Post by lizakhatun1122 on Oct 30, 2024 18:46:30 GMT 10
Taking your first steps on the Internet is becoming increasingly necessary for brands and companies of all sizes. If you don't have a presence on the Internet yet, or you've just started taking your first steps but without following a predefined plan, you should start thinking about how to design your online marketing strategy .
This is a very broad topic, since we would be talking about how to define the lines of action of any type of business aimed at any sector or audience. Therefore, I want to clarify that what I am going to offer you with this post is a practical guide in which I have put a lot of work and love, but in which you will also have to do your part to achieve your goals .
To explain this topic to you in the best way I know how, Miguel Florido has opened the doors of his blog to me and has proposed a challenge to me, so as a thank you for this great opportunity, I do not want to disappoint you!
Based on their recommendations, the plan is as follows; I have prepared one of my step-by-step guides to design your digital marketing strategy effectively, and to help you understand why it is important, I will give you an illustrative tutorial with a downloadable Excel template included .
What is an online or digital marketing strategy on page seo service and what are the benefits for your corporate or personal brand?
Before you consider how to define and design your strategy to gain online presence , it is important that you fully understand what this whole process is about and why you should follow it strictly with your brand or business.
I often come across clients who have heard that they need to be on social media, rank their pages on Google or launch an online store to offer their super-new product, but they don't understand the real reason for all this and, therefore, they don't set realistic goals.
To prevent this from happening to you and you start to go around in the dark with your digital strategy, how about we define this concept and detail the advantages of following an effective strategic plan?
Definitions
Marketing strategies have traditionally been classified according to 4 aspects, known in economics books as the 4 P's, which I will briefly review in one of the following points.
Before this, I want to be direct and give you a jargon-free definition of what an online or digital marketing strategy is :
“It is the process that allows us to contact and create solid relationships with our clients without the need to make physical contact, simply with the help of the Internet.”
As I understand that there are those who also like to give concepts a further twist, here I give you a more extended definition :
“An online marketing strategy is one that allows us to interact with our clients through the Internet without the need to contact them in person. These relationships, carried out efficiently, help us to mutually exchange ideas, products and services that satisfy our needs or objectives.”
However, the most difficult part of all this is not understanding this concept itself, but understanding how it works within companies and the freelance world , since to design this type of strategy you have to analyze and define:
The objectives
Available resources
The target audience
The competition
Lots of information, isn't it? I think that before we go into more detail and see how you can work on all these aspects, it is interesting for you to know what the advantages are of starting this whole process correctly.
The benefits of efficiently defining and implementing a digital strategy
So that you understand very well why you should study all this theory and apply it within your company or professional activity, I am going to give you a brief summary of what I consider to be the most notable benefits of implementing an efficient online marketing strategy :
Promotes “Inbound Marketing”: a well-defined digital strategy provides us with the necessary data to develop campaigns that attract customers, so that they are the ones who decide to buy, and not us who sell to them.
Promotes business growth : thanks to all the data analyzed, we can grow our business.
It means saving costs or “not wasting money” : it is not necessary to invest large amounts of money, it is enough to adapt the budget necessary to implement the appropriate strategies.
It allows you to focus your efforts : The Internet and online advertising offer us tools that allow us to segment very well and work focusing on our specific target market, without having to waste money on carrying out large, inefficient mass campaigns.
To make myself clear, the main idea lies in the possibility of obtaining a lot of information about your clients thanks to the statistical analysis of trends and conversions, something that is possible thanks to digitalization.
From traditional marketing to digital marketing
As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are traditional economic theories that have been providing educational support for years at a theoretical level to help us understand how strategic planning works when we refer to marketing.
While it is true that with the 2.0 revolution and the rise of brands on social networks , traditional (or offline) marketing has converged with increasing intensity towards the implementation of digital strategies, understanding the old theory well is essential to establish strong foundations.
Do you know the 4P's? These are the 4 variables that define a marketing strategy from different perspectives : price, point of sale, promotion and product.
Price : This would include all the strategies that have to do with the price of a product or service when offering it, whether by raising it to differentiate itself in quality, or lowering it to encourage sales in certain periods, on a massive scale, or to block competition.
Point of sale : Where do you want to offer your product or service? In a physical store? On a corporate website or e-commerce site? Through an intermediary or by phone calls?
