To begin creating your digital marketing strategy, first make sure that you have all the right “ingredients”!
What exactly is “digital marketing”?
In this day and age of technology, digital marketing is essentially just marketing! To create a digital (or regular) marketing strategy, it’s important to see the full picture, and go down every avenue that you can! This plan can then be created step by step, and tailored to suit your specific business needs.
So, first things first. Let’s kick off this “digital marketing recipe” with a set of ingredients, and things you’ll need.
The Method
Step 1: The Audit
Before you begin to create or implement a digital marketing strategy, you’ve got to know exactly what you’re working with. Start with auditing your website, SEO, and social media.
SEO Audit
For the SEO audit, use a tool like SemRush and start optimizing your website for search engines to increase your ranking (or, how close to the top of the page your site is, when someone searches it organically). Use strategic keywords, character counts, and other SEO practices that are optimized for search engines, with your audience in mind. In other words, optimized content still speaks to your customers, while speaking the search engine’s language, too. An SEO audit looks at your content, identifies keyword gaps, and potential errors or warnings. From there, a strategy can be formed to address those issues, and increase traffic over time.
Website Audit
Now it’s time to audit your website! Check for any missing pieces of content, and high performing pages or articles. You should also have a look at the on-page appearance: this is your navigation and menu, copy, and graphics. Check to see that these are optimised for your industry
Social Media Audit
Next, it’s your social media audit. Have a look at your online presence-what accounts do you have, and on which platforms? How are they performing-are some pieces of content doing far better than others? Taking a deeper dive into your social media can help you to identify any gaps, the strengths you can play to, and your weaknesses to amend. Make sure that every account is on brand-that is, using the correct messaging, colours and aesthetics.
Tip: Find out which posts are doing well, and track them over time-what is it that makes them do so well, and how can you apply that to all of your posts?
Step 2: Immediate Errors
Once you’ve completed the auditing process, you’ll have a better idea of which areas to prioritize-in baking terms, how sweet or salty you want your cake to be. When starting to create your digital marketing strategy, the first things on your priority list should be fixing any immediate errors and issues found in the audit. This can be anything from broken links or duplicate content, to page speed problems.
Step 3: Prioritization
Now that immediate errors are fixed, it’s time to strategize which digital marketing activities to prioritize in your overall plan. This can again be taken from the audit. Make sure that you’re amending your weaknesses while playing to your strengths. That is, take weak or low-performing pieces of content, social channels, or otherwise, and start to optimise those, using your better performing assets as a template!
Step 4: SEO
In baking terms, it’s time for SEO to be “added to the bowl”! Let’s start by using a tool such as SEMrush, to increase your links, clean up your backlinks, and improve both your on-page and off-page SEO.
1️⃣ Links: having both internal and external links on your site increases your credibility in the eyes of the search engine. Each link works as a vote in your favour, helping your website to rank higher.
2️⃣ On-page SEO involves everything you can see and do on your website itself. That is, your metadata and title tags, content and website design. All of these can be optimized to be favourable for search engines, from the backend of your website developer.
3️⃣ Off-page SEO refers to techniques that are off of your website. This includes link building and earning backlinks from external sources, following up on brand mentions, and everything else that happens outside of your website.
Step 5: Website
Next, it’s time to “mix” your website in the “bowl”. Have a look at increasing your page speed, and making any adjustments to the site structure itself.
Tip: Google Page Speed Checker is a great way to see where the faults in your web speed lies, and how to amend them.Check out your competitors-what are they doing differently?
Step 6: Social & Paid Media
Now, implement your social and paid media strategies. Create graphics and copy that are optimized for each social platform: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Tip: Prioritize platforms that are frequented by your audience, as discovered in the social media audit in step one!
Step 7: Inbound Marketing
“In a separate bowl”, use email softwares such as Constant Contact or MailChimp, and your web developer to create lead magnets and email campaigns.
Step 8: Long-Term Planning
Now it’s time to let your digital marketing strategy bake…or that is, to implement it over time!
SEO
SEO is a never-ending project. With trends, competitors and the industry changing all the time, it bodes well to keep your SEO up to date, too. Make weekly and monthly checklists for yourself, to keep on top of your SEO. See below for an example of these tasks to get you started:
Weekly:
Backlink Audit: keep your backlinks clean, so that they don’t affect your ranking-checking these weekly ensures you can disavow or remove bad links as soon as possible, before they can affect your score
Brand Mentions: keep an eye out for brand mentions, or, websites that mention your company but do not link back to you, and begin to build a list of websites for link building outreach. Sites that already mention your brand are easy prospect targets for a potential backlink!
