Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media Marketing

How to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy, One Step at a Time

Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing Strategy, Internet Marketing Strategy

This guide is the be-all and end-all Digital Marketing Strategy.

Do you require more clicks, engagement, or sales? If you are looking to enhance your online marketing endeavors, you must have a grasp of how a Digital Marketing Strategy works.

A Digital Marketing Strategy can help you convert total strangers into loyal fans. Although various guides are available on the internet, none of them are as comprehensive as the one you’re about to read.

This eight-step Digital Marketing Strategy will help people find your brand and develop relationships with you before they transition into regular customers.

This is not a journey potential customers should take by themselves. Left to their own devices, these people will become lost, lose interest, or forget your brand entirely.

Ultimately, marketing isn’t a one-and-done process. It involves eight different stages that must be accounted for when it comes to promotion and purchases.

The strategy you develop must navigate people through each step and provide them with assistance when they become lost. By involving yourself in their process, you can guide them through every step in order to ensure their conversion to loyal customers becomes a reality.

If you have a solid grasp of what a Digital Marketing Strategy entails, you’ll be able to willfully engineer your company in a manner that predictably moves people through each stage of the process.

To put it another way, generating leads won’t be left to chance. You shouldn’t knock on wood and hope things work out for you. When you have an understanding of how a Digital Marketing Strategy works, referrals and positive reviews will essentially become automated.

Marketing’s purpose is to push customers and prospects subtly and seamlessly through every stage of a Digital Marketing Strategy.

The following article will post a couple of questions pertaining to your company:

What kind of value are you providing the market?
What makes your company worthy of a customer’s business? Why would a potential customer spend their money on you? As a rule of thumb, understand that customers don’t really care what you’re selling as much is how it will affect them.

How can you PREDICTABLY and INTENTIONALLY convert prospects into promoters, advocates, and leads?
A majority of this article will be focused on this particular query. By the time you’re finished reading it, you’ll have a roadmap outlined to predictably and intentionally move customers through their buying journey.

buying journey

Predictability and intentionality are vital, and here’s why:

A Digital Marketing Strategy for your business already exists if you already have even one customer. The question you need to ask yourself is if that customer was intentionally generated, and if so, are you capable of getting another customer using that same intention.

By the end of this article, you’ll have the insight necessary to produce new leads, convert them into buyers, and have those people refer you to others.

Keeping the above two questions in your thoughts, as you make your way through each phase of the Digital Marketing Strategy, you are encouraged to go back to these questions repeatedly. Consider the VALUE provided, as well as how you will PREDICTABLY and INTENTIONALLY transform prospects.

To answer these questions, you must understand what healthy relationships in business entail.

Let’s go through each phase of a Digital Marketing Strategy, one step at a time.

First Step: Create Awareness

The initial step is a no-brainer. You must be on a prospect’s radar.
People need to know that you exist before they can purchase anything from you.

This is the first step in any Digital Marketing Strategy.

It’s a fairly self-explanatory step involving someone discovering you. Nobody can be expected to have automatic knowledge of you. If you want to build customers, you need to build awareness first.

This can be achieved through social media, word-of-mouth, events, blog posts, advertising, or other channels that gets your offers, solutions, and products in the eyes of potential customers.

In order for this to happen, the content that you create must either inform or entertain people enough to get their attention.

Awareness

Second Step: Stimulate Engagement

Once prospects are aware that you exist, you have ignited a relationship with them. However, you still need to earn their trust, as well as help them understand you better.

As such, the following step will entail nurturing relationships with prospects.

Engagement involves interaction with prospects. Talk directly to them using some type of content which is informative, entertaining, or a mixture of both.

Engagement must be maintained throughout a customer’s journey. It is NOT a one-time task.

As part of your Digital Marketing Strategy, this phase starts right after your initial interaction or communication with prospects. It continues for the duration of the whole experience these people have with your company. It entails an ongoing discussion with them using multiple channels: customer support, email, online forums, blogs, etc.

Engagement

HEADS UP: before beginning, it is imperative to understand who your target market is, where they’re located, and what you want them to purchase. To get a better idea of the type of people you are selling to, download our customer avatar template for FREE by clicking here.

Third Step: Turn These People Into Subscribers

When the experience people have with your company is positive, trust starts to form. After this happens, you can ask them to commit by subscribing to a newsletter, which will grant you permission to send them emails.

From here, your prospect will know more about you, and will have interacted with your brand in some form or another.

Obtaining a prospect’s contact details all but solidifies the odds of you communicating with them in the future.

How come?

Nowadays, people are bombarded with content in marketing from just about every company. Just because a person read a blog article of yours doesn’t ensure that they will willfully return to you down the road.

When people give you information that allows you to reach out to them (for instance, their email address), they want you to get in touch with them later on. Their contact info is usually traded to you in return for a bribe of some sort, be it in the form of free products, services, or content.

