Whether e-commerce or brick-and-mortar, digital marketing is an effective approach for generating new business and promoting your brand.
But before you jump into doing stuff, it’s important to have a proper strategy and framework to build on.
At its most fundamental, strategy is a general plan for achieving your goals within a given set of capacities and constraints. A good marketing strategy will take into account your business’ strengths, weaknesses, resources, and marketplace, maximizing results within that context.
Taking the time to put a proper strategy together will:
- Coherently direct your efforts towards overarching business goals
- Minimize backtracking and wasted effort
- Effectively establish your brand within the marketplace
- Create messaging that resonates with your consumer and differentiates you from your competition
- And ultimately, drive sustainable conversions.
1. Laying the Groundwork
“If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” -Sun Tzu
Your strategy does not exist in a vacuum, but in a marketplace defined by a unique constellation of consumers, competitors, and constraints. So first up is what we call the discovery phase.
The discovery phase consists of the groundwork necessary to understand the marketing context you’re getting into: appraising your own strengths and weaknesses, assessing the competition, and getting to know your audience’s (or customer base) interests, desires, and pain points.
A. Scope out the consumer/competitor landscape
First is to get a sense of your place in the marketing landscape so that you can make informed decisions. Conduct some research to learn everything you can about your customers: their demographics, preferences, pain points, consumption habits, and online activity.
- Survey existing customers
- Read customer reviews for businesses in your industry
- See what people are saying on social media and forums like Reddit or Quora
It’s important to get a sense of why customers are spending money on your product or service so that you can hit the right notes in your messaging. An accurate understanding of your audience helps you effectively frame and communicate your offer in a way that is most likely to resonate.
Next, audit your competitors' marketing strategies to see how they’re trying to address that need, and to identify gaps, opportunities, and areas where you can differentiate yourself in your own marketing efforts.
Read through their website, their ads, their social media posts. Take note of their language, what they’re highlighting in their messaging, how they’re trying to frame their product or service, what pain points or desires they’re trying to address. Learn from their successes and failures to identify underserved markets, and use this information to craft messaging that distinguishes you from the competitor in your customer’s eyes.
B. Review your market positioning
Now it’s time for a bit of soul-searching. You know what customers are looking for, you know what your competition has to offer. Where do you fit in that equation? What can you offer that others don't? What does your competition offer that you cannot?
Understanding your own strengths, weaknesses, and brand identity is a crucial consideration in your marketing efforts, so be honest with yourself. A clear idea of your competitive advantage means a clear idea of the audience you should be marketing to, and a clear idea of your weaknesses lets you avoid wasting time and money marketing to customers you will not be able to satisfy.
Use this information to define your positioning strategy.
Positioning refers to how you frame your product in the minds of your consumers to distinguish yourself from the competition. For instance, Ikea frames its products very differently than a boutique furniture store. Both sell chairs, but to very different consumers. Understanding this distinction helps Ikea stay focused on the most promising market segments.
Think about your own positioning:
- Who is your audience? What does your ideal customer look like?
- How can you leverage the strengths you’ve identified, or take advantage of your competitor’s weaknesses?
- How can you create a wedge between you and your competition?
- Which specific customer segments do you want to orient your marketing around?
C. Clarify your brand identity
Brand identity refers to the core ideals you represent as a business, and how those ideals are communicated in your marketing efforts.
Everything else held equal, customers will always default to a brand they identify with, because it represents something they want to see in themselves.
Now that you have a clear idea of your market positioning and who you are as a business, make sure that’s clearly reflected in your brand identity.
Put together a brand guidelines document that contains guidelines on colours, fonts, logo, as well as the voice and tone of your marketing communications. And then follow it religiously, remaining consistent across all marketing channels. Consistency is key to leveraging the familiarity principle, establishing credibility, and projecting the image of an established business that functions like a well-oiled machine. For more detailed step by step, read our article on developing your brand identity
2. Crafting the Consumer Journey
Now is the time for doing. At Drive, our strategy is driven by the AIDA model - a conceptual framework that breaks the consumer journey into four distinct steps: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
The basic idea is that a customer will move through these stages in their “consumer journey” before making their final purchase decision.
What makes the AIDA model useful is that it provides a clear organizing principle to your marketing communication, forcing you to think about how your customer will move through your funnel from first discovery of your product to checkout.
For more on this topic, read our article on the AIDA model.
D. Develop your core messaging
Now that you’ve clarified your market positioning and brand identity, it’s time to put together your core messaging.
