Without This One Key Element, A Digital Marketing Campaign Is DOA

Planning a digital marketing strategy for your online business can get really overwhelming, really fast.

“Digital marketing,” as a whole, encompasses a pretty broad swathe of different marketing channels and strategies. Marketing agencies and consultants usually specialize in one or more sub-niches within digital marketing. You can literally make a career or build a business out of SEO or social media marketing alone.

It's hard to navigate this landscape if you're a solopreneur who's new to marketing. Which channels should you focus on? What strategies should you use? How much should you budget?

Before you start planning, you need one critical thing: clarity of long term goals.

You need to know where you're going. That way, you can create a “road map” designed to get you there. What exactly are you trying to achieve with your marketing efforts?

How are you going to measure and quantify success?

You have to ask these questions from the get-go. Otherwise, you'll get swept away and lost among all the different options that are out there.

A recent post from Quicksprout puts it quite succinctly.

Clarity

Digital marketing is a wide umbrella.

Here are just a few components you might integrate into your digital marketing strategy at any given time:

If you’re not sure what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t be very effective.

There’s just no way around it.

In fact, the brands lacking a purpose are often get caught up in a so-called spray-and-pray mindset, where they tinker with this and that without thinking ahead.

Taking this type of approach seldom yields favorable results and usually wastes time and money.

When you know your why, you have a clear vision of what you’re looking to accomplish and what your purpose is.

Having clarity inevitably helps you pick and choose specific digital marketing strategies and lets you know which metrics you need to measure.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say your goal is to increase leads to your website by 25% within six months.

This would provide you with a sense of direction.

All of a sudden, you know why you’re choosing certain strategies and which actions you need to take to give yourself the best possible chance of reaching that goal.

For instance, you might do the following:

look for an analytics tool that provides in-depth insights on website traffic

identify which three strategies/channels are bringing the bulk of your traffic

put more of your effort into optimizing those three strategies/channels

continually examine key metrics to spot areas of improvement

consistently strive to improve those areas until you reach your goal of 25% more leads