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This article was published on January 16, 2016

What to consider before creating your next digital marketing strategy


What to consider before creating your next digital marketing strategy

Looking for ways to grow our customer or client bases, we turn to marketing and advertising as a way to generate interest and get our products or services out there to those who are the most likely to purchase.

Marketing plays a crucial role in growing and expanding companies, and finding those customers who are eager to buy our products is what makes marketing so challenging but rewarding.

For every product or service being sold, there should be a marketing strategy behind it. But what exactly goes into a marketing strategy and how can you make sure the next one you create is top notch?

Below are some key things to consider before creating your next marketing strategy. There’s also a nice deal from TNW Deals at the end you will want to consider to help up your marketing strategy game and learn the ways of things such as Google Analytics, email marketing, and social media.

Keep your tactical planning short term

Don’t plan a detailed strategy that goes over 3 months. Broad strokes can be longer, sure, but digital strategies and media in general shift so quickly you don’t want to have to go back to the drawing board in month 5 simply because the next Snapchat was released and now you have to have a separate campaign behind it. – Jared Carrizales, founder of Heroic Search

Traditional marketing strategy says you should plan out a strategy for the next three to five years, but that rule of thumb simply doesn’t work in the world of digital marketing.

When planning your digital marketing strategy, make detailed, tactical plans from month to month, while having a longer, more flexible strategy that helps define the overall goals of your marketing endeavors.

In other words, have a digital marketing strategy that focuses on (for example) content marketing, padding your email subscriber list, and increasing your site traffic as the overall goals, but then from month to month outline how you will go about each one. This way, if technology changes on you mid month, you can quickly adapt and not locked into a current plan.

Love your product, but don’t be in love with your product

You should love your product, or else you’re probably working for the wrong company. But you can’t be ‘in love’ with your product because being in love blinds you to its faults. Being in love with your product means that you’ll talk all day about its features when your customers actually care about the benefits. Being in love with your product prevents you from seeing it as your customers see it, so you’ll never be able to actually talk to them. – Brad McCarty, Eligible Inc.

Before you get started on your digital marketing strategy, understand if you love the product or service you’re selling, or if you are in love with the product or service. Just like Brad explains above, loving the product or service will help you resonate with your potential customers better.

If you are so in love with the product or service, you begin to overlook the very things that customers pay attention to, thus losing that connection with them that is crucial in building relationships and growing your customer base. Knowing which side you are on helps you focus and communicate better with your audience.

Prevent becoming the annoying fly in the room

There can be too much of a good thing. In marketing, this is very much true, and even more so in the world of digital marketing. WIth your customers and potential customers involved in digital media most of their day, them (along with a society as a whole) have grown more impatient and developed shorter attention spans to deal with too many things that may be an annoyance or time waster.

In creating your digital marketing strategy, prevent overwhelming your audience and potential customers with endless posts and constant emails. Your posts may be on point and your email marketing messages may be mouthwatering, but if you send them out too often, your audience and customers are just going to start ignoring you, then eventually become annoyed and stop following you all together.

Find that balance in your digital marketing strategy that allows you to stay top-of-mind for your customers and followers, but not so much where they start becoming annoyed when they see you pop up in their inbox or timelines too much.

Pick the right social media networks and posting schedules

Utilizing social media in your marketing strategy is crucial, and pretty much required if your goal is to attract more customers or grow your pool of potential customers. If you aren’t sure what social media networks you should be posting to, or how often you should post to them, figuring that out as part of your digital marketing strategy can go along way.

Certain social media networks are better than others at reaching the audiences and potential customers you are targeting. Don’t aim to be on every network, just the ones you feel your target customers hang out on. For instance, if your target market is the 30-40 age group, chances are many of them are not on networks such as WhatsApp an Snapchat. Pick a handful of solid social networks, and plan out a strategy for each one.

When determining what social networks you will target, don’t forget to also think about what kinds of content you will be sharing, how often you will share on these networks, and how will your tone of voice be for these postings.

Full-Stack Marketer Bundle

If you’re new to marketing or interested in sharpening your skills, TNW Deals has a great deal going on that will help you become a great digital marketer either to help you out with your current products or services, obtain a job in the marketing field, or even advance your current career.

The bundle features three different courses totaling over 22 hours of in-depth marketing strategy  training in things like Google Analytics, Adwords, email marketing, social media marketing, and more. Currently, the bundle is $19, which is 96 percent off the regular price of $513 for all three courses.

Conclusion

Developing a digital marketing strategy takes work and research. With the tips above from seasoned digital marketers, your next digital marketing strategy will be your best and most successful yet.

Pair that with the full-stack marketer bundle from TNW Deals and you are sure to be on your way to creating powerful and driven digital marketing campaigns.

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