Make a Digital Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps (quick start guide)
By: Storytelling Nut
Tags: Digital Marketing, Communication, Content Creation, Strategy Planning, Brand Building

Isn’t it?

Understanding how a Digital Marketing Strategy is built may sound daunting, but I promise, it’s one of the most beautiful, rewarding and fruitful experiences you’ll get out of life once you do it and do it right! Especially the content part.

A Digital Marketing Strategy is made up of 7 simple steps:

Step 1 — Audience profiling

Step 2 — Picking the platforms to focus on

Step 3 — Knowing your CTA

Step 4 — Creating content that leads to your CTA

Step 5 — Media Planning

Step 6 — Collecting Insights

Step 7 — Compiling a report to plan the next move

Here’s a mind teaser by Visual.ly

Step 1: Audience Profiling

You’ve heard this a million times, it’s the key factor in understanding what you’ll be doing digitally to attain your definition of success. You need to know the audience of your business inside and out, in order to cater to their interests and entice them to eventually buy from the business.

Answer the following questions to have the exact picture of your audience and a proper process for strategizing on how to give them what they need and want:

1. Education level (are they drop-outs or graduates and so on)

2. Maturity Level (how self-aware are they)

3. Choice of career (are they into tech, marketing, entertainment, etc)

4. Daily routine (are they productive, procrastinators, lazy, active, etc )

5. Spending habits (are they smart with their money or big spenders)

6. How big is their social circle (are they introverts or extroverts or somewhere in the middle)

7. How satisfied are they in life (are they fulfilled or are they restless in achieving their goals or something else on similar lines)

8. The kind of home they live in (apartment, villa, etc)

9. A problem they face every day (are they after finding a solution to an aching problem)

10. What do they need to learn every day (what kind of knowledge can help them improve their lives)

11. How can they run their lives smoother (something that they need to be conscious about in order to have value-filled days)

12. Are they into reading, movies, gaming and audio (take it further by jotting their favorite genre to consume as well)

13. Their age bracket

14. Their favorite activities for fun

Take your time and jot an answer to each question after researching online and offline.

For online research, you will have to knock the doors of a lot of Facebook Groups, Reddit Subreddits and Linkedin connections.

For offline research, you can reach out to your friends, family and then move on to their connections, expanding into an ever-evolving network for validating your audience.

It's okay if you find the online and offline research too exhausting, you can skip it and jot an estimated answer to the above questions in order to get started quickly. But take some time out whenever you can to research the hell out of your consumer market. Getting the audience behavior right is gonna dictate your success, I promise!

Step 2: Picking the platform to focus on

Choose wisely my lads!

There are three key digital platforms which you must adapt to due to their influential prowess:

Website (Users Vary)

Facebook (2.6 Billion Users)

Instagram (1 Billion Users)

Facebook and Instagram are the easiest to adapt to with a bold number of active users whereas creating a website is about building a user base from scratch, but having one is like owning an office space that’s completely digital. To add upon these, there are quite a few rivaling meaningful platforms that you can choose from:

Snapchat (382 Million)

Twitter (340 Million)

Linkedin (788 Million)

Tumblr (376 Million)

Reddit (430 Million)

YouTube (2 Billion)

Medium (60 Million)

Quora (300 Million)

Pinterest (322 Million)

Picking and adding some of these platforms with the big three will be a smooth task if you nail the audience profiling. Each platform has a different audience with a different behavior with just one common unchanging, unflinching factor! They all want to find something engaging and useful!

Step 3: Knowing Your CTA

CTA stands for ‘Call to Action’ that will inform the audience what to do after experiencing your content, you may want them to comment or visit your website to purchase the advertised product or anything else that leads you towards your targeted Return Over Investment (more on this later).

CTA is an unmissable pointer and you must know your CTA before you begin producing any new campaigns. Everything you do, must lead to a tangible, value infusing goal for your audience. Without the meaningful trouble solving value, the digital marketing you do and the product you work with needs to be upgraded.

For example, I work with a lot of automobile brands and a lot of the times, the CTA drives the audience to visit the website, learn more about the advertised model and fill a short form below if they feel interested.

