Some marketing strategies show better results than others. Some of these strategies also come with risks. For example, using black hat techniques or negative SEO among marketing strategies can be detected by a search engine and result in fines and lower your site ranking. While some black hat techniques can lead to quick success, they will not ultimately succeed in your business. Therefore, when choosing the type of marketing strategy, the final risk and reward should always be considered.
On the other hand, as you know, digital marketing as one of the most important pillars of business growth and development in the last decade has always had a strong presence and a decisive role in overtaking competitors. According to research; The rapid growth of technology, public access to the Internet, and most importantly, the high desire of people to be present in cyberspace have made digital marketing a vital element in the communication between different businesses and audiences.
Additionally, many businesses in cyberspace not only fail to achieve significant success but may also tarnish their past credentials, because the transfer of information in today's world is much faster than we imagined in the past. We did and only one small mistake is enough to face the onslaught of criticism from people, experts, and competitors. We need a comprehensive and powerful digital marketing strategy to pursue and design a principled digital marketing program. Before we look at digital marketing strategy, we need to look at what a marketing strategy is and how it differs from an online marketing strategy.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
The main focus of marketing strategy is based on proper allocation and coordination of marketing activities and resources. Which is planned and implemented in order to achieve the operational goals of the company in terms of a specific market and product. Therefore, the main issue in the realm of marketing strategy is to determine specific target markets for a product family with a particular product. Then, companies seek to gain a competitive advantage through the design and implementation of appropriate marketing mix elements (basically four 4P mixes of product, price, place, and promotion) according to the needs and wants of potential customers in that target market. A marketing strategy is basically a comprehensive plan to achieve a specific goal or goals in the field of marketing that can be measured, analyzed, and achieved. The marketing strategy gives you the best and most optimal way to achieve your marketing goals by measuring what you have in mind (target community, brand, budget, etc.) and what you may have lost.
But what is the difference between a marketing strategy and a tactic? Two words are often used in the business environment (wrongly) instead of each other and of course, there are differences with each other. As mentioned, a business strategy is a focused and achievable set of activities that will help you achieve a number of specific goals. A tactic is a set of specific actions that you take during your strategy. Basically, your goal strategy and tactics are specific and definable steps that will guide you in implementing the strategy (marketing) effectively.
The basis of strategic planning at all levels is the identification of threats. In order to avoid them and recognize the opportunities in order to take advantage of them, the main strategic responsibility of any manager is control and outside care. To be able to synchronize the company with its activities with changes in the environment. Because marketing managers occupy successes within the company and customers, distributors and competitors; They are usually more familiar with market conditions and changes. As a result, these managers are not only responsible for designing strategic plans for their market and product items but are also often key participants in the business-level planning process.
Another interesting point that was revealed by this study was that marketing managers have more influence on strategic cross-sectoral business decisions than managers in other sectors. While financial and operational managers have a greater role in approving major capital expenditures. Marketing and sales managers have more influence on decisions related to strategic management and strategic orientation of the unit of activity, development of company activities and entering new geographic markets, selection of strategic business partners, and development of new products.
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital marketing strategy in the simplest, most comprehensive, and best definition, is a plan that helps you to achieve goals or predetermined strategies through the main digital marketing channels such as paid media, free media, and proprietary media. A digital marketing strategy is a plan specifically designed to achieve business goals through online marketing. This marketing must be done through the relevant online marketing channels for optimal performance. It is important to remember that not all marketing channels are suitable for all businesses.
All successful businesses are aware of the right tactics to identify and reach their target audience and turn them into interested customers. So, first of all, you need to identify your business goals and find the right digital marketing tools to achieve them. So digital marketing strategy seeks to find the best ways and means to achieve digital marketing goals. These methods and directions always refer to two basic and important issues in the planning process. The first issue is that the methods and paths chosen should consider profit optimization, the second issue is related to achieving the goals with the least cost.
In general, your digital marketing strategy should consider both efficiency and effectiveness to achieve digital marketing goals. Goals are an important part of any planning and strategy process. As a result, a marketing plan allows you to successfully build and launch your digital marketing strategy. However, no two internet marketing strategies are the same. In fact, your business should have a unique strategy that fits your needs and includes a combination of targeted actions. In general, a strong digital marketing strategy explains the following types of goals:
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Short term
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Midterm
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Long time
Setting several goals will help you create a better plan for your business. For example, you can set short-term and medium-term goals that will help you achieve your long-term goals.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
Recognize and Record the Type of Buyer Personality
If you want to start a successful online marketing strategy, you need to know who you are targeting. Because if you do not know who wants your products or services, you certainly can not plan a successful strategy. The best way to determine who is in your target audience is to create a buyer identity. Buyers are people who represent people who are interested in your business. Most companies today have several personality styles interested in their products or services. Having such people with different thoughts will help you to have a better understanding of different people in the community who may be interested in your products.
