Getting your business online has never been easier, new tools and technology have allowed many companies to explore many opportunities and reach new markets. Your clients are now closer and more engaged with your and your competitor's brand, which is why you need an effective digital marketing strategy to put you ahead of the game.
Get your house in order
One of the key steps in building your digital marketing strategy is to clearly define your brand. Look within your organization and make sure you and your team understand what you represent.
Clearly state the problem you are trying to solve for your customer, the benefits they will get from choosing your brand, and your offer. One way you can do that is by doing a brand health check, it's a free tool I developed by learning from the best, simply make a copy and edit it for your brand.
Understand your customer
Wanting to sell to everybody is tempting, but unfortunately, that is a recipe for disaster and it never ends well. What you need is a well-defined customer that you intend to solve a problem for.
Choose who you want to serve and then make it your mission to understand them, and the important aspects of their lives. You need to know who they are, what they do for a living, their education level, their favorite online and offline hangouts, and their relationship status (yes, you read that right). People are influenced by their loved ones, and if you are selling to married women for example you need to understand that their decisions may be influenced by their partners.
Build an airtight buyer persona, seek to understand every aspect of their lives and where your brand fits. Once that is done, test your theory by having a 101 chat with real-life potential customers and see what they say, this will be fun! You will learn a lot, that's a promise.
While you can not serve the whole world it is perfectly okay to have more than one buyer persona. Just make sure you understand their buying journeys and never mix them up.
Define your goals
You have your well-defined brand, you have your client persona(s) now it's time to set goals and clearly state what your brand wants to achieve in the next quarter, six months, year, or three years.
Notice that I haven't said five years. Technology is growing and changing so rapidly that few goals will still have value after three years. A quick example is Tik Tok, 3 years ago it did not have the power it has now, but as of recently, it has passed Google in popularity and Youtube in video viewing. Be ready to rethink your goals every year or you will be left behind.
The goals you set as part of your strategy will vary depending on your brand needs. This may include:
Brand awareness
Audience growth
Building a community
Lead generation or donor attraction
Your goals should be so well defined that you can place measuring tools around them to determine their success or failure.
Instead of stating that you want a million followers rephrase that to Gaining one million female followers based in Arusha by December 2022
Choose your battlefield
With a clear customer in mind and SMART goals, carefully pick your battlegrounds. Yes, there are thousands of online spaces but if your clients are like us red-blooded humans then they should be lurking in the usual corners.
Are they on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Tik Tok, or Instagram?
There are many ways you can attract your clients online, but rather than casting your net too wide and hopping from one thing to another, take time to carefully select the platforms that best suit your needs and focus all your energy on them. If you are a B2B company, focus most of your energy on LinkedIn and Twitter but if you're targeting teenage girls then your best chances are with Tik Tok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
But wait your target user might be teenage girls, and if you are trying to get students in your school then your buyers are parents, find out which platforms they use the most. The same thing for diapers, your user might be a baby, but your buyer remains the parent. Hint: target the parent 😉
The ultimate goal
Whether your focus is on B2B or B2C with a big budget or small your ultimate goal should be attracting leads to your website.
Social media is not something you own, these are websites that attract people and let them create content on their behalf. You only create a page on social media and if you ever close that account or the social media loses it's magic you lose all your followers a.k.a clients.
Create catalogs, blogs, articles, and video content on your website then use your social media channels to attract people to that content. If you have a product on sale, tell your followers about it then place a link for them to follow and buy. The more traffic you gain for your website the more likely you are to sell and rank higher on search engines.
Remember to give your website time to grow and work with your team to test out different ways to attract traffic using organic and paid ads.
Have fun creating your strategy, and if you need my help please book a consultation session through this email mbumita@gmail.com