Promotion : This involves implementing actions to promote your brand or product, thereby motivating users to consume it. Here we could name all kinds of discounts, offers, bonuses or promotional announcements, such as raffles on social networks.
Product : What do you sell or offer and how do you do it? What needs does it satisfy? Knowing the characteristics that define your product is also important to give coherence to your brand image.
As you can see, these 4 variables are the central axis of everything surrounding any type of marketing strategy . Within its infinite variables, the options that focus exclusively on the objective of positioning your brand on the Internet are those that will define your online marketing strategy or digital strategy.
Aspects that you must take good care of so that your online marketing strategy works
[clickToTweet tweet=”Aspects that you should take into account in your online marketing strategy by @teresalbalv” quote=”Aspects that you should take into account in your online marketing strategy by @teresalbalv”]
While it is true that there are common points between a traditional or offline marketing strategy and an online strategy, when we refer to the complex virtual world, there are a series of aspects that we must take special care of.
The reason for the differences between both types of strategies lies in the idea of having or not having contact or physical presence with the members around us. Therefore, these are the 4 keys to making your digital strategy work:
Your work team
Having and building a strong brand image on the Internet requires tasks and, in general, a great marketing effort.
This means that you won't be able to do everything yourself, as you'll need to work on aspects of design, programming, SEO, advertising, and even rely on certain offline strategies.
For all of this to work together and keep your business afloat, you need your team to complement and coordinate each other. Only then can you be productive.
The relationship with the client
Relationships on the Internet are very different from those we can have when we work in an office or physical location, and when we refer to dealing with clients, even more so.
The 2.0 customer wants to be a spokesperson and form part of our brand, and to do so we have to know how to work with marketing in an emotional way.
I recommend this video interview I did with Èlia Guardiola about Emotional Marketing
If you allow me to give you my own advice for building strong relationships with your clients, keep in mind 3 key aspects:
Show them the most accessible and transparent side of your brand
Listen and attend to their needs
Offer them a tailored value proposition
Strategic planning
This is the process that refers to all the tasks we carry out from the moment we identify a mission, define the objectives and launch a series of actions, until we analyze the results obtained.
Planning is necessary at all levels (whether you are a company or a freelancer), and for all types of strategies. Although this is true, working in online marketing I have realized that planning is one of the keys to success, especially if we work from home or in a team .
To plan your day-to-day, you will need to use different organizational resources such as calendars and task schedules, or even your own templates! I will tell you more about this now.
Resources and support tools
For your strategy to work perfectly, in addition to a good team or human resources, you will need tools that allow you to cover all the needs in those areas for which you do not have internal resources .
For example, you will need design tools, email marketing tools , or SEO tools to support each and every strategic area you work on in your marketing plan.
Now it's time to tell you step by step how you should define and create your online marketing strategy , taking into account the resources you have available and all the aspects we have seen so far.
Steps to successfully design a digital marketing strategy
[clickToTweet tweet=”Tutorial+Template How to create a successful digital strategy by @teresalbalv” quote=”Tutorial+Template How to create a successful digital strategy by @teresalbalv”]
Realistically, I have to warn you that almost no brand or business manages to position itself and obtain profitability in its first months of operation.
Anything you want to achieve on the Internet requires an initial investment and follow-up of different tasks, which will hardly translate into immediate income.
Being aware of this fact, what is in your hands is to do things as best as possible so that everything turns out as expected, and to do so you have to define very well how you are going to achieve it.
1. Internal and competitor analysis
Before you can define the 4Ps I mentioned at the beginning, you need to gather a lot of information about what is happening around you, to then assess whether or not you are in a position to compete.
To do this, you need information about:
The product or service you want to offer : Who is your target audience? What needs does it satisfy? Is there sufficient demand in the market? Who already offers it and how? What differentiating characteristics does your product or service have?
Your target customer or ideal customer : Where do they live? What is their age? What are their consumption habits? What are their needs? What factors motivate them when making a purchase?
Your direct competition : Who are they? What online marketing strategies do they follow? Who are their customers and how do they meet their needs?
