Gone are the days when billboards and newspaper ads have been the most effective means of promoting your brand and your products. Digital marketing is a must for all businesses, and selecting the right strategies will be key to your success. There are a number of opportunities when it comes to digital marketing, nevertheless, so it can be overwhelming if not outright panic-inducing you to try to find out where to start. We at Digital Nomad Ventures, a digital marketing agency based in Colombo assist to draft Digital Marketing Strategies.

While it might seem tempting to just dive in and get started on as many platforms as once, telling yourself that you’ll figure out the details later, you’re really just shooting yourself in the foot. Doing some sort of ad plan with no clear targets in mind — it’s more about hopping onto a sailboat with a map, where you’re likely to get lost drifting at sea. Without a digital marketing strategy, you won’t see the results because you don’t have the right content in place to actually get the results. And believe me, after all the time and resources you’ve invested, that’s the last thing you want.

Determine What You Want to Accomplish

What do you want your digital marketing campaigns to accomplish? Do you want to build name brand recognition? Generate leads? Get more sales or email subscribers?

Great! Whatever it is that you want, though, you need to name it. This is yet another way that marketing has an online dating crossover comparison. If you go on a bunch of blind dates with no idea what you’re looking for, you might settle down with the first person who you can tolerate. If you have an actual list of traits you want in a person, you’re much more likely to find your match. Your goals matter, and you’ll need to take specific steps to accomplish each one. We’ll look at this more in-depth a little further down.

Understand the Digital Sales Funnel

The digital sales funnel is an important marketing concept that you need to grasp before actually developing your strategy. It is made up of several different steps that buyers move through in order to get to the point of purchasing and/or becoming long term customers. Users who are at the discovery stage aren’t going to respond in the same way to an ad as someone who is at the loyalty stage. They’ll be interacting with your brand in different ways and on different platforms, and your digital marketing strategy will need to be tailored to keep that in mind.

Create Buyer Personas

The next step you’ll need to take in order to create your strategy is to get a solid understanding of who your audience is and what motivates them. This will be essential because it will help you to assess which marketing platforms you can find them on, how they’re interacting with it and what they want to see from you. Buyer personas should be specific. It’s important to note that your buyer personas should absolutely be based on research. Skip the thinly-veiled stereotypes and instead use the analytics that you already have available.

Determine Where to Find Users At All Funnel Stages

You’ve got a good understanding of who your audience is, so now you’ll want to understand how and where to connect with them. Again, refer to your analytics on this and cross-reference them with your buyer personas.

Here are a few examples of how they might:

Someone who is taking a lot of time to plan an expensive bathroom remodel might discover you by googling phrases like “bathroom design ideas” or searching on Pinterest. If they find your blog post featuring images of remodels you’ve done, that could be how they discover you and look to hire you.

A person whose home was flooded after a leaky pipe is going to be looking for someone right now to come to fix that flooring before the mold sets in. Your best bet will be to connect with them through Google Ads because they’ll be searching for those services and you want to be competitive.

Some customers are feeling just okay about that run-down bathtub but don’t have the money to fix it. You run a Facebook Ad campaign showing how affordable and high-quality refinishing tiles or glazing tubs could be and create a demand for someone who wasn’t otherwise looking.

Consider all paid and organic marketing channels and think about which of your audience members are using them and what stage of the funnel they’re in. This will help you determine the marketing channels you should be on and who you’ll want to be targeting in each part of your digital marketing strategy.