Creating a strong digital marketing strategy begins with knowing the buyers' personalities accurately and strongly. As a result, if you know who your ideal customer is, you can target them in some way. In the first place, adjust the personal information of current customers based on the personality of each of your buyers. Then research and interview your audience to learn more about them. Note that you want to check your buyer personality based on real data. So make sure you do not make false assumptions about your audience. Using this information, you can start to form different personality types of people for your business. This identification helps shape your digital marketing strategy and determines which channels to use to reach people.
Set Your Business Goals
If you want to create a digital marketing plan, you need to have goals. You can not create a strategy without knowing what you want to achieve. As a result, by setting clear and specific goals for your campaign, you know what you want to achieve with online marketing and how much effort you need to put into it. As mentioned, you need to focus on short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. Your goals should be in line with your business goals. Whether you are trying to get a certain amount of conversion rate or a certain number of customers, you need to set strategic goals that will lead to bigger goals.
The goals of your marketing strategy should be one of the main and important goals of your business. For example, to improve your annual sales by up to 10%, you plan to increase your monthly content production by up to 5%. Whatever the main goal, you need to be able to measure and manage it, what has been the effectiveness of your strategy? What measures could improve its effectiveness? And… is one of the issues that should be reviewed with data analysis tools and after analysis, it should be decided.
Review Your Current Online Marketing Strategies
If you want to improve your digital marketing strategy process, you need to check it regularly. This review and analysis help you understand how your campaign is performing and how you can improve it. In your analysis, you should consider three different types of media:
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Received media: Acquired media means any free media you receive for your business. In fact, this feedback comes from your advertising and efforts. In general, the received media includes any content or content that is written about your company but you did not create it yourself.
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Media owned by you: Your media includes any media that your business owns. This is the media to which your name is attached and includes blogs, social media profiles, your website, and any image you produce.
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Monetary media: Money media, as its name implies, is any media that you spend to promote your business. Your paid media mostly includes paid ads, such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads or social media ads.
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Budget Adjustment
When launching a digital marketing strategy, you need to know how much you can spend and what resources you have for your campaign. If you have only one overview of your marketing budget, you may be investing too much in a digital marketing tactic. In addition to financial costs, effective people in your business are also part of your valuable resources that require salaries and income.
Digital Marketing Campaign Examples
Digital strategy is easily confused with digital marketing campaigns. Your digital strategy is a set of actions that will help you achieve your overall marketing goal. But a digital marketing campaign is the building blocks or actions during a strategy which will lead you to it goal. For example, you might decide to run a campaign to share some of your most popular content on Twitter to get more leads through that channel. This campaign is part of your strategy to get more leads. The following are some examples of digital marketing campaigns and the strategies they use.
GoPro
Digital strategy: Acquired media, video made by users
GoPro is known for its unique style of action movies, all shot with the company's classic Fisheye lens. Much of the video content you see on its YouTube channel wasn't created by GoPro, but rather by its loyal users. By filling its YouTube channel with user-generated video content, GoPro encourages adventurous people to record amazing videos of their adventures and post them online, which is often the case with GoPro. This ongoing digital marketing campaign has supported the use of video to promote the GoPro product line, and much of the content has been created by the customers themselves.
Geico
Digital strategy: Paid media, YouTube preview ads
All you need to hear is the word "Geico" to remember that you can get a 15% or more discount on your car insurance. But even a company with such a memorable slogan can annoy its buyers if its marketing campaign is too long. That's why Geico launched a series of pre-roll ads on YouTube. Preview ads are a form of paid content on YouTube in which you pay YouTube to show ads for 15 to 20 seconds before the start of movies with the same audience as the advertiser. While some companies try to keep their messages as short as possible, Geico makes the most of the opportunity. As such, preview ads on YouTube are actually fun.
Red Bull
Digital Strategy: Acquired Media, Lifestyle News
Red Bull is better known for promoting dangerous and exciting sports than for selling energy drinks. These drinks are popular with people who do such exercises. Instead of producing digital content in the energy drink industry, Red Bull produces articles and videos for its audience about the latest happenings and events in the sports community. In this digital marketing campaign, Red Bull teaches us that what you sell isn't always the best content strategy. It is the lifestyle that your customers live.
Conclusion
Finally, if you want to have a profitable online business or you want to make good money from your traditional business, you have to master digital marketing skills. Today's religion is evolving rapidly and people are spending most of their time on the Internet. So if you want to promote your business and products, you need to be where your target audience is.
The best marketing channel is to use digital marketing methods to promote and sell your products and services. To create a successful digital marketing campaign, you must first get acquainted with the customer's travel plan. Do not forget that digital marketing is constantly growing and updating and your competitors will definitely use it. So if you want to outperform your competitors in your target market and have more customers and sales, be sure to use digital marketing and keep yourself up to date in this area.
Digital marketing strategy allows you to organize and focus on activities according to future orientations and strengths and weaknesses of the organization, you will also be able to step on the path that leads you to the destination by examining these characteristics in your competitors. We believe, in this path, using some professional tools can be helpful. Bitrix offers services that can be helpful for digital transformation in any business. The Features and services of Bitrix made life easier for users around the world. Companies can control all their accounts from one place, make their marketing plans and create them inside of Bitrix as simply as possible.