Traditionally, we had to invest large amounts of money to carry out a good market study that would give us answers to all these questions. Luckily, today we have very good analysis tools such as SEMrush , which allow us to analyze the marketing strategies of the competition according to the keywords they rank for and the type of content they offer to their audience.
2. Definition of objectives, segmentation and keywords
Once you have analysed the situation, both externally and internally, you must clearly define who you are targeting and what keywords you should position. To do this, you must first define what your objectives are : do you want to position yourself as an expert in some area? Sell more? Get new clients or retain existing ones?
Whatever your goal (or goals), if you are going to position yourself on the Internet, it must be measurable and focused on an audience.
Keep in mind that there are already many people covering the needs that your product or service satisfies, and that they are also targeting the same audience. As I said before, studying their keywords will guide you in knowing how you can focus.
To help you understand this a little better in a practical way, I'll tell you how I work on this stage of the process:
Audience : I define who the product or service is aimed at and what type of digital content best suits their profile.
Content : To detect how I can add value to the target audience, I study the content that the competition shares, the strategies they carry out on social networks, how often they publish, etc.
Keywords : To detect all this, I analyze the keywords positioned by the competition (as well as their search volume), the backlinks that point to their page, the URLs of their website that have received the most visits, etc.
By analyzing these 3 concepts (objectives, audience and keywords), you can start from scratch and generate a list of all those keywords that would position you within your area, that have an adequate search volume and for which you have possibilities .
To do this, you must assess whether your competition, positioned in the top rankings for the same keywords, is or is not too strong in terms of domain authority or content quality.
3. Brainstorming and strategy design
In this third step, you need to capture everything you have analyzed so far and design the general lines of the strategy to follow.
I recommend that before defining which areas you are going to develop to enhance your brand presence on the Internet, you make a list of good ideas to make yourself known and provide value to your audience . For example:
Have a web design adapted for mobile devices (responsive).
Take care of all the details of the corporate image (logo, colors, typography, etc.).
Offer free content in downloadable format.
Make the user a part of your brand with emotional marketing.
Launch offers, promotions, discount vouchers and raffles on social networks.
Record welcome or explanatory tutorial videos about your product.
Send personalized newsletters.
Create communities of interest on social networks.
These are some of the ideas that can form your online marketing strategy, which in turn encompasses different areas:
Graphic and web design
Programming
Social networks
SEO and positioning
Email marketing and other acquisition strategies
This is a very broad topic, since we would be talking about how to define the lines of action of any type of business aimed at any sector or audience. Therefore, I want to clarify that what I am going to offer you with this post is a practical guide in which I have put a lot of work and love, but in which you will also have to do your part to achieve your goals .
To explain this topic to you in the best way I know how, Miguel Florido has opened the doors of his blog to me and has proposed a challenge to me, so as a thank you for this great opportunity, I do not want to disappoint you!
Based on their recommendations, the plan is as follows; I have prepared one of my step-by-step guides to design your digital marketing strategy effectively, and to help you understand why it is important, I will give you an illustrative tutorial with a downloadable Excel template included .
What is an online or digital marketing strategy on page seo service and what are the benefits for your corporate or personal brand?
Before you consider how to define and design your strategy to gain online presence , it is important that you fully understand what this whole process is about and why you should follow it strictly with your brand or business.
I often come across clients who have heard that they need to be on social media, rank their pages on Google or launch an online store to offer their super-new product, but they don't understand the real reason for all this and, therefore, they don't set realistic goals.
To prevent this from happening to you and you start to go around in the dark with your digital strategy, how about we define this concept and detail the advantages of following an effective strategic plan?
Definitions
Marketing strategies have traditionally been classified according to 4 aspects, known in economics books as the 4 P's, which I will briefly review in one of the following points.
Before this, I want to be direct and give you a jargon-free definition of what an online or digital marketing strategy is :
“It is the process that allows us to contact and create solid relationships with our clients without the need to make physical contact, simply with the help of the Internet.”
As I understand that there are those who also like to give concepts a further twist, here I give you a more extended definition :
“An online marketing strategy is one that allows us to interact with our clients through the Internet without the need to contact them in person. These relationships, carried out efficiently, help us to mutually exchange ideas, products and services that satisfy our needs or objectives.”
