Digital marketing strategy

Do you want to learn how to create a digital marketing strategy that works for your small business? read on

If you’re just starting a small business, marketing will be crucial to your success.

Every business, no matter the industry, needs to have a digital marketing strategy plan if the goal is to attract customers.

Whether you’re selling services or products, you need a small business digital marketing strategy plan for getting your business in front of people who are looking to buy what you have to sell. 

The internet will be your number one ally here. Done correctly, you can effectively get your business seen by many thousands of potential customers, some of whom will become one-time or recurring customers of yours. 

Digital marketing can be complex, but as a new business owner, you need only take the basic steps and lay a foundational approach at first.

Achieving results from marketing is a waiting game, so let’s take a look at the steps you need to take before you can sit back and watch your numbers grow exponentially. 

Creating a digital marketing strategy plan for your small business

1. Know Your Brand

The first thing you need to do is more clearly define your brand.

Who are you and what are you selling? Who is your audience?

You can’t know how to market your business until you pinpoint what kind of business it is and where you should focus your efforts.

You should also ask yourself how your business is unique and what is going to be your competitive advantage over the competition?

These are your USPs, also known as unique selling points. 

Once you develop some USPs you can include them in your company bio as well as some marketing channel content.

Your mission statement and values as a company owner should also be clearly defined so you can articulate them to your audience. 

2. Define Your Buyer

Chances are, there will be a certain type of individual who gravitates to your products more than others. Age, location, job title, income level, goals, and interest are all part of your “buyer personas”.

A buyer persona is a conglomeration of similar characteristics that make up the overall persona of your top customers.

You may have a few different buyer personas, like married women over 30, or single men interested in facial hair grooming. 

Once you have clearly defined who your top customers are, you can focus your marketing techniques on them.

This will generate much more success for you than focusing on efforts that aren’t specific enough. 

3. Set Some Goals

Goal-setting is useful in any walk of life, but especially so when developing a digital marketing strategy plan.

Without goals, you could end up letting impatience or impulsiveness creep in and derail what may have otherwise been a successful plan.

You might also grow complacent and not push hard enough to strive for your goals.

SMART is an acronym that stands for smart, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

Build some SMART goals.

Short-term goals are the most useful when beginning a marketing strategy, and you can extrapolate out from there. 

For example, define how many new users you want within the first 3 months.

Or choose a benchmark for how many web page views you want within a certain timeframe, how many clicks you want, and/or how many actual sales you want. 

Clarifying all these numbers and goals to yourself will help you keep the faith and stick to your plan.

It’s also a morale-booster to see yourself knocking down goal after goal on your way to achieving even bigger goals.

4. Determine a Budget

Pick however much you want to set aside for digital marketing so you can know how to proceed from there.

There are many different types of digital marketing and some of them are more expensive than others. Set aside a budget to avoid overspending in the initial startup phase.

5. Build a Plan of Attack

You cannot start your digital marketing strategy plan without having a well defined plan on how you want to proceed.

Have a well-defined plan that is clearly written down to help you to think through your strategies and follow them as you execute

Having a digital maerkting strategy plan will also give you the oppoortuntiy to compare your results and know what is working and what is not.

To help you achieve this, I have created a digital marketing planner that will help you create a digital marketing strategy plan for your small business.

This planner contains already defined strategy prompts and steps that are designed to take your small business from offline to online.

Even if you are already online but do not know anything about digital marketing strategy.

You will be able to create a digital marketing plan that will work for your online business.

Contents of the digital marketing strategy plan

✔Business Model Analysis

✔Business digitalization plan( All the 5 mentioned digital marketing strategies are included

✔Financial forecast

✔Execution plan

5 ways to market a business online. 

SEO: This helps your website rank higher on search engines, thus leading to more traffic and more customers.

PPC Ads: They are another way and can generate revenue on their own while getting you in places where you couldn’t organically. 

Content marketing: Content marketing is a way to provide value to your audience while simultaneously marketing yourself and your products.

Email marketing: This is the art of capturing emails for people so you can send them personalized marketing efforts based on their demographics. 

Social media marketing: One of the most popular, social media outlets like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others to get your name and brand out there.

Combine this too with SEO and content marketing to improve its effectiveness.

Finally, getting popular influencers in your space to promote your products is one of the most effective methods, though it can be costly. 

Depending on your budget, you may choose one or more of these methods to begin with.

Building a website should always be your first step, but from there, how you want to attempt to get people to visit it is up to you.

If you will like to learn how to build your own website, you can easily do so with our course WordPress Without Tears.

This course was specifically built to help newbie business people who have no clue how to build a website, to build a WordPress Site without much stress.

The course is simplified to enable you to go through it and have your WordPress Site up and running in a jiffy.

The WordPress Without Tears Course simplifies the creation and design of your website such that you do not need to spend hours watching videos in other to create and design your first website.

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Ideally, you’ll eventually end up using a little bit of everything, though most of your focus will shift to a few key areas depending on your initial results. 

6. Adapt and Adjust

The last step of building a digital marketing plan is to fine-tune it and optimize it as best you can.

Measuring your initial results and adapt it as you see fit. Assuming you’ve made the right moves and you know how to value a business, you should expect to see positive results after weeks or months. 

The right marketing plan is guaranteed to boost your sales.

It can do wonders to improve the sales of even an average company.

Follow the steps we’ve laid out here and exercising a bit of patience, you can easily get your business seen by people who want to buy from you.

Assuming your products and/or services are of real value to your customers, increasing the number of interested eyes on your brand is a surefire way to improve your sales.

This piece was contributed by Skylar

Skylar is a contributor at Raincatcher and a blogger. His contributing site, Raincatcher, provides useful tools and advice for business owners such as a business valuation calculator, exit planning strategies, and guides to selling your business.