How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

2. Class Project: The project for today's class is to complete digital marketing strategy template that I've created for you alongside the lessons, every exercise featured in the template is designed to help you complete a section of a digital marketing strategy. This will include activities around market research, setting objectives, selecting marketing tactics, competitive research, and ways to measure success. The idea is to complete each section at the end of each relevant class. So that by the end of the course, you'll have your own digital marketing strategy to take away. Your strategy can and should be refined over time. So the idea of this template is to provide you with a starting point and to provide you with some focus and structure for the future. I recommend going back to each section following the completion of the course and padding it out, as well as expanding on it over time. I also recommend reviewing your strategy every few months to make sure that you're still heading in the direction that you'd want to head it. And I would really love to see what you create. So please post your finished marketing strategies in the project gallery. And I'll be sure to have a look through and add any thoughts and feedback. So as a first step, please download the digital marketing strategy template from the resource section to get started, and I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. What is a digital marketing strategy?: Before we dive into the course, it's important to understand what a digital marketing strategy actually is. Digital marketing strategy can be defined as a plan for reaching specific marketing related goals. Using digital or online channels, they're good strategy will help you achieve your goals in an achievable and realistic way. The digital channels you select for your strategy will always depend on what your overall goals are and who your target customer is. This is why a good marketing strategy always starts with looking inwards at your business, what challenges you currently face, what channels you currently use already, what data and research you already have, as well as looking outward at your market and industry in general. Once you've done this, you can then select which tactics and channels you'll use for your strategy. This can range from things like search engine optimization, paid search, online advertising, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing. It really depends on what your overall goals are, what your challenges are, and who your target customer is. In this course, we will break down digital marketing strategy in the following sections, we'll be looking at a situation analysis. So where are you now? How to set smart objectives? What do you want to achieve? And by when we will look at the strategy, you will choose how you position your offering pupil you target with your strategy. And we'll be looking at the tactics. How exactly will you achieve your objectives? And also looking at control. How will you measure your success? 4. Why is a digital marketing strategy important?: So why is digital marketing strategy so important? Well, in my many years of working in marketing, I've seen many times the common mistake that some companies often make this is to jump straight into the tactics without first taking the time to understand the market and the customer. To give an example, it can be really tempting to jump on the latest social media trend such as TikTok because everybody else seems to be on there. However, what you need to ask yourself is, are your customers or your target customers. Using the platform? Is that where they spend their time? If not, then it may be better for you to direct your time and resources elsewhere. So this leads on to my first of why a digital marketing strategy is so important. They firstly, a digital marketing strategy provides you with direction. It will give you a really good indication of where to put your time and energy for the best results based on where your customers are. This will in turn save you time and money in the long run and help to improve your ROI. Digital marketing strategy will help you to stay ahead of the competition and stand out online understanding your business, industry and target customers will give you a competitive edge and allow you to differentiate yourself and be visible in all the right places. It will also help you to increase your sales revenue or brand awareness, whatever your objectives are, good strategy will help you to drive growth and achieve your business goals. It will also help you to optimize your digital marketing and continually refine and improve. In the next section, we'll talk about how to structure your digital marketing strategy. 5. How to structure your digital marketing strategy: In this section, I will take you through the process that I normally go through when creating digital marketing strategy using the SaaS stack approach. This was one of the models that I was taught during my master's degree in marketing. And it was developed by a UK based marketer called PR Smith in the 990s. So, so star is an acronym and it stands for situation analysis, objectives, strategy, tactics, action, and control. Now, as with any model, it has its pros and its columns. I really like it. I use it for the basis for all of my strategies. As I find it simple to understand and easy to implement. In this course, I'll take you through the process that I usually go through when creating a marketing strategy. This can obviously be adapted if needed, to your own personal preferences. But it does give you a good overview of what should be included in a strategy. A good digital marketing strategy should always start with a situational analysis. This is looking at your current situation to help answer the question, where are we now, there are many tools and frameworks that can help you. You are answering this question, which we'll go through in the following sections of this course. The situation analysis will involve analyzing your market, your industry, your competitors, your current marketing channels, what you are currently doing now to highlight any opportunities or weaknesses, this analysis should be repeated fairly regularly, I'd say every six months or so. And that will help to give you a good idea of what's going on in your industry and your own organization, and what changes there are which will help you to respond. And if you monitor this regularly and respond to changes regularly than this will help to give you a good competitive advantage and differentiate yourself against the competition. Next, you want to set your objectives. What do you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase sales or revenue? Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Or maybe you want to increase customer retention. There are so many different objectives so you can choose. And this will really depend on your business and what your overall business goals or the objectives are really important because they set the direction for the rest of your strategy. We'll go through some tactics for setting objectives in the upcoming lessons. Then the strategy section will be a top-level overview of how you plan to meet your objectives. This will include things like, how do you plan to segment your audience? Who exactly will you be targeting? And how are you going to position yourself and differentiate yourself from your competition? These are really important questions to ask before you even start considering what tactics you're going to be using to meet your objectives. This is where your reference and draw upon the analysis from the first section in order to make those strategic decisions. Then for the tactics and actions part of the strategy. This is where you'll be choosing the specific tactics and marketing channels that you'll be using to help meet your objectives. Setting an action plan of how and when these will get implemented. This part is really important to ensure that the strategy stays on track. So the final part of any digital marketing strategy is the control section. In this section, you'll be looking at how you're going to monitor performance. Make sure that you're on track to meet your objectives. This section will include things like what metrics you'll be looking at, how often you'll be looking at these. Who's gonna be responsible and what tools you'll need as well for reporting on the different tactics, it's unlikely that you'll get everything right first time. Constant monitoring and evaluation will allow you to adapt and change your tactics if necessary, to ensure that you meet your goals and objectives. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at the situation analysis and what models you can use to analyse where you are now in more detail. 6. Situation Analysis - Where are you now?: The point of a situation analysis is to identify where you are now. So this includes who you are, what you do, what's currently working, what's not currently working, and what internal and external factors are affecting your business. It should help to paint a picture of where you are currently and what challenges, threats, and opportunities there are that your strategy can help to address the situation analysis could be several areas. I've split each one and we'll cover them separately over the next few lessons. For this lesson, we'll be analyzing where you currently are now using a swat analysis model. There are various models and techniques you can use to analyze your current situation. But I really liked the swat model as I really like its simplicity. A swat analysis looks at your current businesses, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, Threat. The strengths and weaknesses tend to be internal strengths and weaknesses, so things that you can control. Whereas the threats and opportunities are where you'll be looking more outwards and outside of your business. Looking at the industry market and the competitors, these are usually things that are less likely to be within your control. So the strengths, you'd be looking at what you currently do well as a business. What's unique about your business or your brand? What positive things to customers say about your business? So looking at customer reviews or social media, what marketing channels couldn't be performed the best for you? And what competitive advantages do you have or weaknesses? You could look at what areas of your business could be improved. Are there any marketing channels that are underperforming for you? Do you have any issues currently with resource or skills? Maybe your website's a bit outdated. Maybe you don't have much of a marketing budget or opportunities. You could look at, whether you have any gaps in your current product range or services. Have you got any marketing channels that you're not using what your competitors are? Would you like to improve certain marketing channels are focusing new areas. How about the market is growing? Are there opportunities for you there? So for threats, you'd be looking at things like all their industry changes or trends that might threaten your business in the future, market trends, consumer behavior changes, all the threats from new or existing competitors, and also looking at any environmental or economic trends as well. So you might be thinking, where can I go to get all of this information for my swot analysis? Well, some ideas or places you can go to get the research is you can ask your team, if you have one. I would recommend especially asking those that are customer facing. So for example, customer services team or the sales team. Because these people will be dealing with your customers every day and we'll definitely have some valuable insights to share. You can also ask your customers directly. So looking at things like customer surveys or polls, you can put a poll on your website or on your social media pages. Looking at your social media in general, any comments or reviews that you might have on there or there any