Digital marketing is a word that has been overused in the last decade. It has grown to occupy a major part of every brand’s marketing plan. Despite that, it is still something that splits the room when asking ‘What Does a Digital Marketing Strategy Mean?’. In this article, we will try to answer that question and other questions like where to start in the world of digital marketing as a local business in Bangor. Let’s discuss the steps of creating a digital marketing strategy together.
Are You Looking for ‘Digital Marketing Bangor’?
ProfileTree – Expert Digital Marketers and Brand Strategists with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland
We are a self-made, family run agency based in Belfast and Monaghan. We’ve established ourselves in the Northern Irish market since 2010. We’ve grown the team, collected awards, and helped local and international businesses with building top-notch websites. We’ve also helped hundreds of small and medium sized businesses with free digital marketing training through programmes funded by Northern Ireland’s Councils over the course of three years. Investing in building a digital marketing strategy for your business in Bangor means making sure your new partnership is built on proven methods. Our multi-talented experts can deliver on all aspects of digital marketing from social media marketing to building fully fledged websites and creating content optimised for SEO growth.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Digital Strategy Explained
Marketing Strategy Definition
Let’s start by defining a marketing strategy to be able to understand what a digital marketing strategy is. A marketing strategy is a plan for reaching a specific marketing-related goals in a focused and achievable way. It takes into consideration what your business is currently doing well and what you’re missing regarding the objective you set, so you’re more likely to accomplish it. It is an essential part of the overall business strategy, objectives, and resources. Your marketing should consider the behaviour of your target audience and guide the digital marketing strategy.
For example, the marketing strategy would say that digital marketing should perform 70% of the marketing efforts, or 20% – according to the budget, your customers’ behaviour, industry standards, and the business objectives.
The digital marketing strategy, on the other hand, defines what your online presence will look like, the channels you should be communicating through and each tactic you will use a long the way. A digital marketing strategy is a plan for establishing an internet presence through online channels such as organic search, social media, paid ads, and other web-based mediums such as your website. The goals of digital marketing strategies are many. You could increase awareness about your brand, attract new customers to your business, co-brand with other businesses online, retain and upsell your existing customers, and many more objectives.
Digital Marketing Bangor: How to Write a Digital Marketing Strategy for a Local Business
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #1: Analyse Where You Stand
- Analyse your performance across all the digital marketing channels. If you don’t have any presence yet. Then, you need to review every digital marketing channel, understand who it targets, the nature of its content, etc.
- Watch your competitors and your favorite brands within the same industry and outside of it.
- Take notes of what you think can benefit your digital presence.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #2: Target Audience and Buyer Persona
Define your target audience. In digital marketing, you have the opportunity to execute campaigns with very precise targeting. Go beyond traditional demographic targeting and be as specific as possible. Finally, create buyer personas for your ideal customer to really get to know who they are. The more you know your audience, the more you’d be able to create tactics and content that are relevant.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #3: Map Out Your Top-Level Strategy
Your top-level strategy composes the headlines of your digital marketing plan.
Set your goals straight. Goals are what you want to achieve on a high level. For example, it could be to grow sales by 5% or generate 200 signups for an event.
Strategy is the approach you’ll use to achieve your goals. This is usually defined by the stages of the marketing funnel – you can choose to focus on awareness, interest, desire, and action. You can check this guide where we explain the stages of a sales funnel in more detail.
Objectives are measurable numbers that link to your goal. For example, if I want to grow sales by 5% this year, I may have an objective of establishing 200 leads or reaching 400 people.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #4: Define Your Tactics
A strategy is your destination – it’s the achievable, focused plan for getting you to your target. Tactics are concrete and definable steps within your strategy that ensure you reach your objective. If your strategy is to climb a mountain, one key component of your strategy might be to decide which side of the mountain you should climb. Your tactics would be the gear you’d buy, who you’d bring with you, your complete trip plan, how long it would take to get there, what season you’d go in, and so on. A strategy without tactics won’t ever be executed or help you achieve your goals.
