Creating a thriving digital marketing environment is more than just a set it and forget it recipe. It’s one that requires a combination of preparation and carefully selected ingredients, including a great content strategy. Using the steps below, you’ll be able to reassess your digital marketing recipe and determine what other spices, flavors, and ingredients you might need to help it succeed.
Manageable Expectations
When building out a strong digital marketing strategy, setting reasonable expectations is a necessary starting point. Ensure that your goals are attainable. Your KPI’s should be ambitious but not outlandish.
Communicate with your team about the goals you’re hoping to hit, as regularly checking in and strategizing with them can be one of your most valuable assets. It puts everyone on the same page, and ensures that any updates or changes can be implemented quickly and efficiently.
Build Content Around Your Funnel
The key pieces of a high-functioning funnel are awareness, interest, evaluation, commitment, and sale. Knowing these parts and what content needs to be built for each section is incredibly important.
A good, proactive approach would be to examine each funnel stage individually and try to imagine the prospect's mindset at each point of progress before you begin creating content for that particular stage. For example, if a potential customer is not yet aware of your brand, a CTA of "Get your Free Trial" will likely not be effective since they have no idea what it is that you do. Similarly, a prospect who has already committed to a free trial will not benefit much from introductory information about your product.
To learn more about what content should be created for each stage of the funnel process, visit our article: How To Fix Broken Salesforce Sales Funnels
Make Plans For Production
Important as they may be, goals and KPIs are not the only things you need to plan for. You also need to make sure you’re developing a solid content strategy within a set time frame. Typically going month-by-month is a good, strategic period of time to plan ahead.
Be sure to create content for all avenues of your digital marketing output, including email, social media, blog posts, and your primary website. Planning ahead helps make consistent and targeted communication with your audience much easier and more effective.
Know Your End Goals
You’ve done the planning and you’ve built the content. Now, you need to reflect on it to ensure that all the goals you set in the beginning were met, and to determine if you need to make any changes going forward.
In doing so, you may find there to be positive changes like a campaign performing particularly well! Or the need for updates, such as removing the social media icons in your email footer to reduce your spam rate. You should also be checking in to see if you met your growth and ROI goals so you can reassess and fine tune your goals for the next quarter.