recurring themes, any complaints and the positive comments. Also looking at your general reviews, if you have them on your website, google Analytics is a really good place to go for. Information for your swat analysis as well. Any social media analytics that you have access to. If you've got any previous research, it's really good time to dig that out now, competitor social media is really good as well to have a look at as well as their websites. And any industry sites as well. And industry reports like Mintel, any government reports that are related to your industry. Oh, very useful as well. One of the downsides of the swapped model is that it doesn't allow you to give waiting to one strength over another, for example, or one weakness over another. So it's a really good idea is once you've done your swot analysis is to prioritize the points that are the most important. So what I'd like you to do now is go to your digital marketing strategy template, which I provided for you in the project resources section. For the first class project, I want you to fill in the first section of the situational analysis. This includes a short overview of your business, including who you are, what you do, what marketing channels you currently do, and any challenges that you may face. I also included a swat analysis template as well for you to complete. I would recommend that you complete this briefly now. But then you come back to it after the course and after you've had a chance to do your more in-depth research, we'll be covering more in the next two lessons on how to analyze your competitor and your market and industry. 7. Situation Analysis - How to research your market: In this class we'll be talking about how to research your market or industry. A good marketing strategy should always contain some research on the market or industry that you operate it. So some ideas or places that you can go to to find research on your market include trade associations that save your industry, government websites, industry research sites like Mintel, the Office of National Statistics, Google Trends, answer the public and social media. There are many tools and models that you can use to tie all of your research together. But one of my favorites is called the PESTEL model. And this is a model that analyzes external and internal factors that can affect your business and influence your strategy. So PESTEL is an acronym and stands for political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal. What you would do to carry out a PESTEL analysis would be to look at the political things that might impact your business. So things like local government policies, trade restrictions, taxation, things like that that you think would impact your business. Economic would be things like the cost of living, unemployment rates, inflation, disposable incomes, social factors could be things like population growth, age distribution, education, lifestyle and trends. Technological. You'd be looking at things like innovations, automation and AI, technological growth, legal things like employment law, trade unions, copyright laws, health and safety. Gdpr consumer protection. And environmental would be things like weather, natural disasters, environmental policies, climate change, pollution, et cetera. So what you would do is review the factors that you've identified and ask yourself what impact they have on your strategy. What could you do to avoid or reduce any negative impacts from these factors? Do these factors highlight any opportunities or threats company could face? And then what you could also do at the end of this exercise is to go back to your swot analysis and use your analysis here to populate more of the opportunities and threats section in your swot analysis. Now, I really like the PESTEL model. I think that it's a good tool to help businesses understand what internal and external threats may affect their business in the future and may impact the strategy. It does have some criticisms. There are people that think that it's a bit simplistic. However, I would argue that it's a good starting point. And any research you do now can always be built upon at a later date. So what I want you to do now for your class project is to go back to your digital marketing strategy template. And in there you'll see I have provided a PESTEL analysis template. So all I want you to do is start thinking about these areas for your business and just fill in a few points under each heading. Don't worry if it's not comprehensive, but this stage because you can always go back to it at a later date when you've got some more robust data. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about how to research your competitors. 8. Situation Analysis - How to research your competitors: In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about competitive research in order to be clear about your strategy and where you fit in your market, It's important to carry out competitor research. This can help you identify opportunities and improve upon your own marketing. In this part of the strategy, you should be asking yourself questions such as, who are your competitors, what size are they, and how much revenue do they make? How do they compete? They compete on price, product, customer service, reputation, what are their key differentiators? What channels do they use? What's their website like? What social media platforms they use? What's their content like? What are their strengths and weaknesses? You may be wondering what are the best ways to research your competitors. So some of my tips are too subscribe to competitive newsletters. Visit competitor websites, visit their social media pages. You can also use competitor analysis tools. There are lots available out there, ones like SimilarWeb, SEM rush, Buzzsumo, although some you have to pay for. There's also the Facebook ads library, which lets you search for all ads that are currently live. I would probably say to dedicate some time once a month to look at your competitors, social and web sites, screenshots, examples, and keep these in folders. And make sure you put it in your calendar so that it happens at least once a month. So you'll see in your digital marketing strategy template that I've provided you with a competitor research table. What I want you to do for your class project is to complete this competitor research table for a few of your closest competitors. Don't worry about being in depth at the moment, just this is just a starting point. So I would recommend just having a look at your competitors, social media and websites as a starting point. In the next lesson, we'll be going over how to understand your target customers. 