B2C businesses must offer an exceptional digital experience as it is one of the few differentiators left.

These days, prices, reviews and other traditional differentiators are available through a quick web search. The organizations that thrive are the ones that create memorable digital strategies, something that meets and exceeds the customer’s needs and requirements.

Digital tools and platforms are constantly evolving and changing, but we aren’t interested in short-term wins; we want to promote long-term success through our step-by-step models listed below.

It’s worth noting that these steps are simply a quick overview of the process. For a more in-depth, customized solution for your organization, contact us.

6 Steps to create your digital marketing strategy

1. Know your market: Any good strategy or idea will begin with an environmental scan. Understand what the customer challenges are, what competitors exist and how your concept can fit into the market. This is the stage where you’ll want to be free-flowing with your ideas but critical of your strategies – there’s no sense in recreating what someone else has already done. Ensure that your concept or offering is unique or superior in some way to what’s already in the marketplace.
2. Define objectives: The next step is critical, define what you want this strategy to achieve. Keep the objectives simple, attainable and measurable. The timeline for objectives can be variable as long as the metrics you’re measuring are clear. Ensure that your key performance indicators (KPIs) are aligned with your overall marketing strategy, which in turn should be supporting the organization’s priority business goals. For more information on goal setting and metrics check out Rise Up Strategies ‘Measurement and Analytics’ learning module.
3. Know your audience: Once the concept and objectives are set you’ll want to ensure you know your target audience’s needs, wants and desires. Knowing what motivates them will help you create an effective marketing strategy from messaging to the channels that you’ll select. Once you have a good idea of the target audience you can search for relevant research that highlights what digital channels they frequent, what type of creatives/messages are most effective and when to target them.For more information on audience targeting check out our social media resources on audience persona creation.
4. Map out your strategy: Strategy creation is guided by all the previous steps. This section of the process should describe, in as much detail as possible, what you’re going to do to achieve the overall objectives you’ve listed. A good strategy will describe the actions/tactics, along with channels and tools used to execute the campaign. Consider including how the tactics will be executed, i.e. what staff/external resources or tools, and budget requirements in a section later in the document you create.
5. Execute the strategy: The next step is clear, move to the execution phase, bringing together all you’ve created so far.  Your environmental scan, audience personas and digital channel insights should guide you in terms of when to launch the campaign so that it’s most effective.
6. Analyze and adjust: Once the strategy is in the market it’s important to continually measure performance. If your KPIs are longer-term, consider adding short-term metrics to your measurement arsenal so you can monitor and adjust on an ongoing basis. Digital channels are constantly changing, so make sure that you’re able to pivot if external market factors may be influencing your target audience.

These quick steps will put you on the road to a successful digital marketing strategy – but, they are only the beginning. For a more in-depth strategy that is custom-designed to meet your organization’s goal get in touch to set up a meeting with us.