Today, everyone is online, whether consumers or businesses. So, if you want to grow your business and reach your target audience, you must have a well-defined digital marketing plan in place.
For this, you need to create a systematic process of digital marketing to determine where you can find your customers and analyze customer behavior.
However, the ever-changing digital marketing landscape can overwhelm marketers and businesses. Hence, it is more challenging for them to have a fine-tuned marketing process.
The good news is that with consistent effort and focus, you can implement effective marketing strategies to reach valuable users and turn them into leads. If you are still struggling with designing a result-driven and systematic digital marketing process, we have got you covered.
Here’s a 11-step guide to help marketers and businesses understand the intricacies of creating a meticulous digital marketing process. This guide will equip you to build brand awareness, increase online visibility, and foster user engagement. You will also get to know the importance of learning buyer personas, establishing marketing goals, and more.
So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
What Is a Digital Marketing Process?
A digital marketing process comprises various steps, strategies, and tactics marketers employ to reach potential customers and achieve specific business goals through their online marketing campaigns. Different digital marketing process steps bring marketers closer to their objectives.
Marketers must design a data-driven and customer-centric process that engages new users, retains existing buyers, and delivers a personalized experience. As you develop and execute an online marketing campaign, you must be familiar with the fundamentals of the digital marketing process so that it aligns with the customer’s needs and business goals while yielding the desired results.
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The Process of Digital Marketing- 11 Steps to Follow
After learning what digital marketing is, it’s time to understand the digital marketing step-by-step process that marketers follow. To create a dynamic online marketing strategy, you must take care of plenty of things, such as creating a brand, setting goals, developing content, selecting the right platform, and whatnot.
Here are the 11 key steps that you must adhere to to ensure you make the most of your marketing process.
- Define a Brand
- Create a Buyer Persona
- Establish Marketing Goals
- Evaluate Available Digital Marketing Channels
- Define Your Marketing Strategy
- Conduct Competitor Analysis
- Set a Budget for your Campaign
- Use the Right Tools and Technologies
- Bring the Campaign Together
- Track and Measure Results
- Take Corrective Measures
1. Define a Brand
The first step of digital marketing process is creating a brand that you want to promote in the market. This is not only about starting a website or business but also about defining why your brand is unique and what you offer that your competitors don’t.
You need to stand out to get the audience’s attention and market your product or service. For example, many e-commerce stores are now selling environmentally friendly clothes and shoes. Their unique selling point (USP) is that they are sustainable clothing brands.
Similarly, you need a USP to convince people to prefer your brand and buy your products. Your USP will enhance your brand image and reputation, making potential customers more confident about buying from you.
This is also the stage where you decide on your brand’s voice, tone, and mission. What you are doing and why? What is the motivation behind starting this particular business? What value do you provide to your customers? Do you have a purpose?
Some brands make a donation, like sponsoring a child’s education or providing basic necessities, each time somebody buys their products. When you have a motive, people connect with your brand and want to contribute their best. So, make sure to define your brand and state what makes you different from others.
2. Create a Buyer Persona
Digital marketing is continuously evolving, and so are people’s interests. You can create the best content, sharing benefits that your business offers. However, you can’t engage people if they don’t need your product. When you dig deeper to uncover the interests, needs, preferences, and challenges of your target audience, you make more impact.
Therefore, start by understanding your audience, which goes beyond basic demographics. Buyer personas, also known as ideal customer profiles, represent your potential consumers and are created through research, surveys, and interviews. It is the foundation of a powerful digital marketing strategy as it tells you about the people you want to reach and sell your products to.
Buyer personas are detailed characterizations based on diverse data points and meaningful insights. It involves a comprehensive study of their behaviors, preferences, and pain points. It’s important to collect real and accurate data to identify these three key personas so you can adopt a more targeted marketing approach.
Any assumptions made while defining buyer personas can lead to the failure of your marketing campaign. To get a more accurate and well-rounded picture of personas, you must include prospects and customers whose traits align with your target audience.
Your research must uncover demographic information, such as location, age, income, job title, and psychographic information (hobbies, goals, priorities, and challenges).
