Building a digital strategy gives your online activity a purpose, from growing brand recognition to understanding new audiences, increasing turnover or delivering great customer service.

A solid digital strategy can ensure your time and effort online is rewarded with tangible results and save you a lot of energy and frustration further down the line!

Take a look at our four top tips for creating a digital strategy and remember the best news; whether you’re creating your very first strategy, or refining it to fit with new business goals, the same rules still apply – you can’t go wrong.

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1. Research Your Targets and Your Competitors

It may seem an obvious place to start but think hard, how much do you really know about what others in your field are doing, both organic and via paid ads? This isn’t the time to stay in your lane! In addition to similar-sized businesses, spend time looking at what the market leaders in your field are doing, as well as up and comers intent on disrupting the field.

What is the consistent message in their posts? Are they targeting the same audience or looking at a group you’d never considered before? How are they tailoring their message to each platform?

Understanding the approach your competitors are taking will help you to define what makes you unique and help you to refine your messages to stand out from the crowd and push your USPs.

A great place to start on searching your competitor’s ads’ is the ‘Page Transparency’ box on their pages but try Google Trends and Semrush too.

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2. Get to Know Your Audience

It’s very likely you have an idea of who your target audience is, after all your business is built around addressing one of their needs…But how much do you really understand about the people you’re targeting? When are they most likely to engage with a particular platform, if they do at all? What do they listen to? Whose opinions do they trust? And how many audiences are you actually appealing to?

We’ll be delving deeper into creating a great buyer persona in a future blog, but a great template can be found at Semrush or HubSpot.

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3. Think About What You Want to Say

Once you understand who you’re competing against, and who you’re appealing to, it’s time to start thinking about content. Again, research is your friend and it’s well worth putting time in to understand the kind of information people want to know.

A great place to start is sites such as ‘Answer the Public’, a site dedicated to gathering the most popular questions from Google. This provides a solid starting block to uncovering the questions specific to your audience. Refine them until you have four to eight of the most popular questions your audience is asking and use these as the basis to create your content.

Variety is the spice of life, and marketing! Whether you’re addressing the questions via blogs, podcasts, emails, gated content, YouTube videos, TikToks, Pinterest or Instagram images, Tweets, LinkedIn posts, Facebook Live events, the possibilities are endless. Don’t make the mistake of rushing to be on every platform, instead go back to your buyer personas and aim at the spaces populated by your target audience.

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4. Set Your Targets

How do you know if your strategy is succeeding? This is where targets come into play. Set SMART goals (i.e. goals that are smart, measurable, attainable, relevant and timed) to measure your success. Timed is particularly important as overnight sensations are few and far between in digital marketing, particularly if you’re trying a strategy for the first time or trying to connect with a new audience.

A good tip is to either analyse your KPIs against the previous 12 months of data in order to get an idea of your pre-strategy performance or, if this data doesn’t exist, dedicate the first month of your strategy to establishing a baseline you can track growth from.

Following these basic tips is a great way to start building your digital strategy. To take your digital presence to the next level, contact our team today for a free consultation.

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