9. Situation Analysis - Understanding your target customer: In this lesson, we'll be talking about your target customer. You want to target with your strategy. This part of the strategy is crucial because it determines what tactics, what content, and what marketing channels you use, as well as the messaging and tone you'll use going forward. So who is your current audience? It's a really good idea at this stage to start with who your customers currently are and what are their motivations to do this, I would recommend creating a customer persona. This helps you to visualize your customer and brings them to life in the past. When I've created customer persona's, I like to print them off and put them on my wall to remind myself who I'm talking to throughout my marketing. If your business has multiple audiences, then I would recommend for the purposes of this exercise, just choosing one for you to target with your strategy. This will help keep your targeting and messaging more focused. You can always create new persona's and New targeting plans at a later date. So a customer persona should always be based upon robust data and research to avoid you making incorrect decisions, it's a good idea to have a look at what data you have on your existing customers to help build a persona. So things like demographic information, age, group, location, heavier or characteristics, what social media and websites today use. Data like this can be found using your analytics, social media pages, your own database, customer feedback surveys or interviews, keyword research, website capture forms, as well as any previous research that you may have done. Your customer persona can be as detailed or as simple as you like, but it should help you focus your strategy and tactics and help you attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you'll be more likely to retain over time. To get started, have a go at completing the customer persona's section for your target customer in the digital marketing strategy template, don't worry if you don't have any data on your customer at this stage, ideally, a persona would be based on data and research, but you can always make a start with what you have and then fill in more detail at a later date. And it's something that can be built upon over time. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at setting smart objectives for your strategy. 10. How to set SMART objectives for your strategy: In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about how to set objectives for your digital marketing strategy. Objectives help to clarify where are you going with your strategy? What do you want to achieve? Your strategy and objectives should always be tied closely to your overall business goals. So for example, if your business goal is to increase awareness of your brand, then your digital marketing strategy should contain objectives to help you meet that overall business goal. Your objectives should also take into account any weaknesses or opportunities that you may want to address after your situation analysis, before you set your digital marketing objectives for this strategy, the first thing you need to do is think about what your overall business goals are. You may have many business goals, but the purposes of this exercise, I would recommend focusing on one goal that you want to address with the strategy. So for example, do you want to increase awareness of your brand? Do you want to increase sales or revenue? Do you want to attract a new customer group? Do you want to increase loyalty with your existing customers? There are many goals that you may have for your business, but trying to pick one that you feel is important in order to grow your business. Once you've chosen your main business goal, try to think about what digital marketing objectives you could set to help you achieve your goal. I would advise on no more than three objectives to help keep your strategy focus. Objectives should always also be smart. Smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. So why should objectives be smart? Smart objectives will make sure that they are clear and prevent you from setting vague or broad goals. They also give you an opportunity to gauge your success by setting yourself benchmarks and make sure that you set sensible objectives that are realistic and achievable. That means that any unnecessary work that's relevant or that could take you away from what's important will be reduced or cutouts. And it gives you a clear beginning and end to adhere to in reaching your goals. So let's look at an example of a smart objective. So let's say in this example, you want to increase your blog traffic. So in the first subjective, increased blog traffic is very vague. No indication of how much you want to increase your blog traffic by. There's no indication of timeframe. Which means that it would be very difficult to measure whether this objective has been met or not. But then if you look at the second objective, is very clear how much block traffic needs to be increased by and what timeframe is that it's gonna be measured in and how it's going to be done. So the second example is an example of a smart objective. It means that it can be measured very clearly. Another thing to think about is in terms of the bigger chosen. So for example, in this example, the five per cent increase, you need to make sure