Quite simply, core messaging is your fundamental approach to communicating and reinforcing:
- Your market position
- Your brand identity
- Your value proposition
- How you address your customer’s pain points
- How you meet your customer’s desires and make their life better
Core messaging spells out the basic ideas that you are trying to communicate, which can then be used to create slightly more tailored communications depending on your particular platform or stage in the AIDA journey.
There’s a bit of an art to this, but it’s an important section that shouldn’t be skipped over. Write out 5-10 short sentences that clearly highlight the bullet points spelled out above. Don’t try to force everything into one sentence; the goal here is clarity and ease of understanding.
Then, organize your messaging into the AIDA framework. Think about which part of your message is most likely to resonate at different points in the consumer journey.
Attention
- Imagine your customer doesn’t know who you are. What is your ‘hook’? Often it’s something that implies a clear recognition of their problem or desire, and a clear solution to their needs.
Interest
- Once you’ve got their attention, which part of your message is most likely to hold their interest? This generally revolves around differentiating yourself from the competition and providing more information on the features of your product or service.
Desire
- At this point you’ve got their brain, now you go for the heart. This section should emphasize benefits, painting a clear picture of how your product will make their life better, simpler, easier, more fun, and so on.
Action
- These messages should seek to create an incentive for purchase, and remove any potential hurdles. This can be emphasizing urgency, ease of purchase, and reminding them of the problem you’re about to solve.
E. Choose your marketing channels
Now you know what you’re going to say. But where are you going to say it?
Deciding which channel is best for your particular business requires a bit of research to get a sense of what’s out there, and understand the costs and benefits of each. Keeping AIDA principles in mind helps: Do your customers know you exist? If not, the first thing to do is get their attention by meeting them where they are.
Here’s a quick rundown of the main options
Paid ads are the most direct way of getting eyeballs on your offer. Most platforms let you segment your audience to show different ads to different groups of people, and generally offer tons of analytics tools that not only make your ads more cost-effective, but help you hone in on new markets and more effective messaging.
Social media is another great way of engaging with your audience and getting word out about your product or service. From your research, you should know which platforms your audience gravitates to, and from there it’s all about posting regularly and engaging authentically to foster relationships and create a slow trickle back to your page and website. Unless you’ve got a big team at your disposal, we’d recommend picking one channel and really nailing it, rather than spread yourself thin across too many channels and do a mediocre job on each.
Content marketing is all about creating content (video, text, images, etc.) that not only attracts the interest of your audience, but encourages them to share it, getting word out organically. There are tons of things that make for good content, but generally it’s something that educates, informs, entertains, and/or connects with the audience emotionally.
Whichever approach you take, remember to stay focused on the customer journey. Think about the experience from your customer’s point of view, and how you can use the touchpoints you’re creating to gradually guide them through towards a purchase decision.
F. Ensure a strong online presence
Now that you’ve decided on your marketing channels, make sure the different facets of your online presence are optimized to support that approach.
Social Media
- Create or update your social media pages to reflect your positioning, messaging, and brand identity. Remember that it’s better to have one or two actively managed pages than to try and fail to do everything. Neglected social media pages are not a good look for any business, so stay focused on your core strengths.
Your Website
- Update your website to reflect the same (remember, consistency!) While you’re doing this, make sure to think about the consumer journey. How do you imagine a customer moving through your website - what are they clicking on, where are those clicks bringing them? How are you holding their attention, generating desire, and creating a website flow that leads towards conversion?
Your Google Profile
- Pretty much everyone uses Google, so make sure you have a business account that accurately reflects - you guessed it - positioning, messaging, and brand identity
3. Implement, Optimize, and Adapt
G. Keep track of KPIs
Once you’ve put everything into place, it’s time to use quantitative data to optimize the qualitative steps above. Think of this strategy as creating a hypothesis about how best to promote your business, using the data you collect in turn to continually improve upon and optimize your strategy.
To learn about how we use data in our AIDA model, you can read our article "AIDA and the Custmer Journey".
C. Stay Flexible
Congratulations, you’ve just created your first marketing strategy. This is an important milestone, and the knowledge you’ve gained will go on to inform almost every facet of your interaction with customers.
But it’s important not to get complacent. Marketing trends evolve rapidly, consumer tastes change, and as your business develops it's likely that you will change as well.
In many respects, digital marketing is all about keeping focused on a moving target, so it’s important to regularly review your marketing strategy to be sure it’s still properly aligned with market conditions.
Read more about seeting up your SMART goals in Digital Marketing