Digital Marketing Strategy in 5 easy steps

Whether you are a digital marketer and want to become a digital marketing strategist or if you are a freelancer and working for a client and need to show them a demonstration of the strategy you will work on or in case you want to create a digital marketing strategy or social media marketing strategy to grow your own business, this video is for you. I will take you through each of the six steps in order to understand how to create a digital marketing strategy and as well I will work on the slides on the side to show you how a digital marketing strategy in a presentation looks like. If you see the picture here, I call it the wheel of the digital marketing strategy framework. So it consists of six easy steps and you will have to do each one of them in order to create a full-fledged strategy. You can always skip the step number two. It's for those who want to create a very detailed strategy. In a nutshell, the strategy starts at understanding the objective of the campaign. Then we do a little bit of market research. Then we understand who is our target audience. Then we understand where shall we target these target audience based on their behavior. Once we are clear with all of that, then we understand what should be the communication of the campaign. Once we are clear with all these steps, then we should know how to measure if we are doing everything right and if not, what needs to be changed. What should be our approach towards reporting and how should we optimize. First step is the objective. We have to understand the objective of the campaign. In case we are running a campaign, we need to understand what does the client or you yourself for your business want to achieve with this marketing budget. Do you want leads? Do you want traffic to your website? Do you want people to just know about you? And what are the primary and secondary metrics? For example, some clients would be like, we want to generate a lot of leads through our online campaigns, but at the same time, we want to increase followers of our social media handles or we want a lot of reach or awareness so that people come to know about our brand. In this case, the primary objective would be generating leads and the secondary objective, if there is any, would be increasing fans of their social media handles. Once you're clear with the objectives, what is the immediate results they want from this campaign, then you need to understand and map it to their business objectives. When I say business objectives, for an example, in this case, you are a freelancer and working on a presentation to send it to your client. So this here will be our first slide of the presentation. Let's assume for the sake of this video, dental clinic is our client and their marketing and business objective is to increase awareness of the dental clinic, generate leads through calls and website, and to receive a minimum of 90 patients per month through online campaigns and to generate a minimum of 300,000 revenue per month. But overall, their business or the vision behind running these campaigns is to position their clinic as expert doctors with latest technology for dental treatments, or they want to make the clinic as go to place for patients looking for dental treatments. So it's always better to understand the objectives, immediate objectives, and what's the vision behind this. If you understand the objective correctly, your half job is done. Trust me on that. That brings us to the next step or pillar, which is market analysis. Now market analysis consists of four components. One is media trends, where you show that what's going on in the online world, if there are any shifts or drifts in any user behavior online. For example, recently due to COVID, there was a huge surge in e-commerce and a lot of keywords being searched and the search volume of certain keywords increased, certain keywords decreased. You can get all of this information, for example, from tools like thinkwithgoogle.com. I have put a link in the description below if you want to check out the tool. And then you do market and competitor analysis where you can use a lot of tools like Facebook ad transparency or similar web. I have again put both the links down in the description where you can use. And also I have done a detailed video on Facebook ad transparency, which I will put a link somewhere here. And then you provide some information about clients' digital assets audit. For example, if you are working for a client, it's always better to do an audit of their website or social media handles to tell them what are the takeaways, what are the good things about their pages, if there's a room for improvement somewhere. And for that, you can always use a lot of free tools as well. For example, Social Blade is one of the tools for which I have put the link below, which tells you a lot of information about social media handles, what are the daily followers and subscribers or what is the daily engagement rate and a lot of other information. For website and SEO audit, you can use tools like SEMrush, for which I will provide the link below as well. So what you can do is, for example, if you are working on a presentation, so I have given some examples. So for our dental clinic, I have created one of the slides in market analysis, which shows where this is screenshots from Google Trends, which shows that in early months of 2020, people were hesitant to go for dental treatments because there was the search volume for keywords like dentist had decreased. But the spike came back in by the month of June and people started looking for dentists online again. And if you also see in the second screenshot here, people were concerned if they should visit a dentist during COVID. So if you look here, there are search terms like, is it safe to go to a dentist? If our client, which is a dental clinic, was doing a campaign during that period, probably a text ad on Google search, which mentions all safety measures taken