Digital Marketing Strategy for 2020

Does your business have a clearly defined digital strategy for 2020! If not then you need onw.

Importance of creating and using digital marketing plans to help with advanced digital transformation and company growth. Is your Digital Marketing Strategy S.M.A.R.T?

Where do you start that you need to create an advanced digital marketing strategy? This is a typical test as many organisations know how digital and mobile channels are today to acquire and hold customers.The digital marketing world is always evolving, and you're always executing your strategy. You're getting inspired by new campaigns, making last-minute changes, and receiving feedback from your customers that has you tweaking each post, video, and email. The result might be a disorganized, unfocused mess.

Is it hard to see the big picture of your digital marketing strategy? That's no good because the best plans are focused on the goals and metrics that matter most to your company. Further, the best strategies are unified across platforms and create a stable brand that your customers can connect with.

Here’s how to propel you company forward through a robust digital marketing strategy:

1. Focus on your key metrics.

Your digital marketing strategy has to be guided by your goals and the key metrics that reflect them. A company’s goals are changing all of the time, so chances are your goals have changed since the last time you produced your digital strategy.

Collect all of your goals and key metrics in one place, so you get a sense of the overall accomplishments you’re looking for in the coming year. When possible, avoid vanity metrics like Instagram followers, FB likes etc unless you can show that they are closely related to achieving what actually matters to your business—like sales.

When you’re reflecting on your business goals, throw out digital marketing goals that don’t advance the business, and create new goals that do. Get as specific as you can. “Grow your social media community as much as possible” is too broad. Build specific goals by reflecting on past performances e.g If last year you gained a thousand new email sign-ups, aim to increase that by 30%.

Check out what your competition is doing to help you create long-term goals.

2. Collect all of your Digital Strategies.

Now that you know what you should be aiming for, you need to reflect on which tools you’re using, and if they are still advancing your goals. Create a list of the strategies and platforms you’re using to spread your digital marketing message, including:

• Email marketing

• Content marketing

• SEO / SEM

• Your website

• Social Media Marketing

• Video Marketing

• Webinars and live events

• Blogging

• Podcasts

Broader digital media strategies may include multiple blogs, social media channels, and more. It's important to evaluate the ROI you get for each. Have your SEO efforts gained you any 1st place keywords, and if not, why not? Have your social media efforts drove conversion? When you're producing your digital ma

rketing strategy t’s a good time to invest in market research to better evaluate your efforts.

3. Check each strategy against your goal.

Many digital marketing strategies are easy to evaluate. Either your emails are being opened more often, and readers are following links back to your site, or they aren’t. Either you’re ranking higher for select keywords, or you’ve lost ground. You might be surprised at how your strategies have been performing, but at least now you’re informed and know where you should invest more.

On the other hand, your social media presence is notoriously hard to evaluate. Getting more likes on Facebook doesn’t necessarily translate to sales or even clicks back to your website.

So how do you analyse your performance on social media?

Reach: You always want your posts to reach your target audience, so expanding reach is a good sign that you’re moving in the right direction.

Clicks: Many people respond to Twitter posts or comment on Facebook without ever visiting your website or engaging with your brand off the platform, so it's essential to track clicks more than likes or even shares.

Emotional reaction: On Facebook, it’s simple to assess how your followers feel about your post because they can sort themselves by emotion by clicking "angry", "happy" or "wow." On other platforms, the ratio between comments and shares might be more helpful. A lot of comments and few shares is, generally, bad news.

4. Check Each Platform or Strategy for Change

With the ever evolving digital landscape keeping up with trends is absolutely essential.

Here are a few ways to gauge how things have changed online:

Has your audience moved? Social media platforms fall in and out of favor. Newcomers might present you an opportunity to beat your competition. Falling rates of engagement might mean you should reduce your investment, in both time and money, on the platform. For 2020 video content should be a central focus in most digital marketing strategies. Have you personalised your approach? There are many opportunities for personalization in digital marketing, from segmenting your email marketing efforts to hosting more targeting Webinars for specific segments.Is your strategy mobile? Going mobile isn’t just for websites. You need to make sure that every aspect of your digital marketing is easily accessed on a mobile device, from email to webinars.

5. Check Your Competition

After reviewing your digital marketing strategy, you may have cut several areas. Now you have free resources, in time and money that you can reinvest elsewhere. It might be the right time to start a new strategy you’ve always wanted to try. Or, it might be the right time to check in on your competition and see if they are investing somewhere you aren’t.

Start with just your top three competitors. Check out their website to find where they are active in social media and which other digital media strategies they are using. You can read through their social posts and emails yourself, but you’ll get more information if you use a competitive analysis tool.

You might consider the following tools;

• Hootsuite

• Buzz Sumo

• Sprout Social

6. Create a Master Calendar

The best way to keep your digital marketing running well through the year is to have a robust, master calendar.

Too many of us have a separate calendar for each platform, plus one for our blogs, and another for our email marketing. If so, it’s hard to see the full picture. Remember, many of your customers are interacting with you through two or more of these channels, so they need to be synchronised and unified. You want to reach out to your customers frequently, but you don’t want to send them the same message several times a day, and more importantly send them irrelevant content.

Your master calendar should show you the publishing schedule for multiple platforms, and it should point to the key goals each effort is meant to target. In a way, your calendar is more like a brief guide that you can use to refresh your mind; something to remind yourself of what you want to accomplish. This will facilitate your goal of re-evaluating your digital marketing on a daily basis.

Is your digital marketing strategy fully optimised? Does you digital strategy outline all contents? See below:

(1) Executive Summary

(2)   Organisational Background

(3)   Situation Analysis

(4)   Target Audience

(5)   Objectives

(6)   Channels

(7)   Action Plan

(8)   Budget

(9)   Measurement

(10)  References & Appendices

Get in touch with me today!