Also Read: Full History of Digital Marketing (Origin, Evolution, Timeline)
3. Establish Marketing Goals
Now that you have defined your brand and studied your audience work on one of the essential digital marketing process steps—establishing clear and achievable goals. Having precise and measurable goals is the cornerstone of any marketing strategy, as it helps you pave the right path toward your objectives and directs your actions.
Every step and plan must work toward your goals. Make sure to avoid vague targets and keep them attainable and specific.
For this, you can develop a SMART goals framework, which means goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
For example, don’t set a generic goal like ‘achieving higher ranks’ or ‘increasing conversions.’ Be more specific and define clear goals, like optimizing content and website within the next 30 days to increase traffic by 20% and boost conversion by 10% by the end of the quarter.
Also, your goals should be measurable so you can measure progress and ensure you are moving in the right direction.
4. Evaluate Available Digital Marketing Channels
There are multiple digital channels, such as social media, emails, blogs, Google Ads, websites, and so on. Assess all the channels you are already using to determine their effectiveness. This will also help you know how to incorporate each marketing channel into your strategy and tap into its full potential.
You don’t have to include all the channels or platforms in your marketing campaigns, but only the most powerful and useful ones. Categorize each option to have a bigger and clearer picture. You can divide marketing channels into the following three main categories:
5. Owned Media
They are the digital assets that a company owns, such as the website, blog, social media account, or imagery. Businesses have complete control over these marketing channels and can publish content or post anytime they want.
6. Earned Media
It covers anything created or written about a brand or business that doesn’t come from sponsorships or paid ads. It is like recognition you get for your quality products/services and efforts. Third-party websites mostly publish information about a business, and people share it via networks. It includes user-generated content, press mentions, customer reviews, media coverage, etc.
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7. Paid Media
It is the complete opposite of earned media and includes channels you spend money on to publish your content and get the attention of your prospects. It includes paid social media ads, Google Ads, sponsored posts, or anything else for which you pay to increase your online visibility.
Also Read: What Does a Digital Marketer Do? Work, Roles, Responsibilities
8. Define Your Marketing Strategy
You have a goal in front of you and the right channels to reach it, so what’s next? In this guide to understanding digital marketing process, the next step is to craft a marketing strategy that encompasses everything you have decided on so far. However, as you define your online marketing strategy, consider the following factors:
Content- You must produce engaging, optimized, and original content to attract maximum users and place your brand on top of search engine results. Your content should be so refined and top-notch that it stays with people longer. It can be blog posts, social media posts, emails, guest articles, or any other form of content. Make sure that you communicate your brand message effectively through online channels. Also, your content marketing strategy must go hand in hand with buyer personas. This is because it will help you assess what kind of content they would prefer, in what format, on what platform, etc. The more information you will gather, the better content you will produce.
Customer Segmentation- You must divide your target audience into different segments based on their taste, location, age, preferences, needs, and other factors. This will help you offer them what they require and meet their expectations.
Value Proposition- Be clear about your value proposition and what it involves. You must be sure how to communicate this proposition through different digital platforms and select channels to connect with the right people at the right time with the right product, content, or information. You can use blogs, social media, emails, or your website to convey your proposition, but it must tell people why they should pick you over your competitors.
9. Conduct Competitor Analysis
You already know the audience you want to reach and the goals you desire to achieve. Now, the next step is to take some time out to look at your competitors and understand how they are doing in the industry.
As you execute a marketing campaign to take your business to the next level, it’s important to know what you are up against and who you are facing. This helps you create a better marketing plan that gives you an edge over your competitors and makes you stand out from the crowd.
Conduct a competitors analysis to examine the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, what works for them, strategies they use, their market share, and other aspects. You must also know their market position, promotional style, brand tone, message language, who they target, brand personality, etc.
When you assess all these factors of your competitors, you can create a more comprehensive strategy for your business.
10. Set a Budget for your Campaign
Setting a marketing budget is a vital part of any digital marketing process. It tells you how much money to spend on a campaign before you execute any plan. Also, it allows you to distribute the available resources wisely and rationally across different channels and media.
