We often think that good digital strategies belong only to large companies or startups with many resources: false! Any business however small, can build a successful marketing strategy, if you follow these best practices.
Today, entrepreneurs have many ways to learn about marketing strategies both search engines and social networks: videos, podcasts , blogs, etc.
If you have a small or medium business and want to open a space for your business in the virtual world here you share a list of 5 tips that will help you succeed both online and offline.
1. Plan your Strategy
Do you ever improvised a presentation? When I have to give a talk and not prepare myself, I can almost assure you that I run media talk arguments or start using those annoying buzzwords “eeehm”, “therefore”, etc.
It is the same with any Digital Marketing strategy. If you do not plan before launching a campaign or digital strategy, two things will happen:
- We were halfway and not know how to continue.
- Do not really know if we cause any impact.
And the only way to know if we have any impact is to first define the objectives of the strategy. For example, you may find a very funny picture to share it on Facebook, but if the image does not respond to a defined objective to share, you’re improvising.
To define goals, we suggest that these are the SMART features:
- S pecific (Specific)
- M easurable (Measurable)
- A chievable (Achievable)
- R ealistic (Realistic)
- T ime specific (defined time)
You also need to analyze what the market needs through key tools such as Google Trends, where the latest trends in internet searches are collected. This tool gives you a great opportunity to create a campaign consistent with the current interests of our target audience.
You know what scares me about Google Trends? It is such a good tool that can take you even realize that your business is going astray. On one occasion, researching on Google Trends we realized that nobody was looking for a product that had put all our hopes. Through this tool we could stop and refocus to ProyectaPrint.
2. Create content
Remember to put your audience first. A marketing strategy is not what you mean, but what your audience wants to hear.
This is where comes in known content marketing consisting become useful ( Youtility , is the name of the book by Jay Baer ) through unique, free and above all, ayden our material target to be better, to overcome to learn something.
If you have, well informed and professional content, your prospects begin to trust you.
No doubt the main protagonist in this type of marketing is video, especially those in a few seconds squander great creativity. For this reason, the social network of video Vine instantly became a success compared with the time it took to Facebook to position.
Remember, every content should have its own objective and must fulfill a particular function within the overall strategy. The idea is to improve the engagement of users and SEO positioning. Furthermore, the popularity of mobile devices makes a good strategy necessarily raising digital content fully adapted to be mobile navigation.
3. Choose your channels
Have you noticed the new generic and prefabricated slogan of many companies? “ Follow us on Facebook and Twitter“. As if these were the only channels of communication. Gary Vaynerchuck challenges entrepreneurs to think beyond Facebook and Twitter. How about a strategy Pinterest ? I respect greatly C’SANTOS being of the few companies that have a defined strategy Instagram .
Obviously, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social networks, but according to your type of business, you can find other social networks that are more suited to your business. Have you seen the marketing strategy Oil Ideal on Youtube?
And in this aspect of choosing channels, something that will make you succeed is to not think about social networks as communication channels (that’s TV and print) but rather, interaction channels . I have seen many brands that are dedicated to publishing and publishing but never answer comments Is that really be social?
4. Measure the Results
This point is closely related to the first: Define objectives.
Once commissioning strategy is critical to track the results that are obtained to calculate the ROI, ie, the return on investment.
The factors to consider are: the traffic generated, impact on social media, conversion rate, etc. To do this we can use tools like Google Analytics , True Social Metrics , to discuss the state of the campaign in all social networks,Social Mention to make a free followup comments about our brand in real time; Addictomatic to collect the dialogues generated based on a particular subject; SocialBro ideal for getting Twitter statistics; Crowdbooster very useful to measure campaigns and reporting; and SocialBakers , a tool to compare with the competition.
5. It uses Professionals
It is natural that at first your budget is limited, and many of the steps will you or someone on your team.
But setting up a coherent digital strategy effectively often requires professional help. That is why we use specialized company, conduct training or hire professional freelance for the design and implementation phase through employment websites is undoubtedly a key factor to achieve effective results.
When your business grows, will interest topics such strategies RTB (real-time auction) to get advertising space at low cost or using tools re-targeting and behavioral targeting, to track users who have visited our site and to directing our communication to the audience you want to reach. These are just some of the tools with which professionals can optimize a digital strategy.
Finally, to launch a digital strategy that is useful for your business is absolutely necessary to design a strategy that includes
- Plan and define objectives,
- Create content
- Select interaction channels,
- Measurement results and, if necessary, and our budget allows,
- Recruitment of human resource to implement our plan of action.
The strategy can accommodate many types and sizes of businesses budget, but it is ideal that its basic structure includes all the points mentioned.
We hope these tips will serve you to design a more effective strategy. We wish you success in your business and forth.