No topic is more prevalent these days among marketers than building a tremendously effective digital marketing strategy, though, as they say: easier said than done. The whole process seems uncomplicated only to those staring from the outside in. Building a great strategy and bringing the campaign to its successful completion takes a lot of knowledge, effort, joggling a lot, and at times way too many moving parts and no less than love for the craft of marketing. Scroll down for our plan of action that’ll help you to move towards your dream marketing strategy.

Clearly establish your digital marketing goals. Determining what needs to be accomplished should always be a step one for every single marketing team. And the common practice is to apply the SMART approach. It is an awesome goal-setting tool that will take you from generating a great idea to making it a reality. The acronym stands for:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Attainable

R – Relevant

T – Time-bound.

Those are the exact characteristics you need to consider to ensure a successful and an intelligent approach to setting your goals. Now, the difference between a goal and a SMART goal can be easily spotted:

A goal: “Grow online Facebook store to 50 000 followers.”

A SMART goal: “Reach 50,000 Facebook followers in two months. In order to achieve that we are going to do run Facebook ads targeting our audience, create viral content, invest in Facebook specific format videos, advertise through influencers, schedule an X amount of giveaways, create attention-grabbing content, show “behind the scenes” footage using Facebook live,  create Facebook like pop-ups, start using marketing automation tools, link Facebook to the website, engage with the new followers on your page, use more hashtags, create a plan to get tagged by customers, offer a product discount for a like.”

Analyze your past digital marketing campaigns. A successful planning period should always include a re-evaluation of the past digital marketing campaigns, starting from the scratch doesn’t mean starting in the dark. Look at the results of your marketing strategies, the successful ones, the 50/50 ones and especially the failures. Always set aside the time and go through your reports and take a good look at your competitors’ digital marketing strategy. You can even appoint a firm who provides effective digital marketing services.

Research your customer base.  Determining who your customers are is crucial, it’s no less than the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. It’ll all revolve around and rely on your audience engagement, so do all you can to narrow down your group and eliminate those irrelevant to achieving the set goals. Analyze, evaluate, and observe to precisely pinpoint your customer base to figure out the best way to market to them.

Build a buyer persona that will skyrocket sales. In-depth, professional approach to building your buyer persona is the right one. You’ll determine your ideal customer, those who will be buying your products. The trick is to find enough time and resources to put as much as you can into your buyer persona. You’ll need to base your final result of demographics, buying decisions, age, income, daily behaviors, personal plans, goals, challenges, accomplishments, etc. There are a lot of tools available today to help you build a buyer persona, you can buy great soft, use a free make-your-own persona online service or download questioners.

If you’re new to marketing you can take start by following and learning some awesome guides from  ProjectCool.com

Know your tools! When it comes to digital marketing, few things are as important as the tools digital marketers choose to use. Honestly, not to be dramatic, but tools are the make it or break it kind of thing for digital marketers. There is never enough time, there are too many things to juggle and a digital marketer has to be in hundreds of places at once, online and offline. There are a lot of awesome digital marketing tools to help you through the day, there are  SEO tools, the organic and paid social media tools, the email marketing, and programmatic ads, digital signage, the website testing, the content creation, the analytical tools and retargeting ones, the  video hosting and many more. For an effective strategy, you need to clearly identify the tools you might need, research, test and arrive at the best that’ll help you reach your goals.

Here’s an example: a few years ago we’ve had a client that needed to boost traffic for three of their coffee shop locations. We’ve decided on using location-based DOOH, beacons and mobile tech to boost traffic by at least 40%  in two months. We’ve picked one of the five most expensive DS soft and, soon found out that it was a way too over complicated with too much irrelevant features and functions, the design was lacking and when later on the client decided to switch to Apple TV media players, we’ve found out that our soft wasn’t compatible. Rather than just switching to the DS soft on the list, we’ve made a client-specific list, identified all of our non-negotiable features and found apple-friendly soft and a company that heavily invests in eye-catching professional designs. If you’re in need of great DS soft, go to Kitcast help center and learn more about them (https://support.kitcast.tv/).

Identify your means.  Clearly identifying your means is essential for any strategy. Running a successful business is all about the numbers, and, I always insist that this step should only be done by professionals.  There are too many things to consider, like variations in expenses, revenue, and competition, a non-professional will never be able to spot the problems with the budgeting and even the slightest missteps in this stage can deem the whole strategy worthless in the long run. There is no one-size-fits all budget that works for every digital marketing strategy. Always seek professional help.

Remember, building a digital marketing strategy from scratch is a lot of work. And, I can assure you that your first draft and the final result will look much different, and only diligent, in-depth planning with great attention to details will help you to create an unstoppable digital marketing machine. Now, the only thing left to do is to start implementing your digital marketing strategy.