or stuff like that, it would have really helped him to get more clicks and leads. And the other slide in competitor analysis we did, it's always better to go to Google. For example, if you are doing Google ads as well for a client, go to Google, search for keywords which you are planning to target, see which are the top advertisers there and check what ad copies they're using, what messaging they're using and what landing pages they're using. How is their landing page designed? Does it have a form with three fields, five fields? Is the form on the top? Do they have a call button? Do they have a WhatsApp button? And for example, in here we can tell our client, see, based on our competitor analysis, MedDental and Dr. Michaels usually rank top on Google. They are your primary competitors on Google. And for example, they have been focusing on keywords like, we work 24-7 and for example, we also used Facebook ad transparency tool to check what is Hollywood Smile, one of their competitors, what kind of ads are they running. So you can use this tool to check for any Facebook page and Instagram page to check what kind of ads they are running and always go to their competitors and give them an estimate that who are their top competitors in terms of fans or subscribers or followers across their social media channels. This tells a client that you have done your homework and you understand the market and you are able to provide them an execution strategy for them to grow their business. So similarly, you can use SEMrush and other tools to provide website audits and what recommendations you provide and what are the areas of improvement in their websites. Now we understand their objective, we understand the market a little bit. So this brings us to the third step, which is called the who. Who is the audience we should reach out? Because in digital media, it's very important to understand who is your target audience. You don't want to go and show your ads to everyone, which is a benefit of digital marketing over traditional media that you can target certain audiences. In traditional media, people used to have, we call it spray and pray strategy, like you spray the ads and pray that your prospect clients would see those ads. But in digital media, it's very important to understand who your audience is. Just to give you an example, I stay in UAE. It's a small country with 10 million population, but as per the stats, there's 55 million devices connected to the internet capable of showing ads. So imagine the scale of devices connected to the internet. And if you are running a campaign without very granular targeting, where all your ads can show and how much money you would need to reach out to these audiences. Now, understand the who means audience analysis and to do audience analysis, you need three primary things. One is persona identification. You need to understand, for example, our dental clinic, what kind of people come there, which I will show you in the slides. And you also need to do audience mapping. Now, you know what kind of people come to your clinic, who can be your prospect clients. You need to map them on Google. Now, you know what kind of people come, you need to understand what do they search on Google, what do they do on, what are their interests on Facebook, what are their interests on YouTube, so that you can target them based on these interests on each of these channels. And then you need to quantify the audience. If we go ahead and see how we put it in the slides, what you need to do in audience mapping is, for example, for this dental clinic, who is our client, hypothetical client for this video. So, there are three types of people who will visit and can be prospect clients. One, who need urgent treatment, like how do you identify these people? They go to Google, they are suffering from pain, they urgently need to visit a dentist, so they will probably search for dentist near me, dentist, toothache relief and keywords like that. And then there are value seekers, who have shown interest in last few days to visit a dentist, but they are value seekers. They search for keywords like costs for root canal and stuff like that, but their interest is dental hygiene. And then there are people who are quality seekers, so they do not care about the cost, but they look for, let's say, keywords like best doctor, or you can target them on social media platforms by checking their purchasing behavior or shopping behavior, they usually interact with luxury brands. So for this dental clinic, these are the three personas we will target. And now how it helps you is, you want to create different targeting strategies for each of these personas. Now, for example, if we have to quantify these three personas, in UAE, we will say there are 2300 searches per month for keywords like dentist near me, urgent treatment, or keywords like that. And then when we look at value seekers, there are 20,000 people in target audience in UAE who are interested in dental hygiene in last 7 days or 30 days, and at the same time, they are value seekers. And the third one, for example, the quality seekers, we'll tell them there is 13,000 people in our target audience in UAE who are quality seekers. We can get all of this information from different tools like Facebook Planner, Google Ads Planner, which are also free to use. Now that we know our audience and we have quantified it, the next step is the where. The where is all about which channels we should be selected. If you are just doing a social media strategy, you have to select which channels you're going after. Is it Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, for example. If you are doing a B2B campaign, then probably you will put more budgets on LinkedIn. If you are doing a campaign for, let's say, youngsters, teenagers, so you will probably select Instagram and Snapchat. So similarly, if it's a digital marketing proposal or strategy you are working on in So what kind of channels do you select? That is with