Steve Trahanas - Use a Digital Marketing Strategy to Increase Impact

A digital marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that outlines for brands what they want to accomplish and how to reach their goals. It provides brands with guidance as they deploy their efforts, helping to keep everything moving efficiently and effectively. Despite the importance of a digital marketing strategy, an estimated 65 percent of marketers say that they do not have one integrated into their broader marketing platform, and a full 47 percent say that they have no digital marketing strategy at all, even though they do try to employ digital marketing tactics. This places these organizations at an incredible disadvantage as they try to gain a foothold within the digital ecosystem.

Creating a digital marketing strategy

Steve Trahanas says effective online marketing strategies should provide an outline of what the brand hopes to accomplish and how they are going to go about doing it. It should provide information about every step of the journey, helping brands to visualize their end results. The strategy can be adjusted as the organization progresses and they are better able to identify the techniques that work and those that are less efficient.

1. Outline your goals and expectations. To begin, brands should develop a list of goals that they want to see reached through their digital marketing strategy. These goals should be concrete and quantifiable. For example, organizations might mention a percent increase in their share of voice, a particular jump in year over year performance, or a certain revenue number that they would like to hit.

2. Outline your buyer personas and their buyer journeys. Once the brand understands precisely what they hope to accomplish with their marketing efforts, the next step is to identify exactly who they are trying to reach with their messages. With an SEO strategy, the importance of a target audience is far higher than with other, more traditional marketing practices. Rather than broadcasting information to particular demographics, brands instead must understand exactly what their targeted customers want to read, and thus be able to entice them to explore their website and their brand.

3. Look at your existing content. Now is the time when you need to look at your existing content. Steve Trahanas says perform a basic audit to uncover the content that you already have and line it up to the buyer journey for your different ideal customer personas. This will help you start to understand how your content fits with the model, where your strengths lie and where you have room for improvement in your digital marketing strategy.

4. Select the keywords for your material. Keyword research will be the next important step in your SEO strategy. It is important to differentiate keyword research from the old, defunct methods of SEO and keyword stuffing. Keyword research revolves around using insights into search patterns to identify the topics that matter the most to your audience. You want to look at the terms and the topics that have the highest search rates so that you can create the content that is there to answer the needs and questions of your audience. On BrightEdge, you can perform this research using the Data Cube. You can then even take your research a step further by using the Recommendations engine to look at the top ten pages for a particular keyword to gain insights into what helps these pages rank and where you can improve and outrank them.

5. Create high-value content, optimize it, and distribute. Armed with your keyword research, your buyer personas and their journeys, and the insights into your most popular content, you now need to create high-value content that will engage your customers. This content should be driven by what you know about your target customers as well as your defined goals. For example, share of voice or brand awareness goals might include a greater interest in developing content for major publications or attracting followers on social media. Goals focused on revenue will center around creating material that guides people through the entire buyer’s journey to conversion and making a purchase. This material will then need to be optimized to help it stand out to the search engines and consumers.