How to structure and create a digital marketing strategy?

We think that an omnichannel marketing strategy is essential for marketers to make use of the increasing digital marketing possibilities for acquiring and retaining consumers to increase their sales.

Your 5-step digital marketing strategy

The RACE Approach, which includes the RACE Framework as its structure, is a great tool for structuring your marketing plan. It should be used to describe how you’ll get from A to Z across Plan, Reach, Act, Convert, and Engage.

As you can see on the marketing funnel above, creating an effective digital marketing plan necessitates the completion of these five stages, which nurture the customer through their experiences with your organization while influencing their decision-making process and lifetime value.

The RACE Framework is a simple, practical marketing framework that may be customized to suit your company’s needs. One of the advantages of our digital marketing strategy system is that you can observe effects from your efforts right away, as well as user data and insights to modify your plan to meet your goals.

The 5-step method to develop a digital marketing plan that works.

Plan, reach, act, convert, and engage are the five stages of strategic digital marketing planning. In this part, we’ll go through the key success factors for each stage of your digital marketing plan, along with examples that are integrated throughout the Smart Insights RACE Framework.

1. Plan

Every successful digital marketing strategy begins with a plan! We recommend taking a data-driven approach, assessing your current digital marketing performance, and then making improvements.

Customizing analytics, creating KPI dashboards, and establishing SMART objectives are examples of omnichannel planning methods that may be used to develop a strategy for prioritized improvements in how you employ digital marketing media, technology, and data to generate leads and sales.

To guarantee that your digital marketing approach is working effectively and efficiently, we recommend taking a digitally focused strategy and planning. Our digital transformation options are intended to help marketers and executives develop a comprehensive, data-driven, real-world digital marketing plan to support their organization’s overall vision.

The objective of digital transformation is to develop your company’s digital maturity while also integrating “always-on” digital marketing activities with brand and product marketing inside the organization.
An ‘initial’ level of maturity in digital marketing denotes a lack of plan or strategy, vague goals for digital contribution, and limited prioritization of activities.

However, an optimized market-leading digital marketing strategy includes complete integration of digital marketing throughout the company, a structure testing and optimization program, and martech and data integrated for 360-degree customer insights.

2. Reach

By increasing the number of people who know about you, you can improve your marketing funnel. To drive visits to your site, use the most up-to-date key online marketing methods in your digital marketing strategy.

Global members can stay on top of the latest marketing strategies across all phases of the RACE Framework by signing up for Global Memberships. For example, take a look at three tactics to improve your organic search in 2022, which are drawn from our digital marketing trends.

• Continue to track core updates and EAT, especially in 2022, when many marketers have already noticed a serious dip in traffic.
• Continue to investigate your options from structured data and SERP features. For example, in August 2021, Google made this modification to page titles that had an impact on the SERPs. Also, the latest SERPs Features overview from Moz emphasizes focus areas, such as Related Questions.
• If you advertise to local consumers, search engine updates have an impact on keyword usage. These changes can be valuable to optimize for if you target local purchasers.

3. Act

Make use of social media and other means to boost engagement on your website or social media to help you build future leads. You must influence your audience’s next steps after you’ve reached them so that they continue down the funnel towards a purchase decision.

Content marketing

When it comes to content marketing, there’s a lot of discussion about what the goal is. At its most basic level, strategic content marketing refers to using compelling material to attract people and persuade them to convert.

User experience (UX/CX)

You should consider the various types of innovations in interaction design, which have been found to improve engagement with your material when attempting to change customer behavior on your site or social media platforms. This informative summary, with case studies, provides a view of what Taff considers the newest interaction design trends that will continue into 2022.

• Micro-interactions to assist in increasing user activity
• Neomorphism
• Immersive 3D visuals
• The goal is to create a website that loads quickly. SEO expert, Peter Kent, states “it’s all about making your users’ experience as positive and painless as possible.” For example, Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics have encouraged website designers to focus on speed.

4. Convert

The goal of your planned digital marketing approach is, without a doubt, to convert more consumers. Retargeting, nurturing, and conversion rate optimization can be used to nudge and encourage your audience to buy online or in-person if phone and face-to-face interactions are crucial for you.

The following are three ways to boost your conversions:

• Consider how you might optimize your site for always-on use. The variety of testing methods is one of the main advantages of digital marketing, yet many businesses still miss out on these possibilities.
• Examine the level of customization on your website. According to a SmarterHQ survey, 72 percent of consumers claim they only interact with marketing messages that are personalized and suited to their interests nowadays.
• Don’t dismiss social commerce. North American e-commerce agency Absolunet has identified the following indicators of the growing popularity of social commerce:
• According to the E-commerce Association, 87% of e-commerce consumers feel that social media aids in their purchasing process.
• According to a recent study by ProfitWell, 1 out of 4 business owners utilizes Facebook to sell their company.
• According to a report by Social Media Explorer, 40% of businesses use social media to boost sales.
• Consumers would prefer to buy products directly through social media platforms, according to 30 percent.

