Creating a yearly digital marketing strategy is not as complicated as you thought. It’s essential for long-term success and a focused, data-driven campaign for growing your website or business. Without further ado, let’s check out 10 tips to help you create a year-round digital marketing strategy.
1. Prioritization is Key
The first important thing when creating a digital marketing strategy is knowing what you want to accomplish. Of, course, we all want to have larger fan communities and see a growth in sales.
But do not stop at general goals. For example, you might want social media to bring you an increase in post shares of 20% and a 35% increase in page likes for both Facebook and Instagram. Website wise, you can think about wanting to achieve a 15% increase in monthly users.
Of course, there’s always the opportunity of including something new in your all-year-round marketing strategy. If you didn’t do newsletter marketing last year, it would be a great idea to make that one of the priorities of your current strategy.
Of course, you shouldn’t only think about what platform is the right one for your campaign, but also how you’ll reach those goals. Be sure to analyze previous campaigns, and base your predictions on existing data.
2. Establish the Budget
If you’ve completed step one correctly, you should now have a clear list of what you want to accomplish – clear objectives, activities, and correlated results. Now it’s time you assigned a budget to all the activities on your list. How much are you willing to spend on social media, how much on email marketing?
When it comes to the budget, it has to be very clear for you what you want to outsource and what you want to do yourself. Maybe you have in mind hiring an ad agency to help you with social media. If that’s the case, you have to budget both the agency’s fee and the amount of money you want to invest in paid ads.
Learn more about creating a marketing budget that gets results in this article.
3. Determine the Where (Channels)
To create an achievable and ambitious digital marketing strategy, you need to establish your communication channels first. This was easier in the past years, with a smaller number of choices, but now, new platforms are appearing out of nowhere and you have to know them all to see which ones are good for your business.
Of course, you need a great website and if you have the time, I advise you to spend time on creating your blog as well. And now, off to social media. Where does your target spend most of the time? Is it Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn? Do not forget about email marketing, either.
4.You Need a Reliable Content Strategy
Let’s say that you’ve decided to have a website, blog, and Facebook page to begin with. You will start by creating the website but you also have to think about an all-year-round content strategy.
For your blog, create an editorial plan to determine what subjects you could write about that your audience is interested in. Once you have a list of topics settled, you will be ready to start writing your first blog posts. If you are selling a product, do not stop at product features, look further, and try to create a unique experience for the user.
Be sure to use keyword research techniques to help find lucrative subjects that your niche’s members care about and search for.
5. Determine the When
This is something a lot of people forget about, but when you create a digital marketing strategy you have to be very conscious about when you actually send the content into the world.
If posting on weekends is easier for you, do so. Don’t force yourself to commit to posting daily if you do not have the time. Of course, it would be great, but it’s better if you post weekly than if you post daily for one month and then disappear for 3 months. You can always prepare content in advance, and schedule publication, spacing it out.
Some statistics show that most of the fans are active at 11 am and pm. But that’s only one example, as this data changes with each account. You could start with this and then adjust in accordance with the way your audience reacts to this. The key is to always check out analytics and adapt.
6. Pinpoint Key Events
In a year, the needs and attention of the fans change according to the environment. Be flexible and make sure that you have a calendar where you write down all the important events: Christmas, Easter, and any other international holidays related to the product or service you are selling.
A good idea would be to create sales or campaigns around important holidays because it’s the time when most of the people are searching for gift ideas (if you are selling a product).
Just think about what people are concerned about every month. In September, they are concerned about back to school campaigns and October is all about Halloween. By the way, check out these free photoshop overlays to help you out at this time of the year!
7. Search for Digital Tools
If you are overwhelmed by the complexity of creating a digital marketing strategy, you should know that nowadays there are all sorts of digital tools that will help you out.
So, don’t panic. Every help you need is one click away: just search for digital tools that will make your life easier such as social media schedulers or newsletter creators. You can also come across some amazing free tools.
Check out this article to see how AI makes content marketing successful, there are a lot of AI-powered apps out there that could help improve your digital marketing strategy.
8. Team Management
Delegating is important if you want to make sure that all the tasks are in good hands. Of course, it’s amazing if you have a team of specialists, with every teammate knowing exactly what they have to do. You just have to have team management skills to make sure that everyone understood their tasks and are delivering accordingly. Here are some great management tips!
If you are just launching your business, see how much of the work you can do yourself to save costs. If you have writing experience, for example, write blog posts or social media content yourself. After all, there is no else better to tell the story of your brand better than you.
9. Work Hard
Results come to those who work hard and are persistent about what they want to accomplish. And this applies to digital marketing as well.
Create a work routine and try to stick to it. Read the comments on your pages every morning to make sure that you do not have people waiting for your reply for too long (the golden rule is the 24 hours reply), whether if we are talking about clients or partners. Create your social media posts once a month and just schedule them to make sure that you do not miss anything and also save time.
Do not get distracted if in one month you see a decrease in numbers, make sure that you always have your goals in mind, be willing to learn from your mistakes and you will succeed.
10. Use Data to Your Advantage
Now that your all-year-round digital marketing strategy is in action, you’ll need to monitor its performance. Integrate Google Analytics, conduct visitor surveys, and be sure to evaluate if you’re moving towards the goals your set according to prediction.
Be sure to note down the pieces that are performing better than expected, and see what you can do to edit future and pasts posts to up their conversions. The same goes for pieces that weren’t a hit with your audience. The key is basing your decisions on existing data, which will maximize your chances of success.
And remember, creating an all-year-round digital marketing strategy is not only about goals and numbers. It is also about your work ethic and how much you are willing to invest to get the results that you want.