4 Steps to Building a Digital Marketing Strategy

4 Steps to Building a Digital Marketing Strategy

A strong online presence matters. In today’s world, hundreds and thousands of brands are vying for consumer attention and only businesses with a strong digital presence stand out from the crowd.

Every business, irrespective of its size, needs a winning digital marketing strategy. Whether you want to build a brand from scratch or strengthen an existing one, an effective digital marketing strategy will help you achieve specific digital goals.

Here are steps to build a game-changing digital marketing strategy from a Santa Rosa-based agency.

Set Goals, Objectives, and Key Performance Indicators 

Without clear, actionable goals, you are essentially directionless. When defining your goals and objectives, ask yourself what you want to achieve. Set both quantitative and qualitative goals. Quantitative goals are measurable, whereas qualitative goals are intangible.

Typical examples of quantitative goals include increasing monthly recurring revenue by 15 percent or boosting conversion rate by 3 percent. Some examples of quantitative goals are increasing consumer trust and improving brand reputation.

Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable, specific, and tied to your company’s mission and vision. Break them down into milestones.

Set meaningful and effective KPIs, ones that focus on traffic, optimization, and conversion. Some common KPIs are pages per visit, conversion rate, unique visitors per day, conversion rate per keyword, and attrition rate.

Understand and Define Your Target Audience 

Calculate market size, perform market research, and identify the key players in your market. Define your audience. Do you want to target people in a specific age group or do you want to focus on a specific niche?

Identify platforms your target audience uses and what type of content best appeals to them. Try to understand factors that influence consumer buying behavior. Identify e-commerce sites your target audience uses to buy products.

Create and Implement Your Strategy 

Identify the marketing channels you can focus on. Invest in the ones your target audience uses or choose popular channels that drive sales. Use tools such as Google Analytics to test different channels and identify the ones that work best for your business.

Next, build your content strategy. Use data to understand customer pain points. Decide how you want to use the different types of content. Use your content to create a strong value proposition. Your content should be interesting, informative, and thought-provoking. It should discuss a problem or challenge your target audience faces while offering a solution to it.

Monitor and Track Digital Marketing Performance 

Monitor your KPIs. It may be a good idea to hire a digital marketing company in Santa Rosa for the task. Your digital marketing partner will generate detailed reports, provide transparent communication, and suggest strategies or optimizations to improve your campaign.

WSI Smart Marketing is one of the best digital marketing companies in Sonoma County. We will build an adaptable and agile digital marketing strategy that addresses your pain points. If you’d like to discuss your business’s needs, call us at (707) 843-3714.

4 Email Marketing Tips for Effective Communication

Man and Woman Celebrating Over Office Desk

Ask any email marketing agency in Sonoma County “Is email marketing dead?” and you’ll hear a similar response. No! In fact, the volume of emails sent is increasing exponentially year over year. Direct messaging, phone calls, and social media are all great methods for establishing open lines of communication with your clients and building brand connections.

However, email marketing is undeniably one of the best communication assets your business can leverage. Utilize these best practices to create powerful, meaningful connections with your current and future customers.

Send the Right Content

Sending the right content means delivering valuable, relevant, and timely information to your audience. Some great examples of this include: blogs, industry news or developments, requests for surveys, and so much more.

Creating content buckets will help you define the various types of information you want to provide to your readers. This sets expectations from the very beginning about what the client can expect to consistently receive from your business. Analyzing your email campaign performance is a great way to determine what is and is not working to help optimize your campaigns.

Build a Clean List

Quality over quantity is key. Buying lists from third parties will only increase your bounce rates, lower recipient open rates, and diminish the quality of your survey feedback. Not to mention you risk having your domain blacklisted if you get reported for spam too much.

The good news? Building an organic list simply requires a bit of consistency and patience. The main task is to just ask! Leverage your social media presence by posting a preview of your blog and prompt followers to subscribe if they want to learn more. When you send any welcome letters or account updates, be sure to have call to action (CTA) buttons easily visible so clients can subscribe to your newsletters and blog updates.

Optimize

Optimizing your emails for effective user experience is one of the most important factors for successfully establishing and maintaining communication with your clients and partners. There are a few things to consider when optimizing your emails. Consistency in your branding format and how frequently emails are sent out can build brand recognition.

Keeping your subject line short and to the point, typically six words or less, helps prevent your email being from being flagged as spam. Lastly, and more importantly, ensure the email is optimally formatted for desktop and mobile presentation. You should always test this by sending the email to yourself first and viewing it on both desktop and mobile.

Track and Measure

You cannot track what you do not measure. One of the biggest challenges business owners face with email marketing is finding the right formula that works for your specific audience. You can use A/B testing to help determine what style of content resonates best with your customers.

A/B testing can be used to test long and short formats, subject lines, from name, and much more. Once you have established an appropriate tracking method and your key metrics, you can see where you need to make adjustments in your strategy or delivery.

Utilizing these best practices will help you make the most of your communication efforts with clients while continuing to improve the quality of your digital marketing campaigns. If you don’t have the time to create a methodical, strategic email marketing strategy, you can always partner with an email marketing agency in Sonoma County.

Have questions? The experts at WSI Smart Marketing are experienced with email marketing and a wide variety of other digital marketing services to help you create an effective, well-rounded strategy for your business. Call us at (707) 843-3714 to discuss your business’s needs.