5. Engage

Finally, after you’ve worked so hard to acquire them, do you know that retaining current consumers engaged after their initial purchase may boost sales? Using the data you currently have about them, use web, email, and social media marketing to create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.

There are a number of different tactics digital marketers may use to gather client feedback and exercise their skills. Today’s possibilities for market research and testing include:

• A/B testing
• Customer personas
• Customer journey and content mapping
• Voice of customer surveys
• Path analysis
• Website customer intent surveys
• Usability studies of digital experiences
• Multivariate testing
• 
  

Furthermore, machine learning enables for tremendous insights into consumer behavior. Predictive analytics may be used to:

• The send time to connect with a prospect (may be established when they originally purchased or subscribed, but this can be fine-tuned over time)
• Based on an analysis of latency (average response time), we offer the best timing and follow-up communications.
• The best product or category combination from cluster-based segmentation

How to develop a winning plan

The Smart Insights RACE Framework is a tried-and-true, step-by-step method for getting started. Use the Smart Insights RACE Framework to enhance your marketing and gain new consumers.

Do you have a clear plan for digital marketing?

Did you know even in 2021, many companies don’t have a digital marketing strategy?

Almost half (45%) of businesses don’t yet have a planned strategy, according to our most recent Digital marketing study.

Why is it important to have a digital marketing strategy?

Here are the top 10 most common issues we encounter if you don’t have a plan. This might assist you in refining the scope and goal of your online marketing strategy, as well as justifying spending on digital marketing. Some examples include:

You’ll have a great online value proposition if you’re planning to start an internet business.

The success of your online business lies in how effectively you can communicate the benefits of your products or services. A unique value proposition that is tailored to each of your target customer personas will assist you in distinguishing your online service and encouraging existing and new consumers to engage and stay loyal. Marketers who are savvy use their marketing strategies to attract B2B.

For many businesses, developing an omnichannel marketing plan is crucial since the material engages your consumers through various channels such as search, social media, email marketing, and your blog.

You’re not connected (or “disintegrated”)

It’s all too typical for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos, whether it’s a specialist digital marketer sitting in IT or a different digital agency. It’s simpler that way to bundle ‘digital’ into a single category. However, of course, this is true only in moderation. Paid, owned, and earned digital media perform best

That’s why we recommend creating a comprehensive digital marketing plan so that your digital marketing can work for you! Digital will be integrated into your business as usual with the implementation of an integrated strategy. Find out more about how to integrate digital marketing into your existing corporate culture.

Duplication is costly and time-consuming.

Even if you have enough resources, they may be wasted. This is especially true in businesses with a larger budget where many departments of the marketing organization use distinct tools and engage different agencies for comparable online marketing operations.

The following are a few factors to consider when thinking about how you may promote your company. You’ll need to carefully analyze your situation in order to determine whether it’s possible and how much time, money, and effort would be required. There are many drawbacks associated with hiring remote workers that we will discuss later on in this article.

Marketing success factors in digital marketing

An effective digital marketing approach can assist you in making the finest judgments to help your firm succeed. A strategy process model establishes a framework for organizing and following the various activities of strategy formation and execution.

A marketing plan, therefore, should include a check to ensure that all of your skills are in place to assist your company manage all of the digital touchpoints. However, which capabilities are critical and which do you need to evaluate?

A winning approach should be based on assessing seven critical capabilities, which are:

• Strategic approach
• Performance improvement process
• Management buy-in
• Resourcing and structure
• Data and infrastructure
• Integrated customer communications
• Customer experience

Marketing strategy

To begin, a marketing strategy is a data-driven, proactive method for promoting and communicating across all channels and touchpoints. All marketing efforts are informed by the business’s overarching structure and vision, which was established first. Marketers implement tactics to execute their activities that lead to the outcome once the plan has been established and communicated.

Digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing plan is a channel strategy that is derived from a marketing plan. The digital marketing approach must include the following elements:

• Intermediaries, publishers, and competitors can all help you stay up to speed.
• Objectives for future online and offline channel contributions are the foundation.
• Define and communicate the differences of the channel to entice consumers to use it.
• HOWEVER, a channel integration is required.

Put another way, digital marketing strategy is a strategy for businesses to:

• Reach our channel leads and sales goals.
• Budget for acquisition, conversion, retention, and growth.
• To successfully leverage social media, businesses need to communicate the advantages of utilizing this channel.
• Prioritize the audiences that you want to reach through the channel.
• Prioritize items that may be purchased through the channel.

There are surprisingly few high-quality digital marketing strategy websites, given that most of the time, these strategies take precedence. We think we’re different in our emphasis on strategy as well.