We all have been in a position where we want to spend luxuriously on our brand’s campaign and make some over-promising strategies. But do we at all know what our brand really needs? Or what others expect from us? There would have been many instances when you made a strategy and thought its undefeatable and will surely go viral but the results are far away from what you expected.
Internet Users.
The data above shows the number of internet users until June 2019. As you can see more than billions of people are on digital platforms and you can’t control everyone. Hence, it is advisable to get your hands on the samples first. Samples are the few selected users that you test your strategies on. You can select them by various procedures on the basis of their gender, age, profession, interests, etc. This will help you in understanding your target audience first.
Things you should do while planning your brand’s digital marketing strategy are:
- Make Your Brand Stand Out:
Think again why are you planning to run ads or build a website? The answer is very simple to define your brand. Every plan is drafted to achieve certain goals. The goal may vary from brand to brand. You can be on digital platforms just to make your brand more visible or maybe to attract more sales or just for raising funds, but is any of it possible without proving the worth of your brand? We all know digital platforms are a great way to express yourself and reach out to the target audience. One should use this opportunity to make their brand’s ideology more clear and prominent. For the initial days, one must focus on the USP and the beautification. If your message is very clear and to the point audience will be more attracted to it. Gone are the days when glitter attracted the youth. Nowadays it’s more about simplicity, short and one-liners. Generation Z is more about summary. You just need to feed them with information that can be explained in as few lines as possible. This is the reason why copywriting is taking the place of content writing. One should not just keep their SEO game on point but also need to have held on social media platforms.
- Know Your Audience:
If you don’t understand the audience you will be selling your services or products to how can you define them? You can be successful only in explaining your product only if you know the psychology of your target audience. Take sales, for instance, the most common question asked is to sell the pen. But how are you going to sell it if you don’t even know they need of your potential buyer?
In other words, will you buy a brand that you know nothing about or the products that you don’t need? You can’t sell a comb to a bald person. Digital marketing is very simple, you just need to know your audience to sell your product.
Always ask these questions to understand your consumers:
- Why do they buy a product?
- How do they buy it- offline or online or any particular seller?
- What can affect their decision and makes you stand out?
Once these answers are clear to you, the next step to planning out the strategy comes. You may even depend on the data that can be collected through various sources like emails, surveys, blogs, etc. After gaining all the information you can start designing the persona.
Designing a persona means creating a superficial audience that will help you in giving an exact picture. When you start knowing your audience you make better decisions as you can understand their psychology. This even helps in building the ad campaigns which gives very effective results.
- Choosing The Right Platform:
Once you have a thorough understanding of your audience you can easily figure out the channel you should be using. If you have more of the corporate audience then LinkedIn is the best, and if it’s more youth-oriented you can go for Instagram and Snapchat. Not just audience but you can also select your motive. If your main motive is website traffic then obviously you will choose blogs, PPC, or other ways. But if it’s sales then you would go a little harsh.
Hence, it is very important to know the exact motive and then you can easily figure out the channel you will be marketing on. Sometimes channels are not meant for consumers’ awareness or sales but for the brand itself. The brand should know the channels or platforms that can give them deep insights into their performance. Also, this helps in keeping a close eye on your competition.
- Analyzing your ROI:
Return on Investment is something that every brand needs and as a marketing person, it’s your duty to give your best to the organization. Nearly every platform offers you an insight into your performance. It is the best practice to keep a check on them at regular intervals. Your strategy and future plans depend on this report. You can never run back from the fact that data speaks for it. You may have worked really hard and put all your blood and sweat into a campaign but if the data says it failed then it is failed and your efforts go in vain.
We mostly try another approach, our team focuses on both backup and main plan. Never treat your 2nd approach as a result of failed attempts. But, always try making it the best.
TIP- Before making any strategy or plan always do thorough research. Your research should be data-driven and cost-effective. Cost-effective doesn’t mean it should be cheap, it simply means that your budget should define the reason for the spending and show data that made you invest in it. If your research is on point and strong then you can easily analyze the failures and successful attempts of others.
Your digital marketing plan should be based on the aforementioned points and you can see the change yourself.