the where, which channels you should select. And along with the channels, you have to also tell them what targeting strategy you will use. Okay, I'm using Facebook, but how will I tap into my audiences which we identified in the previous steps? And how will I reach out to these audiences on Snapchat? How will I do? So this is the fourth step or pillar, which is called the where. So it focuses on one, what channels you will use and what will be the targeting strategy you will use. In this case, for example, I'm showing a funnel here to our client. The funnel, I'm sure you all are aware about the marketing funnel. This is called the marketing funnel. Now this funnel represents the journey of a user from awareness when they come to know about a brand and finally when they become a user or a customer to a company. Now in this case, what we are showing them is, one, these are the different targeting options and different targeting strategies we are using. To reach our audience for our hypothetical dental clinic, one, we will use behavior and interest targeting, for which we will use Facebook and Instagram. When I say behavior and interest, we will go to people who recently have liked or engaged with the content of dental clinics or they were searching for or they were visiting blogs related to dental hygiene or dental treatments. And similarly, then we'll reach out to custom audiences on GDN and YouTube. So guys, custom audiences is a very powerful tool, which Google came up with, where you can target people who visited certain websites or who were looking for certain keywords on Google and later when they go to other websites, you can target them. I have done a dedicated video for this, for which I'll put a link up in the video. Similarly, this is actually the fourth pillar of our strategy. We are telling the client or even if it's for ourselves, we are just putting it in ink and paper. So the third one which we'll use is remarketing and lookalike audiences. Remarketing is when a user visits your website and you target them later. So for example, in our case, there might be a lot of users who clicked on our ads, came to our website, which is the dental clinic website, but did not fill a form, did not call us or did not interact with our website to fill a form or click on WhatsApp button or anything. So probably they were in a hurry. It's very wise to reach out to these audiences when they go on other websites or Facebook or any other digital media channel to show them the ad again, because they already had an intent and probably the chances of them converting, coming back and filling up a lead form is higher. So we'll use remarketing and lookalike audiences is whenever you create an audience based on your website visitors, you can create, you can tell Google or Facebook that find me similar audiences like this. So you can use, we will use this targeting strategy across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and GDN. And then finally, the other targeting strategy we'll use is on Google based on search terms, what people are searching. This is bottom of the funnel because they are hot leads, they are actively searching for dental clinics around me and stuff like that. So we'll use this across Google. And then once we have a lot of leads, we will also use MailChimp and Facebook follower campaign. So for example, if there is a user who filled up a lead form on our clinic website and probably they end up in the clinic and have done their treatment, later we'll create a Facebook follower campaign and target only these people who filled up the lead form so that they can, so that they can follow our page if they like our service. And also we can create an MailChimp email campaign and send it to them with the link to review our page on, let's say Google review, or even we can send them a link of our social media handles and ask them to follow us. Now the next slide, which ideally goes into the presentation, is now that we already know about which channels we have selected for this campaign, in our case here, we have selected Facebook, GDN, YouTube, Search, as well as the email channels. So we will, ideally we decide on a budget allocation depending on the quantification of audiences, how much audience is available on each of the platforms. So we will do a budget allocation and show them which channel we recommend to spend the budgets on and what percentage. Now that we already know what the objective is, we have done market research, we understand the audiences, we decided on the channel mix, now the important factor, the next important pillar is the what. So now you know the audiences, now you know which channels you will use, now you have to decide what will you say, what will be your message. Please note that your messaging has to be in line with what your objective is, do you want to drive leads, do you want awareness, and it has to be in line with what kind of audience you have identified and targeted, which is relatable to them, and also you have to consider what channels you have selected in the fourth pillar. Because if it's Facebook and if you are doing a banner on GDN, it's a different thing, the messaging has to be different, the tone of your messaging should match the platform where you are advertising. Now in this step, which is the what, which is messaging and formats, we discuss what should be the creative message, we discuss on what formats, for example if we are going on Facebook, are we doing Facebook stories, for example if it's awareness, you want to let people know about an offer, or you want people to know that there is a dental clinic around you, we started a dental clinic, probably Facebook stories would be an ideal choice, but if it's, you want to showcase your services, probably a carousel ad, so it depends, for example if you want to do a Legion campaign, probably a carousel ad, so it depends on what your objective audience and what channels you have selected. In this pillar, you select and you recommend