Ensure Your Digital Marketing Strategy Supports the Business Goals

Many digital marketing options today are so cheap it can be tempting to just try a little of everything and see what works. However, there is enough knowledge now about social media platform demographics, search engine optimization, keyword-based ad sets, market penetration, landing pages and other strategies that you can make initial digital marketing decisions from a place of knowledge and strength.

In this post, learn four steps to ensure your digital marketing strategy supports your business goals.

First, Have a Business Plan

Your business plan should be the driver for every action you take, including developing your digital marketing strategy. From setting your ad budget to identifying where your target market hangs out, reading your business plan is like consulting a digital marketing compass that reliably points north.

Plan of action: Sit down with your business plan before making any digital marketing decisions. Set your ad budget based on your goals for this coming sales year. Make notes on your “ideal customer” and identify which online platforms are most likely to attract that demographic. Then research costs to advertise on each of those platforms followed by allocating your budget accordingly.

Next, Set Up (or Consult) Google Analytics

Google analytics is so useful it is hard to believe it is still free! Once you have outlined where your available ad dollars will be going, you will need Google analytics to tell you how much of your inbound marketing traffic is coming from those sources.

Until you have had Google analytics up and running on your website for at least six to 12 months, you won’t be able to adjust your ad strategy based on that data. But once you have 12 months of data in hand, you can evaluate where the majority of your traffic comes from and make plans to advertise on those platforms.

Plan of action: Get Google analytics up and running on your website(s) to track inbound traffic and hits, and find out how people are finding out about your business. You want to identify the top 20 percent of inbound traffic sources and focus your digital marketing efforts on these sources.

Ensure Your Online Presence is Consistent

Let’s say you have a presence on three social media channels plus an e-commerce store and a company website. If a stranger visits every one of these online homes, will they instantly realize it is the same company? In other words, is your online presence—your brand—consistent across platforms?

If not, this is where you have your work cut out for you. The last thing you want is for prospects to be confused when they finally decide to buy from you because your store looks very different from your website or your Facebook company page. Part of building a trust-based relationship is consistency, which you can best demonstrate through a consistent and unified online presentation.

Plan of action: Do an audit of your online presence. Make sure your logos, slogans, photos, colors, fonts and all other elements that relate to your brand and company persona are cohesive.

Finally, Analyze and Measure

Since you are still gathering Google analytics at this stage, your days of analyzing and measuring are yet ahead—but not too far ahead. From here on out you will need to continually analyze results across platforms, tweaking your strategy as you go when you notice something is working better or not as well as you anticipated.

Plan of action: Put it on your calendar (weekly, monthly) to sit down and analyze how well your digital marketing strategy is working.

By following these four steps, you create a structured system for implementing a marketing strategy, establishing a consistent message, gathering data and analyzing results. This allows you to adjust your marketing plan as you go to optimize results.