by Louis Baptiste
A step-by-step guide on how to create an effective marketing strategy to help your company succeed in digital marketing in 2024.
Creating an effective marketing strategy is not science; it’s a much more complicated craft. It’s an art, a game of chance, and an absolute mystery for the beginner.
However, the first rule here is don’t panic! You can do it all with flying colours! All you need to do is follow this step-by-step guide, and you’ll come up with a brilliant marketing strategy for your company.
So, without any further ado, let’s look at all the steps that you need to develop a well-rounded, practical, and efficient marketing strategy that will bring you to the top of the industry.
Determine your goals
Determining your goals is a first crucial step. It determines everything that comes after that. In digital marketing, you can achieve many goals: attract more traffic to a website or a specific page, grow social media following, increase clickability of certain pages, increase on-page time, and many more goals.
When you start creating your strategy, this is the first thing you need to think about: what is your end goal? What would you like to achieve at the end of the week, month, quarter, or even a year? That’s real food for thought. But it pays to start with these specific goals in mind.
Do extensive marketing analysis
When you’ve determined your goals, it’s time to research. An effective marketing campaign is impossible without doing good research on the audience, the competitors, the trends in the industry, etcetera.
Here you need to analyse every factor. What can benefit you, what can go wrong? The first, and probably, the most important factor in this puzzle is your audience. Do thorough research to understand how your audience feels and thinks about your products. Try to learn the finest bits of information that may help you to do a better job with your marketing plan and strategy.
Always do a deep analysis of your competitors’ websites, blogs, and social media. Learn what they have done right and wrong thus far. Ask what worked great for them, and what was a complete failure?
Usually, when you work in one niche, what’s worked for your competitors will work for you too, since people probably expect the same from you. However, don’t copy anyone completely: just get an idea of what you can do and recreate it in your own personal manner.
Set a budget
Having a budget for your marketing strategy together with a plan should always be at the top of your priorities. Here you need to determine the number of paid hours that it will take for you or your staff to create and deliver a your plan. Also, consider funds for guest posting, link building, copywriting, SMM, PPC, etcetera.
We also recommend that you consider a sufficient budget for marketing tools you will need to use in this journey of making your marketing goals real. Some of them, like Google Analytics, are free and effective. Others, like HubSpot Marketing tools or Ahrefs, are equally important; but, these can be costly so it’s important to build them into your budget.
Also, don’t forget about content creation apps like Photoshop or Movavi Video Editor. A video merger tool is particularly important if your strategy involves creating video content for platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. These tools allow you to seamlessly combine different clips, add transitions, and create a polished final product that delivers effective audience engagement.
Finally ensure a line item in your budget for task managers and planners, these are crucial for your goal. But you could save some money by opting for more affordable or even free options like Any.do planner.
image by Brands and People on Unsplash
Create a content plan
The next step in your marketing strategy path is to create a Content Plan. You need to create a separate plan for social media posts, emails, blog posts, marketing releases, guest posts, and link building.
Consider how often you need to perform tasks according to every plan: how many blog posts you need per week, how many backlinks you would like to get a month, how many emails you want to send to your customers, etcetera.
Once you have this plan, you can move on to creating actual tasks and delegating them to sector specialists. The important note here is that everything that is made for marketing should be created and brought to life under the watchful eyes of an SEO specialist.
SEO and marketing cannot be separated in 2024. All content you create for your company’s promotion, needs to be made with SEO in mind. All your hard work will be wasted without SEO, so don’t ignore this incredibly important part of your marketing strategy.
To make content creation easier, consider using tools like iMovie for Windows or other video editing software to produce high-quality videos and visual content. Video remains one of the most engaging content types, and integrating it into your content plan can significantly boost your marketing efforts. Whether you’re creating explainer videos, product demos, or engaging social media clips, having the right software will help you produce professional and captivating visuals that align with your brand message.
Analyze your failures and wins
Analyzing what’s going on in your digital marketing strategy is essential at every step of your way. You need to get timely reports about the results of your efforts. Measure every step along the way to find the weak spots in your marketing strategy and fix them to optimise your performance and maximise your positive results.
Your marketing strategy should be somewhat flexible to allow you to take a step back or forward depending on circumstances. Long-distance strategies can’t predict everything that may happen with your company or the industry as a whole, so you need to have an option to change your ways before it is too late.
We usually use pretty regular tools like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, or already mentioned HubSpot marketing tools. You can use any other apps or software that is more fitting to your personal needs, but the ones we have mentioned above are a good place to start.
Summary
Now you know all about developing the best possible marketing campaign for your business promotion.
If you follow our instructions, create adequate goals, do thorough research, set up a reasonable budget, create a content plan and analyze the issues after, in the end, you will get nothing but success for your company. And that’s all you need: and maybe, a splash of luck, so good luck!
Louis Baptiste, the author, is a freelance journalist and exponent of digital marketing techniques. He specialises in marketing and business improvement.
