Getting started with your Digital Marketing Strategy
Whether you're running a cafe or a financial services company, having an effective digital marketing strategy is vital to successful online brand marketing. However, creating an online presence can be pretty daunting, and there’s so much noise out there about how to grow. Let’s divide the challenge into some actionable areas.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, it's a way of building a community and connecting with your ideal customers online. A big part of digital marketing is building a community and connecting with your ideal customers. Once you understand where your people are, you then need to think through how you guide them through a journey of entertaining, informative and inspirational content, that brings them from awareness of your brand to conversion.
Creating your own Digital Marketing Strategy
Get to know your audience
Who are you talking to? A great place to start is creating audience personas; semi-fictional representations of your target customer. This activity is always really helpful - not to mention thought-provoking - and we make sure it's a focus point in our Seaglow strategy days. Customer personas help us to sense-check who we are aiming our marketing over time. Important things to consider include demographics, pain points, interests and online behaviours.
Set your goals
To create effective goals, start with the end in mind and map out what you need to achieve. From there, you can start to concentrate your efforts on what’s going to drive your ideal audience through a funnel to get there.
For example, at Seaglow we like to work with other purpose-led businesses. We have a content map that covers how we’ll reach these people across various platforms, as well as measures to see what’s working and what could be tweaked or ditched completely when it comes to content.
Understand the competition
Whilst we aren’t advocates on focusing too much on the competition, it is good to analyse what they have done and what has worked well, or what opportunities they have missed. Having a quick look through their digital efforts, allows you to see the type of content their audience are engaging with. We would never recommend copying their content, but understanding their position in the market is important and gives you some benchmarks to scope what good looks like for your industry.
Just make sure you stay in your own lane and always take inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt’s quote ‘comparison is the thief of joy’.
Analyse your current digital presence
If you’re already up and running with a website and social media accounts for example, take a look at how they are performing. Use tools like Google Analytics for insights to see what is working in terms of engagement. Website platforms like Squarespace also have some analytic functionality to measure the success of blog posts for example. This will help you identify what to keep and what opportunities you have for improvement.
Live and breathe the power of storytelling
When someone is scrolling through marketing news on their phone, sandwich in hand, they aren’t going to stop on their feed and read a dry post that sounds like an instruction manual. Your strategy will benefit from creating content that adds genuine value for your audience. If they can’t connect with your story and your content, they may be less likely to consider your services.
Choose the right channels
Not all digital channels are equal for every business. Choose where to focus based on where your audience spends their time online and what your goals are. Similarly, while it’s important to have brand continuity, it’s also a great idea to show the different areas of your brand personality on different platforms.
For example, our tone of voice and the content we share on our Instagram stories is often more relaxed compared to LinkedIn posts or articles.
Create compelling content
Connect with your community by creating content that speaks to their emotion. Compelling content resonates with people’s thoughts and feelings and engages them by either solving a problem that they have or provoking an emotive reaction such as laughter. The best way to create compelling content is to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal consumer and think about their thoughts and feelings.
Empathy is a tool that many marketers are good at tapping into to work out what strikes the hearts of their audience. Take Aldi for example, they are great at using humour in their online content. Their team have captured the nation with their content that is cheeky and highly relatable. Aldi’s content not only has customers returning to their socials but also gets people talking offline.
Approaching AI content
There has been widespread adoption of content created by AI - known as generative AI - with ChatGPT the most prominent example to date. While AI will undoubtedly shape many areas of digital marketing, it’s not a new phenomenon, and it’s still currently a tool to supplement human creativity as opposed to a replacement.
You may use AI to research, schedule and even create elements of your digital marketing strategy, but authenticity and getting your story across from human to human is still at the forefront of the strongest marketing content. Not convinced? Think about the last thing you read or viewed online that made a real impression on you. The chances are, it was crafted at least in part by a real person.
Optimise for Search Engines (SEO)
Make sure your audience can find you easily. Use keywords, create quality content, and optimise your website’s user experience. SEO is like the signposts that guide people to your shop. At Seaglow, we’ve had plenty of conversations around weighing up authentic storytelling and writing vs optimising for SEO at all costs. Ultimately, you don’t have to choose.
It’s possible to create content that is SEO-friendly and also engaging. But when in doubt, we’d always recommend steering towards creating content that your audience would want to read and engage with.
Dive into Email Marketing
Email marketing remains a great way to create personalised content that resonates with your audience. You can collect data from feedback and surveys to then further boost your marketing targeting to make future campaigns more effective. According to Hubspot, 38% of brands increased their budget for email marketing in 2023 and the trend continues to climb in 2024.
It can also be a cost-effective way to reach a large amount of people quickly. If segmented correctly, you can save loads of time reaching multiple people through the same dynamic messaging. A well-timed email campaign, for example, to mark the opening of a local restaurant, can be a really powerful reactive marketing tool.
A great lens to use for email marketing is to get that empathy mindset back on and put yourself in the shoes of your ideal consumer. Think to yourself 'Does this email hold value for my ideal consumer? Does it solve a problem for them or answer one of their frequently asked questions? Does it offer them something that they do not want to miss? Does it reinforce my company's credibility?'
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a digital tool that organisations can utilise to display their ads to a targeted audience. They almost always work on an auction system. This means the advertiser sets the budget and the objective of the ad, complimented with audience data, interests and behaviours. The platform then spends the budget by serving the audience with creative and copy that encourages the use to take the intended action set by the advertiser.
Paid advertising allows businesses to very quickly reach a micro-targeted audience that have the intent to take their desired action. It also allows the business to retarget audiences that may have already shown an interest and not yet purchased, or those who have purchased previously.
This instant reach is really efficient compared to other marketing methods like SEO, which need to be built up over time. Ways to target people through paid advertising include interest targeting, keyword targeting and behavioural targeting. You can also track the success and return on investment of your ads through the use of measurement tools to ensure you’re getting value from your ads.
Final thoughts
Don't be afraid to experiment and find what works best for you. There is no one unquestionable, one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy that will work for everyone (that’s our current thinking, let us know if you find it).
Try to sync up your passion for your brand with your marketing strategy; it will come across in the content you create. Digital marketing is not just about selling; it’s about creating meaningful connections and experiences that will help build a dedicated audience that have their notifications switched on for your next post or product launch.
Finally, your marketing strategy will evolve over time, so enjoy the journey and don’t be afraid to say goodbye to old ideas and processes and make room for new ones.
If you need support with your digital marketing strategy, we would love to help. We offer a range of different services, suitable for all budgets, to help you get your digital marketing strategy performing for your business. Book a discovery call.
