketing strategy in 2023?
It’s essential to regularly review and adjust your brand’s digital marketing strategy in 2023 to ensure it remains effective and relevant. You may need to adjust monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on your goals and objectives. Regular monitoring of key performance indicators, ongoing market research, and keeping up with industry trends can help you stay ahead of the competition and maintain a successful digital marketing strategy.