Monthly:
SEO Audit: as mentioned above, consistent SEO audits are key in driving your overall digital marketing strategy. It’s crucial to first, understand the issues you face, and then to resolve them before they can negatively impact your business. Request a free SEO audit of your website, here!
To create a long-term plan, a few things you can be doing for your website weekly and monthly are as follows:
Website
To create a long-term plan, a few things you can be doing for your website weekly and monthly are as follows:
Weekly:
Metadata Updates: when updating your on-page content, don’t neglect the off-page! Metadata refers to your meta descriptions, meta-tags, alt-text, meta keywords, and title tags. These all act as a sort of “hashtag” that helps to drive relevant traffic. As the market changes, so do your keywords, and so should your metadata.
Monthly:
Website Audit: just as with the SEO audit, doing a quick scan of any errors in your website is important to keep on top of!
Social Media
What goes into your social media?
First, you’ll need to create a graphic-this can be either a photo you took, or an image you created using a tool such as Canva or Photoshop. Your graphic doesn;t have to be complex. Something as simple as a quote on a clean background can work!
Tip: Create clean, colourful images that pop on a social media feed-you only have a second to catch your audience’s attention, so use it wisely!
Next, you’ll need to create the caption. When it comes to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, gone are the days of “formal” copy. Have fun with your captions-use puns, emojis, and engaging messaging! A caption that your audience can relate to, or even have a laugh at, is more likely to drive that engagement!
Finally, it’s time for hashtags. A hashtag is : a word or phrase prefixed by the “#” symbol. When added to the description of a post on social media, a hashtag essentially marks that post as associated with the topic it is hashtagged with.
Read more about hashtags in my Ultimate Guide to Marketing Jargon here.
It’s important to use hashtags that are relevant, but it’s also helpful to use hashtags that you’re more likely to show up for. For example, “#marketing” is used on Instagram so many times that you’re not very likely to show up at the top of search results. On the other hand, adding a more specific hashtag such as “#digitalmarketingagencylondon” gives you a much higher chance at being seen! That’s not to say you can’t still include “#marketing” as well, but ensure to use the more specific hashtags too!
Tip: search for hashtags on Instagram prior to posting, and compile a list of hashtags with a number of posts proportional to your business! For example, a business with a following of 1,000-5,000 might look at using hashtags with 10,000-100,000 posts, whereas a business with a following of 100-500 would aim to use hashtags with 1,o00-10,000 posts
Weekly:
Posting: a common question I hear is “how often should I post on social media?” The answer? It doesn’t necessarily matter! As long as you’re consistent, and keep it up, you can post 5 times a month or 5 times a day (although those are hyperboles, and I wouldn’t strictly recommend those numbers-everything with a grain of salt, as it were)
Monthly:
Social Media Calendar: to get ahead of your social media posting, it’s always a good idea to create a social media calendar at the beginning of each month. A really efficient way to do this is through a social media scheduler, such as Loomly.
Paid Media Advertising
The first thing to think about when it comes to paid media is strategy. Ask yourself the following questions:
Who are you trying to reach?
Where is your audience?
What are you offering?
What results are you trying to achieve, and by when?
Using the answers to those, start to form an action plan. Using Google Ads, Facebook Ad Manager or LinkedIn Ad Manager, create ads using standout graphics, and engaging copy, as we discussed earlier, when we added social media.
Create a budget of how much you want to spend. Unlike social media, paid advertising is not free, and it isn’t cheap, either. Try bidding for specific keywords that your audience is likely to resonate with.
Tip: Make sure to track your paid advertising campaigns in Google Analytics with a UTM code. This is helpful to determine what sort of ads speak to your audience, and makes it easy to run A/B testing campaigns
Content Creation & Strategy
When most people hear “content” they automatically think “new content”. It’s not a bad thing to produce new pieces all the time-if you can keep that up, it’s great! However, creating new pieces of content all the time isn’t always viable.
Content Upgrades: A more efficient way to drive traffic is by updating your old content. It seems simple-and that’s because it is! Upcycling your old content pieces don’t take nearly as much time as creating new ones. Updating your content ensures that you stay relevant, and rank for the keywords you’re showing up for!
Tip: make sure to track how your up-cycled posts are doing, and be sure to apply successful methods both to other old content pieces, and when creating new ones!