Some of the most commonly used CTAs are:

Learn More

Shop Now

Call Now

Send a Message

See More

These automobile brands are ultimately interested in selling their cars, so if you reverse engineer the process of completing a purchase that initiates digitally, it would look something like this:

User makes the purchase > In Consideration > In Conversation with the Salesman > Details received by the salesman > User fills the interest form > Finds the product valuable > Visits the website > Clicks the CTA > Finds the content engaging and useful > Sees the Social Media Post / Social Ad / Google Ad

Step 4: Creating Content That Leads To Your CTA

GIF by Linski101

This one is my favorite pointer, I’m gonna enjoy every word I type to explain it!

The content creation is divided into three parts:

Copywriting

Storyboarding

Execution

If you aim to become an entrepreneur, you can’t aim to make millions. You have to aim to solve an aching problem for a specific group of people with a valuable solution that will get you to your millions.

Similarly, when you’re digitizing your brand, you can’t aim for the users to buy from you. You have to aim towards educating, entertaining and engaging your audience that will drive them to buy from your business and the technique you use to achieve this is content!

Creative valuable content that remains evergreen is time-consuming, nerve-wracking, brutally excruciatingly difficult and fun. If you get it right, it will blow your socks off, if you get it wrong, you can try again tomorrow.

Answer the following questions to get the foundation right for your valuable content:

What’s the value that my brand offers?

What is the key main problem that my brand solves?

What are the keywords that are associated with this problem and the solution?

Once you jot the answers for these, it’s time to write the copy. Grammarly is my go to tool for writing content with its powerful AI that takes care of the tone, spelling errors and touchups to deliver the punch where it's needed. After I’m done writing the content, I love to keep it organized in a cell format post by post with Microsoft Excel. Take a look at the snapshot below and you’ll see how an excel file helps keep everything organized:

The formula for writing a copy that actually affects a human brain lies in understanding how storytelling in a powerful movie works. Adapting the formula for social media content will look like this:

Hook + Theme + Takeaway

So writing a caption for an automobile brand that focuses on safety will look something like this:

‘Make your journeys safer with XYZ Car Model’ or ‘Take the danger out of your Journeys. Travel safer with XYZ Model’

Fitting the copy into the equation we created will look like this:

Hook = Make

Theme = Your journeys safer

Takeaway = With the XYZ Car Model

The second caption will look like this:

Hook = Take the danger out

Theme = of your journeys

Takeaway = Travel Safer with XYZ Car Model

Write the copy for all the posts you plan to launch within a single campaign and move onto storyboarding. This is where you will roughly sketch out what you will see in the visual that compliments the copy. You can use a notepad to draw a rough sketch or you can use Microsoft Paint to quickly muster up your idea. For a much more sophisticated version, you can opt to use Adobe Photoshop, but that’s gonna take some time to get used to and another blog to teach you.

For the copy we’ve jotted down, I would recommend going with the visual of a car with all the safety features labeled out. This will communicate the speed with which the car is moving towards the destination and the value proposition it offers which is safety.

Moving on to the execution phase, you will hand over the copy and storyboards to the Graphics Design Team. They will work with real-time photography and vectors to bring your vision to life.

Review the complete plan and analyze if further tweaks could be made to better engage the audience! If you feel confident that the content is valuable enough for people to engage with, then let’s move on to the post captions!

Post caption is where you will provide the CTA and inform the audience about the next step they can take if they feel interested in the car. You can either give them the option to inbox you for more information or give them the website page link where they’ll be able to see the product in more detail.

Out of all the big social media platforms, Instagram is the only one where you can’t put up a clickable link in the post caption. So either you can inform the audience to inbox you for booking a showroom visit to see the car in person or to check out the link in bio (it’s the only place where you can place a clickable link)

Once the content is designed and approved by the client, we schedule it to automatically release on our platforms. For a tool that’s fast, free and easy to use, you can check out Buffer or you can check out this amazing comprehensive blog on which planner to choose by Buffer itself here.

Step 5: Setting up Google Analytics

All digital platforms have their built-in insights tool which will give you a breakdown of how your content is performing, but for the website, you’ll manually need to setup the Google Analytics to see a detailed breakdown of users, average time they spend on your site, the pages they visited and so on.

