In a digitally centered world, having an effective and impactful digital marketing strategy has become a necessity for success for all varieties of organizations, regardless of their size or industry. While traditional marketing strategies have often been tailored to meet the needs of large corporations with extensive resources, it’s important to recognize that marketing can be just as transformative for non-profit organizations. Marketing is no longer just about promoting products or services; it’s about creating meaningful connections with the community, advocating for causes, and building trust. Read on to explore the strategic playbook for digital marketing and how it can serve as a powerful tool to transform your brand, connect with your target audience, and drive growth in today’s competitive digital landscape.
Digital Marketing in Simple Terms
First, it is important to understand what a digital marketing strategy is. In simple terms, a digital marketing strategy uses digital channels, such as social media, to connect with customers and promote business. While digital marketing has been around for decades, the increasingly digitalized world has transformed it from being a tool to a necessity. Check out this recent blog, to learn more about the definition of marketing and how it compares to branding.
Your Digital Marketing Strategy Playbook
How can you take your marketing to the next level? The beauty of marketing is that there are a variety of ways to accomplish the same thing with no right answer. However, the following tools of this strategic playbook, in no specific order, are guaranteed to boost your digital marketing strategy.
Social Media Management
Social Media Management encompasses the overall process that takes place when any marketing is done through social media. Essentially, it is a timeline of what needs to be done and when. Organizing the content you will post and how will ensure timeliness, consistency, fresh content, and further increase engagement. Focus on content that is tailored specifically to you. At Fix & Form, we spend a large portion of our front-end time understanding the client and their goals. This ensures our human-centered branding approach, focusing on who you are as a brand and fully encompassing every way you can capitalize on that. What are your goals? What do you value? Who is your audience? Those are just the beginning of important questions to consider when brainstorming content. In order to organize the planning of social media content, making a spreadsheet of some kind with applications such as Smartsheet, is crucial to successful social media management. Using a scheduling tool allows you to able to include specific details for each objective, such as who was assigned the task, the due date, channel of distribution, link to Canva content, the content image, keywords, URL to be included in the post, hashtags, publish date, and post time. This is especially useful when you have multiple people working on the same projects, ensuring everyone is on the same page with content, timelines, and responsibilities.
Website Development
In the digital environment that exists today, having a website for your business is increasingly critical. Implementing a well-developed website allows for increased awareness, engagement, enhanced credibility and trust, smoother customer experience, communication channels, data collection and analysis, and e-commerce capabilities. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is increasingly important for every website as the digital world becomes oversaturated. Competing to be the first page of websites that show up on a search engine with a search is difficult, but practices such as keyword research, on-site and offsite optimization and technical search engine optimization will be your game changing competitive advantage. Since our attention spans do not have the patience to wait for a website to load, even a two second difference in load speed on your website can be the difference between gaining or losing a customer. Websites are often created with generators such as WordPress or Wix, both of which allow the ability to make sure your website loads properly on all types of devices. Take advantage of this! Also using platforms such as TinyPNG allow for image optimization which makes your website load faster without taking away from the image quality.
Email Marketing
Yes, email marketing is still a thing. While we understand the spam emails you might consistently receive and utter tendency to curse the email for attempting to unsubscribe a hundred times, email marketing is still a key channel for businesses to reach consumers. They key however, is developing a balance of marketing and spamming. Two key metrics to look for in email marketing is the percentage of users who open the email and the click- through rate, also known as the amount of users who not only open the email but also engage by clicking on a link. Just like social media management and website management, there are many tools that can help you with email marketing such as Brevo. In order to achieve a key email marketing strategy, focus on your copy right. Create a sense of urgency, personalize the emails, and ALLOW recipients to set their preferences on how to receive information from you. This develops a genuine, yet informative human-centered brand.
Marketing Analytics
While a newer development in digital marketing, marketing analytics is a key player in a successful marketing strategy. How do you know what to post if you do not evaluate what is working and what is actually driving your business down? As the West Virginia University described, “Over the past decade, marketing has evolved from creative storytelling and brand building to a precise science.” Marketing is more than just creating content and posting it. It is a science, requiring a deep understanding of your consumers, also known as human-centered branding, in order to gain insights and develop informed strategic decisions. A key insight marketing analytics provides is understanding where a consumer is in there purchase decision process and tailoring each marketing decisions to help that process along.
Digital Marketing is taking over. The question is will you adapt with it? While rapid change can be difficult, we hope you are just as excited as us in developing strategies to be ahead of the times, leveraging tools and insights to improve your human-centered brand and business. Let’s connect, and build a digital marketing strategy that is right for you!