to your clients that what should be the creative messaging and what formats we should use, and also you have to understand what should be the personalized messaging if you are choosing, for example for value seekers, there has to be a different message which suits them, which is engaging and prompting for them, and for luxury clients, you have to show a different message, you have to, let's say for example, you have to focus on cutting edge technology, we have expert doctors, one of the largest dental clinic chain, but for value seekers, probably Root Canal starts with 1499 Dirhams, or messaging like that, or for example if we are, we have to create separate messaging for people who are searching on Google for urgent assistance or treatment, they have to be like 24-7 available, book an appointment, so it all is stitched, you have to stitch it together like a story from the market analysis till you decide on creative and what formats to use. So if we have to put it in the presentation, so probably the slides will look like this, where you show that which platforms and what formats we will use and what should be the messaging and also I forgot to tell you, for example, remarketing, it has to, remarketing campaign needs to have a separate message, for example, looks like you are in a rush, leave us details now or call this number, because this campaign is only targeted to people who visited your website already, or in this case, our dental clinic website and they did not fill a lead form, so we'll reach out to them on Facebook or other channel, but we'll tell them, show them a personalized message, looks like you were in a rush, you didn't leave us your details, please call us on this number or, you have to make it small obviously, but this has to be the message. Now as I showed you, as I already told you, so personalized message, we have to look at each of the persona and come up with three tones of the message, for example, like I told you, quality seekers, we focus on keywords like best-in-class lab, cutting-edge technology treated by experts, however, for value seekers, okay, root canal in one sitting, get complimentary blah blah blah blah and similarly for the persona, which needs urgent treatment. Now that we have decided who our audience will be, the audience we will target, we have decided on what channels we'll reach out to them, we have decided what messaging should be, what creative formats we'll use, which means we are ready to go live with this campaign and one of the pillars or one of the factors which people underestimate is the approach to reporting. Now it's as important as the five previous pillars we discussed, the approach to reporting because that's one of the benefits of digital marketing that everything is measurable and you can change everything in real time based on when you observe something is working and something is not working. So that's where this pillar comes into picture, which is the how, how will we measure, how will we report and how will we make changes to the campaign, which is optimization and make it better. So you first decide on what KPIs you need to focus, so for example, in our case, we will focus on how many leads are we getting from the campaign, what is the cost per lead we are getting, but we'll not stop there, we'll also look at KPIs, secondary KPIs like what is our traffic lead conversion rate, are we getting thousands and thousands of users to the website, but nobody is clicking, nobody is filling up a lead form, which gives us different signals, let's say, probably the messaging needs to be changed because people expect something else while they clicked on that, but when they come to the website, they don't find it there and they just leave the website or probably we are not setting expectations, it's a very expensive dental clinic, people click on it, okay, let me go when they see the prices on the website for each treatment. So it tells us like, these secondary metrics tell us where do we need to change, do we need to change probably the audience, are we targeting audience who have less spending power or are we targeting, or we can even check, okay, men are converting more than women. So we need to set what KPIs we'll look at while we are doing this campaign and then we need to understand what A-B testing we are doing, for example, we target, we create two sets of creatives and we have to see what creative is working better and which one is not doing good or probably we are targeting two different cities or in our case, let's say, we are targeting, created two campaigns, one target to one part of the city and one targeted to the broader area and we see, okay, people are reluctant, they don't want to travel from, let's say, more than 10 kilometres to visit a dental clinic. So we initially do a lot of A-B testing but you have to tell the client that this is the A-B testing we will do to understand how to run an optimised campaign which will generate the results. You also can suggest how we will report, will you have to wait for us, you have to set expectations, will you wait for us for every week to get reports or will we provide you a Data Studio real-time report and in case you want to know how to do Data Studio reports, comment and I will create a video quickly on how to do a Data Studio report. So if you have to put this thing in slides, this is how we will put it in a slide, we will show how we will measure, what KPIs we will focus and whether it will be a daily report, will it be a monthly report, will it be a real-time report. In case you want this presentation, comment below and I will send you a link to download this particular presentation which you can use as a template to create strategies. That was it guys, I hope you find it helpful and if you have any comments, just let me know in the comment section below or if you have not subscribed to my channel yet, please consider subscribing to my channel. Thank you so much for watching the video and I'll see you in the next one.