This part is a bit technical which I’ll cover in a future blog, but for now, let’s assume, you have a developer that you’ll be working with who can assist you in setting this up. But make no mistake, this is an unmissable action pointer!

Step 6: Media Planning

This is my second favorite step on the list! Media Planning is where you jot down a total budget that you can spare to spend on a campaign to boost it in order to achieve your target, then you distribute the budget among the platforms according to their usefulness for your brand.

To put it in even simpler words, Media Planning is about placing ads on Digital Platforms so they showcase your product to countless people in order to gain their interest and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Most of your budget will go to the top 3 advertising platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Google. You can allot some of the budget to other platforms that you’ve planned to cover from the list above and see if you get commendable results and take it from there. But it depends on whether you have a big budget to work with or a small one.

I’ve had the luxury to work with fairly big budgets, so I’ve always had the option to distribute my budget on quite a number of platforms and formats. But the majority of my budget always goes to Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and Google Ads. The brands I manage have always benefited greatly from these platforms, so these are always on top in our Media Planning Strategy.

Step 7: Collecting Insights and Compiling a Report

Once you’ve posted your content and placed your ads, it’s time to sit back and let the campaign run its course. You’ll need to check up on your content and ads on a weekly basis to see what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize accordingly.

For example, your audience may not find the copy engaging enough to interact with the post or the Facebook Ad you placed might need a tweak with the targeting. There could be millions of reasons for something to be not working, but only one reason for it to work. The value your brand offers is being clearly communicated with your words written in the content.

Pay extra attention and go back to it again and again! Revise the hell out of your words until you’re absolutely exhausted and confident about the content’s clarity and it’s potential to be fun and informative!

While every platform provides built-in analytics to measure how your brand is performing, there are quite a few tools out there that give you the luxury to see all the platforms’ analytics in one dashboard.

I personally use Sprout Social to bring all my analytics into one place, but know that there are other commendable tools that you can choose from. The reason I chose Sprout Social is that a friend referred it to me and I found it pretty user friendly, so I stayed with it.

If you wanna dig a bit deeper into which tools you can try out for analytics, check out this right to the point blog published by Sprout Social itself here.

I highly recommend using a tool for your analytical work, but if you’re low on budget, just opt to use the built-in insights tool of the digital platforms your brand uses.

To give you an idea of how to and what to look for in the insights, we’re gonna talk about the insights tool offered by Facebook. You can easily export a CSV or an excel file as shown in the image below to better navigate across the insights.

Following is the list of metrics, you’ll need to look at:

Impressions

Reach

Engagement

Top 10 posts

Most commented post

Most liked post

Most shared post

Post with the most link clicks

Post driving the most inbox messages

Sum up all the numbers within the individual categories and see what kind of content performed the best. The definition of good performance will depend upon your objective you aimed to achieve with the campaign.

If your objective was brand awareness, then you’ll probably look for the most talked-about content, but if your objective was website traffic, then you’ll look at the posts with the highest website link clicks.

You’ll do this exercise for all the platforms your brand uses.

Bonus Step: What’s Next?

Once you’ve analyzed the content performance, you’ll need to plan and experiment with the next campaign accordingly. For the brands I manage, we plan the whole year out based on the insights that give us a pretty good idea of what our users need and want. The insights inform us of the kind of copy, visuals, aesthetics and the communication we should stick to and the ones we should ditch.

For example we found out that the ‘Learn More’ CTA garnered the most clicks by our target audience in 2019, so 90% of the content we released in 2020, had the ‘Learn More’ CTA.

Similarly, you can pinpoint which kind of visual aesthetic worked for your brand, did animated content performed better or still images performed better?

If you can get multiple heads to analyze the data, you’ll find it to be challenging and fun to get to the conclusion of what you should be doing next!

This is how you can get started with a Digital Marketing Strategy if you own a brand or work with a brand and hope to digitize it. If there’s anything you’d like to discuss in more detail, I’m just one Email away at storytellingnut@gmail.com.

The next blog I’ll be releasing will focus solely on content creation, if you’d like to receive an email notification when it goes live, be sure to become a Storytelling Nut here.

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