that this is realistic for your business based on past performance, current resource and analysis that you've done in the situation analysis makes sure that the figure you choose is realistic. So what I want you to do now for your class project is to head over to the digital marketing strategy template and come up with three smart digital marketing objectives to help you achieve your main business goal. 11. Setting the direction for your strategy: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about setting the direction for your strategy. In the strategy section, you need to detail how you're going to meet the objectives you set. This part brings all of your research together and gives a top-level overview. How are you going to get to where you want to be? In this section, you need to be thinking about segmentation, targeting, and positioning. If you've not heard of these terms before, then segmentation refers to the process of dividing your audience into smaller groups with similar needs and motivations. This allows you to target your messaging much more closely. You may have many different groups of customers that buy from you that you want to target. And each group would require separate targeting with different messaging designed to appeal to their individual needs. Alternatively, you could choose one target markets, for example, the one that's most aligned with your overall goals or offers you the most potential. Once you've chosen your target audience, you then need to think about how you're going to position your brand against the competition. This is where the competitor research comes in. So what is your unique selling position? Why should your target customer choose you over your competitors? Does your product or service solves a problem they have? Think about your y. One way to visualize this is by creating a perceptual map for your industry. Focus on what is important for your customers and see where you and your competitors and land on the map depending on your product or service. You can also consider pricing strategy here and how you will consider your pricing against the competition. So what I want you to do now is to complete the activities in the strategy section of your downloadable marketing strategy template. Given that you've already described your target customer and the customer analysis section, consider how you position your brand to appeal to them and complete the brand positioning map. Also consider your USP. Why should your target customers choose you? What messaging will you use to attract your target audience? In the next lesson, we'll cover how to choose your digital marketing tactics. 12. How to choose your digital marketing tactics: Okay, so now you have your top level strategy. This section is all about how exactly do you get there? What digital marketing tactics will you use to help you meet your objectives? Before we get into this lesson, I just wanted to give a very quick definition on the differences between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the top-level plan that defines where you want to go. Whereas the tactics are the individual steps and actions that you will take to get there. The tactics you choose will very much depend on the objective you've set, what budget you have, and what customer group you're targeting. They should also tie back to the analysis you've done in the previous section. So for example, were there any channels that you're currently not using and there's a gap there, or are there any channels that your competitors are using and you're not? These are channels that you could explore in the tactics section of your strategy. Each tactic you choose should be justified by asking, is this tactic helping to meet our objectives? If not, then perhaps it's not the right tactic for you. You should also state exactly what you want to do for each tactic and the actions you will take by when. For example, if you decide that you want to use e-mail marketing, then what emails will you send and when do you already have an e-mail service provider? Is this something that you need to research? Do you have the budget for an e-mail service provider? Do you have a design team to create templates? It's all these questions are things that you need to think about in this section. So let's look at an example. Say you are small online fashion retailer targeting women aged 1825. I'm one of your smart objectives is to increase website traffic by ten per cent in the next quarter compared to the previous year. Going back to the customer persona research and your Google Analytics data, you know that a large percentage of your current traffic comes from social media. But an opportunity from your swot analysis is that you have no presence and TikTok, but your competitors seem to do well on there. Based on your competitor analysis. You also know that this platform is popular with your target customer demographic. Well, if your tactics could therefore be social media, but your action could be to focus on setting up a TikTok account and content calendar, regular posting with the aim of driving traffic to your website. Another action could maybe be to hire a new employee to manage and grow social media. If this was a different brand with a different demographic, for example, if it was a business, hogs and other businesses than TikTok probably wouldn't be appropriate, but LinkedIn maybe a better option from a digital marketing perspective, there are many tactics that you can choose for your strategy. And this, again, will depend on your objectives and your target customer. Some tactics that you could use include social media, e-mail marketing, SEO, Paid Search, content marketing, video marketing, influencer marketing, online advertising, affiliate marketing, and your own websites. Don't choose tactics for the sake of it. Make sure that they're always tied back to your overall objectives, audience. And what you want to achieve. What I'd like you to do now is head over to the digital marketing template and choose at least one tactic for each objectives you set in the previous section. So what exactly you plan to do for each and why you have chosen each tactic. In the next video, we'll be talking about how you can measure the success of your digital marketing strategy. 