Subscribers

There is a problem with this, though. These days, people are hesitant about sharing private information. As such, you must present them with something of value that justifies this information exchange. Some people use guides, reports, demos, book chapters, webinars, or product samples to entice customers into giving them their email addresses.

Ultimately, you must present prospects with something they desire. All they have to do to get whatever your offering is surrender their email address. That’s all.

Fourth Step: Convert Them into Customers

If your offering has value (perhaps it solves a problem or answers a question), your prospects will be quite eager to share their contact information with you. All they need is information on how to do it.

The most optimal way of achieving that is to use a low risk/high-value offer (a.k.a. entry point offer) that allows them to sample your offering without you suffering a significant loss.

For clarification’s sake, entry point offers aren’t developed to earn you profits. Their sole intention is to facilitate a seamless transition that makes them go from follower or subscriber to a new customer. You’ll be able to concentrate on earning profits shortly afterward.

For now, the financial commitment you make should be small: perhaps between $8 and $20. Endeavor to have your costs covered after the acquisition of a customer.

This isn’t the place to encourage prospects to invest more money on more intricate services or products. In doing so, you would essentially be asking for too much way too soon.

This isn’t even the place to think about earning profits for yourself. During this phase, expect to lose money acquiring prospects.

Convert

The conversion stage entails ramping commitment levels up from leads you have already. Profitability is not the objective at this stage.

Successful businesses worldwide understand that costly marketing activities is a part of the customer acquisition process. It is the reason cell phone companies happily buy out the contract of your competition, or provide you with a brand-new phone at no charge.

Acquisition of the customer is the goal here; profits will come later.

Fifth Step: Generate Brand Excitement

A new customer will conduct some type of transaction with your company after this point. The transaction will be small, though. Regardless, a customer has given you a portion of their money or time.

It is now of utmost importance to ensure that this transaction remains a positive experience for them.

Here’s why: if an individual did not receive value from the transaction, they will not have any incentive to progress to the following stage and buy costlier items from you.

With that said, how can you go about ensuring that the experience customers have with you is good?

customer satisfaction

Firstly, we must assume that the item or service a prospect gave up their time or money for was worth it. The services or products you offer must be outstanding to them.

Secondly, a prospect must receive value from the most recent transaction they had with your company. The excitement phase of a Digital Marketing Strategy is what you need to keep circling back to. Whenever a prospect or customer follows through on what you have asked of them (for instance, attend a webinar, purchase a product, use a service, etc.), your marketing should be engineered so that it optimizes the value they obtain.

Sixth Step: Turn Them into Repeated Buyers (Ascend Phase)

By now, you’ve invested money, resources, and time into acquiring customers and leads while ensuring that they receive value from you. It is possible that – up until this point – you might not make a profit. This will be more likely if the market you’re in is competitive (and which one isn’t, really?). Money might be lost on this process’ front end for the sake of acquiring customers.

Front end purchases can be a shrewd business move if you can monetize customers from the back end.

A Digital Marketing Strategy’s Ascend phase is where customers are prepared to purchase more from you, and do so more frequently. If your company provides a core offer, then this will be the time to present them with that offer. After a customer buys your core offer, you can then present relevant offers to them. During this phase, you should be up-selling to customers and offering them profit maximizers.

Ascend Phase

Seventh Step: Encourage Them to Refer You to Others (Advocate Phase)

At this point, you have a satisfied customer that has bought several things from your company. The subsequence phase in your Digital Marketing Strategy would be to encourage customers to be advocates for your company.

An advocate can be defined as someone who praises your business.

Some refer to advocates as “passive promoters.” Your business won’t be promoted by them actively, but if anyone asks them about you or the services you provide, these people will respond with favorable things to say about you/your services.

Therefore, when you’re at this phase of a Digital Marketing Strategy, ask customers to share any positive experiences they’ve had with your company either through a post on social media or writing a positive review somewhere.

Advocate

The last two phases (Promote and Advocate) aren’t beyond the scope of controllable marketing. These phases can intentionally generate more promoters and advocates.

Eighth Step: Turn Them into Promoters

What separates promoters from advocates is the fact that they actively speak highly about your products, services, or brand. On the other hand, brand advocates aren’t as active. In fact, the main difference between the two is that the latter is passive.

In several instances, a promoter might’ve had a positive encounter with your business, and wanted to tell their family and friends about it. In other instances, they promote you because you’ve given them an incentive to.

Because new people are hearing about your brand from someone they trust (like a family member or friend), these people are more inclined to become new customers of yours.

Proactively building more promoters will be essential, as it produces a slew of unpaid salespeople who spread the gossip about your offering.

Promoters

Active promotion might entail a commission or affiliate relationship, or perhaps a complimentary offer in exchange for sending new customers in your direction. It is a situation where both you and the referrer wins.

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