sor016 “The Complete Guide to Creating a Diglal Marketing Srategy That Works,
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September 8, 2016 // 8:00 AM
The Complete Guide to Creating a Digital Marketing
Strategy That Works
Written by Elissa Hudson | @xELISSA
ow OOS
In an ever-changing digital landscape, success in business can often depend on
what you do (or don't do) in terms of marketing your company online.
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From SEO to content marketing and analytics, it can be overwhelming figuring out
where to start — and, more importantly, what's going to have the biggest impact on
your business. To be effective at digital marketing, you'll need a strategy.
Download our complete guide to creating a digital
marketing strategy that works here.
What is Digital Strategy?
The term ‘strategy’ might seem intimidating, but building an effective digital strategy
doesn't need to be difficult. In simple terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to
achieve a desired goal, or multiple goals. For example, your overarching goal might
be to generate 25% more leads this year than you drove last year.
In short: Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that are going to
help you achieve that goal using online marketing.
Now depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might
involve multiple goals and a lot of moving parts, but coming back to this simple way
of thinking about strategy can help you stay focused on meeting those objectives
Despite our simplification of the term ‘strategy’, there’s no doubt it can be difficult to
get started actually building one. So, we've put together a series of seven building
blocks to help you create an effective digital marketing strategy and set your
business up for online success.
What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?
It’s easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but
here's how to distinguish the two.
As we've already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to
help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing
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campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you
towards meeting that goal
For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best
performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel
That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.
It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of
years, it doesn't make it a strategy -- it's still a tactic that sits alongside other
campaigns to form your strategy.
Now we've got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing
campaigns, let's dig into how to build your strategy.
How to Build a Comprehensive Digital
Strategy
1) Build your buyer personas.
For any marketing strategy ~ offline or online -- you need to know who you're
marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer
personas, and your first step is to create them. (Need help? Start here with our free
buyer persona kit.)
Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by
researching, surveying, and interviewing your business's target audience. It’s
important to note that this information should be based upon real data wherever
possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing
strategy to take the wrong direction.
To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a
mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who
align with your target audience.
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“The Complete Guide to Creating a Diglal Marketing Srategy That Works,
But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to.
inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is
likely to vary depending on whether you're B2B or B2C, or whether your product is
high cost or low cost. Here are some starting points, but you'll want to switch them
up depending on your particular business.
Quantitative (or Demographic) Information
Location. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to easily
identify what location your website traffic is coming from.
Age. Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant. It's best
to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and
customer database.
Income. It's best to gather sensitive information like personal income in
persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share it via
online forms.
Job Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing
customer base, and is most relevant for B2B companies.
Qualitative (or Psychographic) Information
Goals. Depending on the need your product or service was created to serve,
you might already have a good idea of what goals your persona is looking to
achieve. However, it's best to cement your assumptions by speaking to
customers, salespeople and customer service representatives.
Challenges. Again, speak to customers, salespeople and customer service
representatives to get an idea of the common problems your audience
faces
Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and people who align with your
target audience. If you're a fashion brand, for example, it's helpful to know if
large segments of your audience are also into fitness and wellbeing, as that
can help inform your future content creation and partnerships.
Priorities. Speak to customers and people who align with your target
audience to find out what's most important to them in relation to your
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business. For example, if you're a B2B software company, knowing that your
audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very
valuable information.
Take this information and create one or more rounded personas like HubSpot's
Marketing Mary, and ensure they're at the core of your digital marketing strategy. If
you need more detail, check out this comprehensive buyer persona guide with
templates.
2) Identify your goals & the digital marketing tools you'll
need.
As a marketer, your goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of
the business. For example, if your business's goal is to increase online revenue by
20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website
than you did last year to contribute towards that success.
Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to measure it, and more
importantly, actually be able to measure it (.e., have the right digital marketing tools
in place to do so). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital strategy will
be different for each business and dependent on your goal(s), but it’s vital to ensure
you're able to do so, as it's these metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in
the future
(HubSpot Customers: Reporting in HubSpot brings all of your marketing and sales
data into one place so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn't.
Learn more here.)
3) Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels and
assets.
When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate
into your strategy, it's helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting
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overwhelmed. The owned, earned and paid media framework helps to categorize
the digital ‘vehicles’, assets or channels that you're already using
Owned Media
This refers to the digital assets literally owned by you. Whether that's your website,
social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the things your
business has complete control over.
Earned Media
Quite simply, earned media refers to the exposure you've earned through word-of-
mouth. Whether that’s content you've distributed on other websites (e.g., guest
posts), PR work you've been doing, or the customer experience you've delivered,
earned media is the recognition you receive as a result, You can earn media by
getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people sharing your content
on social media, ete.
Paid Media
Paid media is very self-explanatory and refers to any vehicle or channel that you
spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas. This includes things
like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored
posts on other websites), and any other vehicle which you directly pay for in
exchange for visibility.
Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet so
you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
Your digital marketing strategy might incorporate elements of all three channels, all
working together to help you reach your goal. For example, you might have an
owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that's been created to
help you generate leads. To amplify the amount of leads that content generates,
you might have made a real effort to make it shareable, meaning others are
distributing it via their personal social media profiles, increasing traffic to the
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landing page. This is the earned media component. To support the content’s
success, you might have posted about the content to your Facebook page and
have paid to have it seen by more people in your target audience.
That's exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Of
course, it's not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media is very
successful, you might not need to invest in paid. It's all about evaluating the best
solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for
your business into your digital marketing strategy.
Now you know what's already being used, you can start to think about what to keep
and what to cut.
4) Audit and plan your owned media.
At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which pretty much always
takes the form of content. Everything your brand says is your content, whether
that’s your ‘About Us’ page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks,
infographics, social media posts - it's all considered content. Content helps convert
your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to raise your brand's
profile online. Whatever your goal, you're going to need to use owned content to
form your digital marketing strategy.
To build your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what content is going
to help you reach your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the
website than you did last year, it’s unlikely that your ‘About Us’ page is going to be
included in your strategy (unless that page has been a lead generation machine in
the past!)
In fact, it's much more likely than an ebook that's hidden behind a form on your
website drives far more leads, and as a result is probably something you want to do
more of.
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Here's a brief process to follow to work out what owned content you need to meet
your digital marketing goals:
Audit your existing content
Make a list of your existing owned content and rank each item according to what
has previously performed best in relation to your current goals. If your goal is lead
generation, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the last year.
That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your
website that’s converting well
The idea here is to figure out what's currently working, and what's not, so that you
can set yourself up for future success.
Identity gaps in your existing content
Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have. If you're
a math tutoring company and have discovered in your audience research that one
of your persona's biggest challenges is finding interesting ways to study, but you
don't have any content that speaks to that concern, then you might look to create
some.
By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a
certain type of landing page convert really well for you (much better than webinars,
for example). In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the
decision to add an ebook about ‘how to make studying more interesting’ to your
content creation plans.
Create a content creation plan
Based on your findings and the gaps you've identified, make a content creation
plan outlining the content that’s needed to help you hit your goals. This should
include:
* Title
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‘The Complete Gude to Creating a Dig Marking Svategy That Works
* Format
* Goal
* Promotional channels
* Why you're creating it (e.g., ‘Marketing Mary struggles to find time to plan her
blog content, so we're creating a template editorial calendar’)
* Priority level (to help you decide what's going to give you the most ‘bang’ for
your buck)
This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if
you're planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you're
producing it yourself.
5) Audit and plan your earned media.
Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get
an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are
coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from most
effective to least effective.
You can get this information from tools like Google Analytics, or in HubSpot’s
Sources Reports if you're a customer.
You might find that a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a
lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn converted really well. Or you
might discover that LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing your content,
which in turn drives a lot of traffic. The idea here is to build up a picture of what
earned media will help you reach your goals, and what won't, based on historic
data. However, if there’s something new you want to try, don't rule that out just,
because it's not yet tried and tested
6) Audit and plan your paid media.
This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your
existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter,
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etc, to figure out what's likely to help you meet your current goals.
If you've been spending a lot of money on AdWords and haven't seen the results
you'd hoped for, maybe it's time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and
focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. (Check out this
free AdWords guide for more on how to leverage it for business.)
By the end of the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media
platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you'd like to scrap.
7) Bring it all together.
You've done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the
elements that are going to make up your digital marketing strategy. Here’s what you
should have so far:
1. Clear profile of your buyer personals)
2. One or more marketing-specific goals
3. A spreadsheet of your existing owned, earned and paid media
4. An audit of your existing owned, earned and paid media
5. An owned content creation plan or wish list
Now, it's time to bring all of this together to form a solid strategy document. Let's
revisit what ‘digital strategy’ means -- ‘the series of actions that are going to help
you achieve your goal(s) using online marketing’.
By that definition, your strategy document should map out the series of actions
you're going to take to achieve your goals based on your research to this point. An
Excel sheet is probably the best format. For the sake of consistency, you'll probably
find it easiest to map out according to the owned, earned and paid media
framework we've used so far.
You'll also need to map out your strategy for an extended period of time (usually 12
months or longer, depending on how your business is set up) so it's helpful to
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overlay when you'll be executing each action. For example
* In January, you might start a blog which will be continually updated once a
week for the entire year.
In March, you might launch a new ebook accompanied by paid promotion.
* In July, you might be preparing for your biggest business month.
* In September, you might plan to focus on earned media in the form of PR to
drive additional traffic during the run-up.
By taking this approach, you're also creating a structured timeline for your activity
which will help communicate your plans to your colleagues -- and help keep you
sane!
Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it's
almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy
template. Remember that the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the
actions you're going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time -- as long as
it communicates that, then you've nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.
If you're eager to learn more about digital marketing and how you can build a
truly effective digital marketing strategy for your business, check out The Simple
Guide to Digital Strategy in 2016.
What other questions do you have? Share them with us in the comments below.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been
updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
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THE SIMPLE GUIDE TO
DIGITAL STRATEGY IN 2016
PTRTTTTEEEM— Ties. fools, and tactics from HubSpot, General
Assembly, Dropbox & Eventbrite to succeed in 2016.
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