However, the most difficult part of all this is not understanding this concept itself, but understanding how it works within companies and the freelance world , since to design this type of strategy you have to analyze and define:
The objectives
Available resources
The target audience
The competition
Lots of information, isn't it? I think that before we go into more detail and see how you can work on all these aspects, it is interesting for you to know what the advantages are of starting this whole process correctly.
The benefits of efficiently defining and implementing a digital strategy
So that you understand very well why you should study all this theory and apply it within your company or professional activity, I am going to give you a brief summary of what I consider to be the most notable benefits of implementing an efficient online marketing strategy :
Promotes “Inbound Marketing”: a well-defined digital strategy provides us with the necessary data to develop campaigns that attract customers, so that they are the ones who decide to buy, and not us who sell to them.
Promotes business growth : thanks to all the data analyzed, we can grow our business.
It means saving costs or “not wasting money” : it is not necessary to invest large amounts of money, it is enough to adapt the budget necessary to implement the appropriate strategies.
It allows you to focus your efforts : The Internet and online advertising offer us tools that allow us to segment very well and work focusing on our specific target market, without having to waste money on carrying out large, inefficient mass campaigns.
To make myself clear, the main idea lies in the possibility of obtaining a lot of information about your clients thanks to the statistical analysis of trends and conversions, something that is possible thanks to digitalization.
From traditional marketing to digital marketing
As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are traditional economic theories that have been providing educational support for years at a theoretical level to help us understand how strategic planning works when we refer to marketing.
While it is true that with the 2.0 revolution and the rise of brands on social networks , traditional (or offline) marketing has converged with increasing intensity towards the implementation of digital strategies, understanding the old theory well is essential to establish strong foundations.
Do you know the 4P's? These are the 4 variables that define a marketing strategy from different perspectives : price, point of sale, promotion and product.
Price : This would include all the strategies that have to do with the price of a product or service when offering it, whether by raising it to differentiate itself in quality, or lowering it to encourage sales in certain periods, on a massive scale, or to block competition.
Point of sale : Where do you want to offer your product or service? In a physical store? On a corporate website or e-commerce site? Through an intermediary or by phone calls?
Promotion : This involves implementing actions to promote your brand or product, thereby motivating users to consume it. Here we could name all kinds of discounts, offers, bonuses or promotional announcements, such as raffles on social networks.
Product : What do you sell or offer and how do you do it? What needs does it satisfy? Knowing the characteristics that define your product is also important to give coherence to your brand image.
As you can see, these 4 variables are the central axis of everything surrounding any type of marketing strategy . Within its infinite variables, the options that focus exclusively on the objective of positioning your brand on the Internet are those that will define your online marketing strategy or digital strategy.
Aspects that you must take good care of so that your online marketing strategy works
[clickToTweet tweet=”Aspects that you should take into account in your online marketing strategy by @teresalbalv” quote=”Aspects that you should take into account in your online marketing strategy by @teresalbalv”]
While it is true that there are common points between a traditional or offline marketing strategy and an online strategy, when we refer to the complex virtual world, there are a series of aspects that we must take special care of.
The reason for the differences between both types of strategies lies in the idea of having or not having contact or physical presence with the members around us. Therefore, these are the 4 keys to making your digital strategy work:
Your work team
Having and building a strong brand image on the Internet requires tasks and, in general, a great marketing effort.
This means that you won't be able to do everything yourself, as you'll need to work on aspects of design, programming, SEO, advertising, and even rely on certain offline strategies.
For all of this to work together and keep your business afloat, you need your team to complement and coordinate each other. Only then can you be productive.
The relationship with the client
Relationships on the Internet are very different from those we can have when we work in an office or physical location, and when we refer to dealing with clients, even more so.
The 2.0 customer wants to be a spokesperson and form part of our brand, and to do so we have to know how to work with marketing in an emotional way.
I recommend this video interview I did with Èlia Guardiola about Emotional Marketing
If you allow me to give you my own advice for building strong relationships with your clients, keep in mind 3 key aspects:
Show them the most accessible and transparent side of your brand
Listen and attend to their needs
Offer them a tailored value proposition
Strategic planning
This is the process that refers to all the tasks we carry out from the moment we identify a mission, define the objectives and launch a series of actions, until we analyze the results obtained.
