How powerful is your digital strategy?

Great digital marketing doesn’t happen with luck. It happens with the help of a great strategy.

Around 45% of companies surveyed in a Smart Insights poll admitted they don’t have a digital marketing strategy. More people than ever before are finding information online– so if you are not appearing in their searches, you’re invisible to them. That’s why it’s very important that your efforts should tie back to your core strategy that will work best for your business and increase your chance of success in reaching your overall marketing goals.

With many tactics and tips out there, it is easy to get into execution mode. Developing the right strategy will help you identify what makes your brand unique and will help you get your message out to your audiences through a variety of channels.

A clear plan and measurable goals will help you prioritize and focus on the most important elements of your strategy. Take some time to learn and create a strategy and you will have the potential to expand your business exponentially.

In the second episode of Truelogic DX – The Podcast Edition titled Developing Strategy for Digital Channels, SEO expert and Truelogic Inc.’s Managing Partner Bernard San Juan III shared some tips on how to create a solid digital marketing strategy.

He highlighted the importance of setting a concrete business and marketing goal before diving into the digital marketing strategies and tactics that could help grow your brand.

“Everything starts from whatever your business goals are. You can’t plan a trip without knowing what destination you’re trying to get to,” Berns said.

“And the relative point of reference is the goal that you had set for your marketing. So when we say marketing goals, most of the time for us, we like to think about that in concrete terms,” he said.

One of the important concrete goals that he mentioned is setting a deadline, but it can’t just be any number with any deadline.

“Those numbers and those deadlines have to match the business goals to have to be aligned with the goals for the brand at large,” he said.

He also highlighted that these business goals should be something that everybody has agreed on, especially on where and how digital marketing contributes to the overall goal of the business.

Choosing the right channel

According to Berns, identifying business goals will have an impact if you are selecting the right channel to grow your brand.

“The best way to figure out what your channels are is by sorting them into three categories, which we like to call your own assets, your leased assets, and your earned assets, your owned assets are the ones where you have proprietary control,” he said.

“These three channels can be used to maximum effect. [H]ave a cohesive strategy that thinks about how to utilize all of them to the maximum benefit of your brand,” Berns added.

Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram are one of the excellent top funnels for Berns because it defines what kind of content you want to push.

“Top funnel reach and engagement campaigns are, at best, mid-funnel, but most of the time they’re very top-funnel. If you are pushing brand awareness, then clearly the campaign you’re running is a very top funnel. YouTube also falls in your top funnel options because views and referral traffic to your website is what YouTube can deliver,” he said.

For bottom-funnel strategies, Berns suggested that SEO can be utilized to target commercial or product pages. He also added AdWords search or remarketing and Facebook conversion campaigns as great bottom-funnel strategies.

“How successful you are at funneling users all depends on the content that you create,” he said.

What is the biggest misconception in marketing?

Brand centric messaging, where brands tend to always create content about themselves is one of the biggest mistakes that Berns sees in the marketing industry.

“There’s nothing wrong with creating brand-centric messaging, but a hundred percent of your messaging can not be brand-centric. A certain degree and a certain amount of it does have to be customer-centric messaging,” he said.

However, he underscored that content is the most potent weapon in marketing because it is any collateral that helps and brings a brand closer to its customers.

“There seems to be a failure to realize that brand-centric content is just awareness content.,” he emphasized.

“So you don’t always produce brand-centric content cause brand-centric content tends to be very emotionally flat. If you want to move someone to action, you want to create content that’s emotional,” he added.

Above and beyond numbers

For San Juan, it is important to know that digital marketing goes beyond just numbers. It is about understanding your target audience, branding, messaging to what archetype your brand is, and to what kind of emotional appeal you’re making,

“Your digital marketing strategy will always be – I want more leads, therefore I need more traffic. Therefore I need to rank more keywords. Therefore I need a larger service. Like it will always be a game of more is more and you know, not a game of less is more. So don’t play your digital marketing game like a numbers game,” he said.

“If you’re crafting your content based off of the people you’re talking to in the channels, they’re guided by the strategy you created, which is aligned with the business goals,” he added.

Powered by Podmachine, Truelogic DX Podcast is for people who want to take their digital marketing game to the next level. It showcases all the digital marketing fundamentals, tips, best practices, and conversations with industry experts about the latest trends and happenings in the digital world.

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