The famous quote of Alice in Wonderland highlights one of the main problems of the businesses today; “If you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter which path you take”. Most of the businesses do not know where they want to go and fail to set company and consequently, marketing goals. Lacking aligned marketing strategy with the firm goals will cause a failure to adopt a wrong marketing push hence inefficient use of resources and time. Instead of trusting the wind that takes us somewhere, businesses need to work on a plan by setting up marketing strategies aligned with the sought company achievements as a priority. Companies need to implement measurable marketing strategies to see the ROI effect clearly which makes the digital marketing strategy an investment rather an expense for the businesses.

 WSI’s 7 Step Framework to Develop Solid Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing strategy is composed of many parts that all need to function for the same goal. Having a large-scale and holistic digital marketing strategy may seem complicated and hard to implement however the WSI’s 7 Step Framework would give ease to adopt the right marketing strategy aligned with the goals of the business.

Step 1: Define SMART Goals

Setting up goals aligns expectations and also lightens up a clear path to pursue. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. While setting up goals, all these components need to be realistically considered. It is vital that businesses implement technological tools to track and successfully coordinate different parts to reach defined goals.

Step 2: Create Solid Personas

To build a robust digital marketing strategy, businesses have to make sure of who their audience is. A sense check with the current and the competitors’ personas of the business always helps. New personas can be achieved by a detailed look at the competitors and a further breakdown of the current audience. Businesses can create personas by realising relevant characteristics and behaviours of a group by having a deep dive in demographics, job, lifestyle etc. Understanding what problem the product/service solves and what benefit the persona achieves and eventually why this persona would want to buy from the business will help to create strong personas. Having detailed personas, customises the approach to the targeted audience and widen the customer base of the business, and increase the chance of sales with the tailored experience.

Step 3: Build Strategic Content

Delivering relevant and compelling information to core customers is essential for a successful digital marketing strategy. Having a robust content strategy for potential customers has three main pillars, which are awareness, consideration, and decision. First, awareness about the product and services will spark the need and interest of customers, and secondly, more detailed info for the functionalities and added value of the product/services compared to other goods in the market will be shared. As a final stage, competitive advantages should be given compared to other players such as price, differences in additional services and delivery to decide on your side. It is vital to reach potential customers with the right content based on what stage they stand on the funnel. Differentiating the contents of three stages based on the characteristics of each persona will help businesses to capture potential customers easily. Having a holistic content strategy that covers every phase of the decision making of different personas will enable an effective marketing strategy.

Step 4: Having Broad Offerings

After moving on three stages in the funnel, customers would decide on the product/service based on what the business is offering more than any other competitor. The offerings include both monetary and non-monetary resources such as white-papers, blogs, events and even customer support that help customers to build knowledge and accompany them in their whole journey. Customers value and build trust more to the businesses that devote their time and energy to offer a variety of services. The willingness to pay increases with the enhanced offerings as the business ensures the trust and position itself as the most knowledgeable and expert provider

 Step 5: Design Conversion Paths 

Understanding the current customer experience with the business is essential. Are they having any difficulties in reaching what they look for on the website? What distracts and causes them to leave after a short look? While creating content, the businesses should not only design to share information but also to ease the audience’s engagement. Digital marketing aims to trigger the interest of the audience and direct them to be a customer. The more engaging content will end up with higher lead numbers, hence a higher possibility of boosting sales. Another question to design a better conversion path would be by looking at how competitors use digital marketing tools. An active review of competitor’s digital marketing channels and tactics is crucial to deliver better ones. Answering these will help the business to design a better consumer experience and beat the competition with higher conversion paths.

Step 6: Widen Digital Marketing Tactics 

After 5 important steps, now businesses know their targets to achieve, personas, contents for different stages, offerings and experience they deliver. As the 6th step, and maybe the most important one, is to build a customised marketing tactic based on the current position and the need of the business. Matching the most effective marketing tactics with business’s need will deliver reliable results with efficient use of resources and adequate management.
Here are some tactics for businesses to have better visibility and ROI:

• Engaging, responsive and mobile-friendly Website Development Strategy will deliver a better customer experience to the business
• Email Marketing will make the leads stay connected with the business
• Effective use of Social Media Marketing will exponentially increase the audience while ensuring reputational management
• SEO Strategy will help the business to have a sustainable positioning for customer searches
• Paid Campaigns, unlike SEO that takes a longer time, will allow businesses to boost their visibility in a short time
• Marketing Automation will ease the management of workload and enable to follow the hot leads’ journey
• Consulting on customer and competitor analyses will deliver a better understanding to create better strategies

Step 7: Analyse KPIs for a Better Strategy 

The beauty of Digital Marketing lies in being easily trackable and measurable. Businesses cannot manage and conclude on the success of a strategy if the output is not measurable. Businesses can decide and track the most critical KPIs for each tactic adopted as a digital marketing strategy. Being able to see the results of the adopted digital marketing tactics in KPIs allow businesses to amend the strategy if needed or focus more on chosen channels that give the best results to use the resources optimally.

If you want to find out how WSI can help your business to build a tailored Digital Marketing Strategy, get in touch with us.

We’re happy to have a no-obligation chat with you.

About the Author

Hande is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur, Principal of WSI London, founder of Quattro Business Consulting, co-founder of Think Neuro and Buddy Performance. She is independent Board Member in verous companies and institutions. She has studied Industrial Engineering, has worked with 200 clients from different parts of the world and she has 20 years of consulting experience.