Once you have a budget, allocate a specific amount to each marketing platform. However, make sure to maintain a balance between the money you are willing to spend and the money you need to invest to get the desired results. For example, 500 INR may work for your one PPC campaign, but it won’t drive the same valuable results as the campaign with a 2000 INR budget.
Also, when you have a budget, you make a wiser and more logical marketing plan and set clear priorities to generate the best results.
11. Use the Right Tools and Technologies
Cutting-edge technologies and tools have become an integral part of digital marketing. Whether you want to optimize content, schedule social media posts, automate email marketing campaigns, or analyze competitors, you need reliable and feature-rich tools.
Fortunately, there are ample tools that align with different marketing objectives. They can help you with different marketing tasks and activities. From sales intelligence platforms to marketing automation, you can get your hands on various software and technologies to reach your objectives and monitor the results of marketing campaigns.
Marketers and businesses are also integrating AI-powered tools with their marketing tactics. For example, ChatGPT is a popular platform for creating content and copies. Similarly, Hootsuite is a tool to automate content posting across multiple social media channels.
Here are some of the key areas where you can use advanced tools:
Content Calendar- Several tools let you schedule your content and posts so you can be sure that your marketing strategy makes sense. They help you optimize your resources, create long-term plans, explore ideas, and stay on track. You simply have to mention the author, date of publication, keywords, post topic, tags, and other details, and the tool will take care of the rest.
Keyword Research- Marketers use keyword research tools almost daily to find relevant and target phrases and words for their content. Keyword research is crucial in boosting your website’s search engine rankings and driving organic traffic. So, if you want search engines to find your pages and content, you must use keyword research tools for your content strategy.
Social Media Posting- Writing an engaging article is not enough. You need to promote it and take it to the audience through different channels. What’s a better way to do this than social media? However, planning daily social media content, creating copies and captions, and posting and publishing content at the right time can be daunting. Moreover, deciding on links, hashtags, number of characters, and other details makes it all the more challenging. Therefore, it’s best to use cutting-edge tools that make posting on social media hassle-free.
As you choose the right tool for your marketing campaign, delve into its features, automation options, and other aspects. Stay updated with the current trends and innovations to adopt the best technology. Leverage the power of AI to automate repetitive tasks and focus on other productive areas. However, balance the human element and technology to convey your brand message accurately.
12. Bring the Campaign Together
By now, you have done and researched a lot. You have everything you need, right tools, channels, resources, and data. You also have your eyes on your goals and your buyer personas. You know what media channels you need and have evaluated each option based on their performance.
With this, you have a clear vision of all the necessary elements to make a result-driven marketing strategy. To complete the process of digital marketing, you need to combine all the components as a unit. So, without any further ado, bring all of it together to create and execute the final marketing strategy.
Also Read: What’s Future of Digital Marketing? Industry Trends to Know
13. Track and Measure Results
You have finally designed and implemented your marketing campaign. Great work so far! However, your job doesn’t end here. There’s still a lot to do. The most crucial step is to track progress and measure results to determine whether your efforts have yielded the expected results.
You must continuously monitor performance and output to ensure you have put together the best campaign. This also helps you optimize your marketing spending and performance.
Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the success of your campaign and measure ROI. KPIs are statistics that tell you whether you have reached your goals or not.
You would need a real-time data visualization system to track and measure results. It will help you identify opportunities and room for improvement. Also, you can make more informed and logical decisions with valuable data. So, use reliable software or tools that can process and extract data efficiently.
14. Take Corrective Measures
Last but not least. By regularly monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you can take corrective measures on time and improve elements that are not working. Restructure your campaign to drive results and alter strategies to reach the target audience.
Analyze all the elements, find the gaps, compare results with expectations, determine what went wrong, make corrections, and follow-up.
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Conclusion
We hope you will follow these steps while designing your digital marketing process. Be organized and focused to earn the top ranks in SERPs and enhance your online presence. Also, make technology your best companion in this journey because it will make things simpler for you, offering automated, personalized, and successful campaigns.
There will be trickier tasks, but you can use more advanced tools to streamline the entire process and boost your marketing efforts. Have a well-structured plan to pave your path and reach more people.
Do you aspire to be a digital marketer? Then enroll in our online digital marketing course now and take your first step toward a lucrative career.
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