Planning is necessary at all levels (whether you are a company or a freelancer), and for all types of strategies. Although this is true, working in online marketing I have realized that planning is one of the keys to success, especially if we work from home or in a team .
To plan your day-to-day, you will need to use different organizational resources such as calendars and task schedules, or even your own templates! I will tell you more about this now.
Resources and support tools
For your strategy to work perfectly, in addition to a good team or human resources, you will need tools that allow you to cover all the needs in those areas for which you do not have internal resources .
For example, you will need design tools, email marketing tools , or SEO tools to support each and every strategic area you work on in your marketing plan.
Now it's time to tell you step by step how you should define and create your online marketing strategy , taking into account the resources you have available and all the aspects we have seen so far.
Steps to successfully design a digital marketing strategy
[clickToTweet tweet=”Tutorial+Template How to create a successful digital strategy by @teresalbalv” quote=”Tutorial+Template How to create a successful digital strategy by @teresalbalv”]
Realistically, I have to warn you that almost no brand or business manages to position itself and obtain profitability in its first months of operation.
Anything you want to achieve on the Internet requires an initial investment and follow-up of different tasks, which will hardly translate into immediate income.
Being aware of this fact, what is in your hands is to do things as best as possible so that everything turns out as expected, and to do so you have to define very well how you are going to achieve it.
1. Internal and competitor analysis
Before you can define the 4Ps I mentioned at the beginning, you need to gather a lot of information about what is happening around you, to then assess whether or not you are in a position to compete.
To do this, you need information about:
The product or service you want to offer : Who is your target audience? What needs does it satisfy? Is there sufficient demand in the market? Who already offers it and how? What differentiating characteristics does your product or service have?
Your target customer or ideal customer : Where do they live? What is their age? What are their consumption habits? What are their needs? What factors motivate them when making a purchase?
Your direct competition : Who are they? What online marketing strategies do they follow? Who are their customers and how do they meet their needs?
Traditionally, we had to invest large amounts of money to carry out a good market study that would give us answers to all these questions. Luckily, today we have very good analysis tools such as SEMrush , which allow us to analyze the marketing strategies of the competition according to the keywords they rank for and the type of content they offer to their audience.
2. Definition of objectives, segmentation and keywords
Once you have analysed the situation, both externally and internally, you must clearly define who you are targeting and what keywords you should position. To do this, you must first define what your objectives are : do you want to position yourself as an expert in some area? Sell more? Get new clients or retain existing ones?
Whatever your goal (or goals), if you are going to position yourself on the Internet, it must be measurable and focused on an audience.
Keep in mind that there are already many people covering the needs that your product or service satisfies, and that they are also targeting the same audience. As I said before, studying their keywords will guide you in knowing how you can focus.
To help you understand this a little better in a practical way, I'll tell you how I work on this stage of the process:
Audience : I define who the product or service is aimed at and what type of digital content best suits their profile.
Content : To detect how I can add value to the target audience, I study the content that the competition shares, the strategies they carry out on social networks, how often they publish, etc.
Keywords : To detect all this, I analyze the keywords positioned by the competition (as well as their search volume), the backlinks that point to their page, the URLs of their website that have received the most visits, etc.
By analyzing these 3 concepts (objectives, audience and keywords), you can start from scratch and generate a list of all those keywords that would position you within your area, that have an adequate search volume and for which you have possibilities .
To do this, you must assess whether your competition, positioned in the top rankings for the same keywords, is or is not too strong in terms of domain authority or content quality.
3. Brainstorming and strategy design
In this third step, you need to capture everything you have analyzed so far and design the general lines of the strategy to follow.
I recommend that before defining which areas you are going to develop to enhance your brand presence on the Internet, you make a list of good ideas to make yourself known and provide value to your audience . For example:
Have a web design adapted for mobile devices (responsive).
Take care of all the details of the corporate image (logo, colors, typography, etc.).
Offer free content in downloadable format.
Make the user a part of your brand with emotional marketing.
Launch offers, promotions, discount vouchers and raffles on social networks.
Record welcome or explanatory tutorial videos about your product.
Send personalized newsletters.
Create communities of interest on social networks.
These are some of the ideas that can form your online marketing strategy, which in turn encompasses different areas:
Graphic and web design
Programming
Social networks
SEO and positioning
Email marketing and other acquisition strategies