13. How to measure the success of your digital marketing strategy: The final stage, or a digital marketing strategy is how you're going to measure success. This is really important to ensure that you stay on track and meet your objectives. You need to think about what you will measure and how often. I would recommend setting KPIs or key performance indicators for every tactic that tie back to the objectives set. I would also recommend monitoring these on a weekly basis to make sure that you're on track. You will also need to think about who will measure the progress of the tactics and objectives and what systems and tools you may need to do so. Some examples are KPIs that you may want to measure include cost per customer acquisition or CPA, cost per click, or CPC, return on investment or ROI, return on ad spend, or ROAS, conversion rates, website visitors or traffic, social media engagement, so shares, comments, saves, etc. Sales Revenue leads customer retention. Net promoter score or NPS. Or for email marketing, things like open rates, Click Rates, unsubscribe rates. Again, the KPIs you choose will vary depending on what your objectives are. What you want to measure. And be careful not to choose KPIs that are more like vanity metrics. So things like likes on social media or followers or clicks on emails alone. You need to make sure that the KPIs you choose are ones that help you measure whether you've met your objectives. Just to give an example of how you can select KPIs, I'll use the social media example again from the previous lesson. So say if your overall objective was to increase website traffic, one of the tactics was to set up a TikTok account and post regularly on there. So the KPI in this instance would be to monitor the website traffic from TikTok. This could then be monitored weekly and the strategy could be adjusted depending on performance. If we didn't monitor this at this stage, then we wouldn't know if it wasn't performing well for any reason and we may not meet the objective in time. Or if we're monitoring the performance of the TikTok content, then we can look at what content is doing well, what content isn't doing well, and we can optimize the content that's doing well. We could test different versions and try and improve the content that isn't performing well, then we can stop using that content or try and tweak it to help performance. What are some ways that you can measure progress? Depending on your tactics, you could measure progress using Google Analytics. You could use your own database or CRM system. You could use stats from your e-mail service provider or social media insights or analytics. A tip that I would have is to create a dashboard in Excel or Google Analytics with the KPIs for each objective you've set most of these weekly and adjust based on what works and what doesn't at this stage or once the strategy is complete, I would also recommend that you create a physical plan. So like a Gantt charts or maybe a board on a tool like Trello or Microsoft Planner. With all of your tactics and tasks, you can then assign them to people, give them deadlines. And this will make sure that things actually get done by the deadlines and the objectives have a good chance than are being met. Finally, it's really important with any digital marketing strategy to continually review and refine what you're doing to make sure that you're doing the best that you can? I would make sure to look at the KPIs at least once a week. And then you can look at what's performing well and do more of that and address the areas where you may not be performing as well. The final exercise in this project, I would like you to head over to the digital marketing template and suggest one to two KPIs that you can measure PR tactic in your marketing strategy. I'd also like you to put down how often you will measure these metrics and what tools you'll use as well. 14. Thank you!: So that brings us to the end of the class. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and that you've learned something new. I also hope that this class has given you the confidence and the knowledge to create your own digital marketing strategy for your own business. Remember, this is just the beginning of your marketing journey. And hopefully you now have at the beginning of a digital marketing strategy that you can refine over time and used to help grow your business. The purpose of this class was to give you a broad overview of what a digital marketing strategy is and how to structure that. It was to give you a starting point and provide you with a template that you can use go forwards. A good marketing strategy should always be built on robust data and research. So whilst this course was a good starting points, I would recommend that before you make any decisions for your business, that you go back and had out the sections where data and research is required. This will make sure that you're not making any decisions based on assumptions. And all the decisions that you make are strategic and based on data and research. If you're interested in learning about the digital marketing strategy in more depth and a more detailed overview into how to complete the different sections of the strategy. Then please follow me on Skillshare and look out for future videos. Please feel free to post your projects in the project gallery, whether that's the entire strategy or just sections of the strategy. I would really love to see what you've done and I will look through them and provide feedback. If you have any questions for me, then please feel free to contact me via Skillshare or via my website. I'd be really happy to answer any questions or give you any sport that you may need with your digital marketing. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.