Digital Marketing Strategy: Tools and Implementation Steps. The digital marketing is a relatively new medium and moving in a turbulent and unknown environment for many as the Internet. Investments in digital marketing are always a sensitive issue for companies, the difficulty in knowing their effectiveness means that many small and medium companies devote more resources to other quantifiable aspects, more "safe" and ensure a return on investment short term.
However, digital marketing is essential for any company that wants to stay alive on the Internet and it is necessary to adapt and be constantly updated to be able to follow the continuous technological advances suffered by this medium. For this, it is necessary to be prepared and have a strong digital marketing strategy for which, if we have the necessary knowledge, a large investment will not be necessary.
For this reason and above all for those companies that have not yet decided to implement digital marketing strategies, we want to tell you what their pillars are, how to correctly formulate a strategy for this area and how to correctly measure their efficiency.
The main tools of the digital marketing strategy are: The web, online positioning, corporate blog, email marketing and social profiles.
The website is the fundamental pillar of digital marketing, everything is based to a greater or lesser extent on it. The purpose of the website is to convince users who are interested in the type of your product or service that your offer is the most appropriate of all. To achieve this you need traffic first, if people do not enter your page it is impossible to convince them (this is achieved with the help of the other tools). Once they are inside they need to feel comfortable navigating in it, an attractive web, with a clear message and with quality content will achieve that visitors do not leave running within two seconds of entering. It is also necessary to offer your clients ways to contact you, innovative tools such as live chat or "click to call" are very fashionable and make contact with your visitors much easier. One of the advantages of having a website is that it opens the possibility of selling your products without having to own a physical store. Large multinationals such as Amazon or Alibaba sell their products only online.
The positioning in the search engines is the biggest gateway to your website, organic traffic is basically achieved while being well positioned in the search engines. This is achieved by creating quality content on your website, for this you can help a corporate blog, press releases … this way you will get other websites and companies to talk about you and link your page and the search engines will place you among the first positions.
Having a corporate blog will not only help you to offer your readers interesting and quality content, but also, as we have already mentioned, will help you position yourself in the search engines. Elaborate colorful articles, with new and interesting information, will make your blog have faithful readers who are interested in your content, which will also bring more traffic to your website.
Email marketing will help you to build loyalty to those users that you have already converted into customers, creating newsletters that inform your customers about new offers, promotions or new products or services of your offer, you will get new business opportunities and also your commercial image It will be benefited since customers will appreciate being notified of the news of your company. You have to be careful not to spam too much or it will be counterproductive and you may lose a client who bothers receiving so many emails.
The goal of creating company profiles in social networks is not to sell if you do not create a community of users loyal to your brand that share your content with their own followers. In this way you can keep a feedback with your followers and check the feelings they have with your brand. You have to know the most used social networks of the moment and which of them is adapted to your offer, it is not necessary to have a profile in all social networks since you would be dedicating resources and time to something that would not be effective.
We already know what are the main tools of digital marketing but to put them into practice it is necessary to previously establish a strategy and plan our way in the online medium correctly. For this it is necessary to follow a series of steps.
What kind of people might interest my product? Once you know the answer to this question you can segment your digital marketing actions and establish clear action guidelines. For example if you have a young audience you should take care of social networks and post colloquial things and close to young tastes … If for example we are dedicated to something very technical as computer services, our blog we can guide people with certain knowledge, with a more professional and uncompromising language when using technicalities.
Buying the same car that the neighbor is frowned upon, but it is always good to keep an eye on the competition to know what strategies they are following and how to guide them, knowing that it has served them and that has made them lose customers can help us to develop our own online plan .
And your weaknesses … elaborating a SWOT analysis will allow us to know in which points we are stronger and we can exploit them or on the contrary which points we should strengthen and guide our tools to it.
What budget do we have? What part of this budget are we willing to allocate to digital marketing?
Do we have the time and resources available to execute any of the aforementioned tools?
It is important not to give blind sticks, we must know what we want to reach, but it is important to set some "real" goals and not be too enthusiastic. If we pursue clear objectives instead of going blind it will be easier to reach them.
Once the action plan has been established and we have decided on the tools we will use, we can only know the effectiveness of each of them.
The best way to really measure the impact and efficiency of our digital marketing campaigns is to combine this Analytics tool with a virtual number that we will place in each of the different campaigns and that will give us statistics of received calls, missed calls, time of wait for customers, call time … to know how many people really just interested in our offer and just call our company. In this way, in addition to measuring the impact, we can contact customers and convince them of the suitability of our product or service.
Measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns will help us to know the ROI (return on investment) and be able to evaluate the results of them. In this way we will know if we should allocate more or less budget and resources in the future and try to improve those that have deficits or directly eradicate them.
In short, all companies that act on the Internet have to devote time and resources to improve their digital marketing, taking advantage of your strengths and opportunities you can use those tools that best suit your company and get the most benefit. Often many companies outsource this service as there are many consultants and experts who can get the most out of your company and your capabilities in a marketing strategy, in this way you ensure that your digital marketing plan will be correctly formulated.