4 Aspects of a Digital Marketing Strategy

by Joshua Botello

Digital marketing has been alluring for small business owners to leverage the technology that larger corporations have been using for the last few years. Many small business owners looking to jump into the foray without quite knowing what digital marketing is. Small business owners may not understand marketing as a whole, so if they want to migrate or expand into digital marketing it tends to become a technological mess. It usually means cleaning the slate and rebuilding effective marketing starting from scratch. In this article, we’ll cover the 4 Aspects of a digital marketing strategy to build digital dominance.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is essentially traditional marketing in a digital space. With digital marketing, the idea is to leverage online platforms and properties like websites, blogs, social media, video, live streams, webinars, and email marketing. Many of the fundamental marketing principles such as goals, target markets, marketing channels, and creating a marketing mix.

Create Goals

Goals in marketing strategy are akin to a destination on a journey. You don’t know what you have accomplished if you haven’t set a goal. Goals in a marketing strategy are what you are going to measure your efforts and tweak according to your results. There are 3 sets of goals you need to create to have a fully faceted digital Marketing strategy, so let's go over those.

Business goals. These goals are the aspirations of the business to grow through marketing online and offline. Goals need to SMART. I don't mean they need to be verbose or complicated but specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and Temporal. These goals can be as simple as increasing online signups by 20% or adding 1000 followers to an email list in 2020. Creating a solid goal based on what your business is looking to achieve is essential to success.

Audience goals. Once you create your business goals and determine who your audience is (I’ll get to that below), you need to determine what customers want. Customers are looking for your business to solve their problem and creating audience goals is how your solution makes their life better. You can use buyer personas to create these audience goals.

Marketing goals. Now here is where the convergence of business goals meets the audience. The business goals will coincide with your business needs, for example, increases in product sales or subscribers.

Build Your Audience

The audience is the driving force for all your marketing efforts. If the audience doesn't respond to your efforts or messaging, then you are likely to waste time and money. This is why knowing your audience is important. So how do you determine your audience? Ideally, research is done (if you are a new business) while the business is in the planning stage or reviewing current customers to draw patterns within those demographics.

So how do we do this?

If you have current customers but are looking to build a digital marketing strategy then here’s what you do.

• Step 1 Document your best customers. You know who they are, know to list them out.
• Step 2 Find a pattern. Your best customers have something in common. Determine those patterns and group them by Age, Gender, income, location, and hobbies.
• Step 3 Determine their goals. These customers get something from you they don't anywhere else. Knowing what gets out of your business is what it’s all about.
• Step 4 Media. Finally, we need to figure out where they are hanging out. Determine what channels or media they frequently use so you know where to best reach them.

Pick a Channel

So now that we know who your audience is and where they hang out. You need to determine where you need to be. Based on your audience and where most of them are, that's where you need to be also. It doesn't have to be fancy or complicated. It can be as simple as having a blog or email list to social media and video or live streams.

The biggest trouble most business owners have is choosing the correct channels based on their audience and their goals. As you pick your channels, it is extremely important to understand the demographics of those channels, especially social media. As a business owner, it is a lot easier to choose a channel you are familiar with or choose a fancy new channel with billions of users without the proper demographic makeup of your audience.

For example, If your audience makeup is over 40 years old, leveraging Snapchat and TikTok aren't going to help your goals. Alternatively, investing heavily in Linkedin when your business is aimed at consumers won’t get you anywhere. Choose your channels wisely.

Build Your Media Mix

After having to determine WHERE you are going to market, now you need to determine how you are going to market. This is where your media mix comes in. But what is a media mix? The Media mix is the digital version of the marketing mix in traditional marketing, where a business uses a combination of Owned, Earned, and Paid media. Ideally, a digital marketing mix incorporates each of the media types to formulate an effective strategy. Let’s take a look at each of the media sources below.

Owned

Media that is owned is created or “under complete” control of the business. This media is created on your website, blog, email newsletter, videos, and podcasts. The great thing about owned media is that it's largely free (besides the resources it takes to create) but it is largely dependent on SEO and search algorithms. From a credibility standpoint, it’s the business advocating for itself and may not be picked up readily by your audience.

Earned

Media that is considered user-generated like comments, reviews, quotes, or social media interactions. The difference between owned and earned media is how it is discovered. This is social proof: where owned media is shared by a community on any platform that garners positive sentiment. Earned and owned works together by creating content on owned sources and sharing it with the community to earn social proof and build authority.

Paid

Media placement costs. This media is paid to drive traffic to your company. This media includes Google Ads, Social Media Ads, paid influencers, and sponsored messages. Paid media gets traffic. Plain and simple. The problem is it can cost a lot and it doesn’t go very far on its own. Paid media needs the owned media content for the audience to resonate with that content that will be shared and earn social proof.

While digital marketing is a whole new frontier for many small business owners, it’s not a silver bullet. Depending on business needs and market, business owners may never have to employ digital marketing. As technology progresses digital marketing may be inevitable, so investing early on the business owners' part, will allow the business to grow and thrive.

Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.