7 steps to craft your digital marketing strategy, improve ROI By Pradeep Chopra

Since you have shown interest in reading this post, I am assuming that you are looking for answer to either or all of the following questions:

Shall we use Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or some other digital media?
How can we repeatedly produce success in leveraging digital marketing?
How can I convince my management to increase the budget for digital marketing?

How can we decide on the resources we would need for successful execution of digital marketing?
How can I be sure if our digital marketing agency is doing the right job?

Relax! You are not alone. One of the biggest reasons why many digital marketing campaigns fail is the absence of a coherent digital marketing strategy. Since the starting point for many of the digital marketing initiatives is to leverage a new and popular digital media channel, which everyone else including competition is talking about, most of those initiatives end up turning into a failure or a chance success.

According to Bain/Red Hat Digital Transformation survey, the most digitally mature companies are eight times more likely to gain market share than the least digital mature.

Are you interested in consistently and reliably producing success of your digital marketing campaigns? While there is no formula for success, applying following seven steps in crafting your digital marketing strategy will build a strong foundation in delivering high ROI of your digital marketing investments:

Define Goals & Metrics and Identify Tools to Measure Success:
‘If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there’ were the words of Lewis Carroll. Peter Drucker mentioned “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.’ These two quotes aptly create the importance of defining your objectives and measuring progress before you start your digital marketing journey.

Research Target Audience to Identify Relevant Channels: The choice of digital media channels should be based on where your target audience is present vs what is popular or others are talking about. One of the key advantages of digital media is that it gives you the ability to research and identify relevant channels.

For example, without running an Ad on Facebook, through its Ad interface, you can find out how many relevant people are present on it. As I am writing this article, I can see that there are 43,000 men on Facebook from Jaipur aged between 25-35, who own iPhone 6S and are currently travelling.

Create Content that Addresses Buyer Persona Pain Points: Relevancy is the key to success on any medium and digital is not an exception. Instead of creating some flashy or jazzy content, which may look interesting; produce content, which addresses the concerns of your target audience.

Build a Content Library for Various Channels: As I shared in my earlier article, 7 reasons for digital marketing failure in startups, underestimating the importance of content is one of the reasons why many digital marketing campaigns fail. Depending upon your choice of relevant digital media channels, you have to be prepared to continuously create relevant content.

Allocate Paid Advertising Budget: While paid advertising is not mandatory, majority of the digital marketing campaigns does not reach the desired level of success in absence of paid advertising. It not only creates newer avenues for targeted reach, it also helps amplify the impact and reach of content developed for organic media.

Create a Timeline and an Action Plan: Since digital marketing involves real time actions, we tend to believe that planning is not required for creating success on this medium. In fact, planning makes you stronger to deal with the challenges posed by the real-time nature of this medium and is the only way to reliably produce success.

Evaluate Results and Improve Your Strategy: Given the dynamic nature of digital media, you will be lucky if everything goes the way you planned. Most likely, you will have to evolve your strategy and that requires constant evaluation and optimization. Defining your objectives and metrics, mentioned in step 1 will be your access to continuously optimize the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.

I hope these steps have given you a possible direction to be able to fulfill your digital marketing objectives. I welcome your contribution through acknowledgment or disagreement to my thoughts.

The author is a serial entrepreneur. He’s the CEO of Digital Vidya, one of Asia’s leading digital marketing training companies. If you want to learn Digital Marketing then you can find more about their digital marketing training programs. He can be reached at @PradeepChopra on Twitter

This article was first published by Economictimes