The same applies to your digital marketing strategy. The most common mistake is that many agencies and marketers just draw the strategic headlines without getting into the tactics. Taking social media as an example, your strategy would be growing your fanbase and increasing the engagement rate.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Tactics
The tactics, however, would be as such:
- Planning out the campaigns that will run throughout the year.
- Setting up the budget for your ad spending and assigning objectives to each campaign.
- Determining the influencers you will work with throughout those campaigns
- Creating a clear timeline for the important events and announcements. For example, if I need 200 leads, I may use a landing page with a webinar and social media during the second and third quarter of the year to entice prospective new clients.
- The types of content you want to use like user-generated content, video marketing, webinars, stories, reels, etc.
Let’s dive deeper into this in the content strategy.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #5: Plan Out Your Content Strategy
Content is incorporated into almost every aspect of the digital marketing strategy. Whether it’s a website, a webinar, social media marketing, video marketing, SEO, email marketing, or even paid advertising, content plays a major role.
Start by Identifying Your Digital Persona and Tone of Voice
Brand voice is a facet of brand personality. It is the distinct way a brand communicates with its audience. It’s how you express the unique personality of your organisation. Think of your brand as a person. If your brand were a person, what would they look and sound like? Are they talkative? Conservative? Professional? Serious? Funny? What would they wear? The places they would hang out at. This helps you humanise your brand.
Your brand’s tone of voice is how you voice out the thoughts of the business. From web copy to tweets to brochures to videos, it applies to all channels and touchpoints. It’s consistent. To craft a relevant tone of voice, you need to identify what your organisation values. Whatever your answer, it needs to align with your target audience. 51% of consumers think brands they buy from should share their values. So, make sure your tone of voice reflects your company’s values. Your audience cares because you care.
Whoever will take the task of defining the brand’s tone of voice. They should understand your brand values and culture. They must also do their homework of researching competitors and analysing the audience and any relevant data. A brand voice is an extension of your brand persona. Of course, other things need to be considered. Ideally, the person doing this must have good writing skills to be able to use the right sentence structure, word choice, and familiar with the language spoken across different digital media.
Select Your Channels
Select the channels you want to be present. Focus on quality rather than quantity. For instance, if you realise that you have an account on many social media channels where you are inactive, then focus your efforts on the active accounts if they’re worth it. Or, set a new goal to grow your presence on these channels.
Moreover, after you’ve identified your brand persona, tone of voice, and target audience, it becomes easy to select the most effective channels for your brand. If you know that your audience are young, prefer bite-size content, then the choice is obvious, it’s either TikTok or Instagram. If your customer persona is thirty-five or above, your content is articles and long-form content, then LinkedIn, email marketing and your website’s blog are your go-to channels. Think about how each channel contributes to meeting your objective and goal.
Prepare Content Calendars and Content Pillars
Preparing content calendars and content pillars is something you will get better at by time. A content calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Content calendars typically include upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships, and updates to existing content. Content calendars are the guiding compass to your day-to-day content creation tasks. From brainstorming ideas up until publishing – your content calendar will make it easy for your creative team to collaborate and execute content that will be published.
A fully developed content calendar will include the written content, designs, animated visuals and videos, publishing date and platform, ad budget and KPIs (if applicable). KPIs could be impressions, reach, views, etc.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #6: Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Many companies start their digital marketing journey and keep moving forward without a clue on how to measure success. KPIs are the factors by which you measure success.
Each activity that you invest in should have a clear KPI, which is your measure of success. If you have an email marketing campaign, then the email open and engagement rates are important to measure success. Meanwhile, if you’re working with SEO, then the number of traffic coming through Google is your definition of success. Whenever you’re assessing the user experience on your website and its calls to action effectiveness, then the conversion rate would be your KPI. Try to be as specific as possible with your KPIs to be able to benchmark and optimise your goals as you go.
Digital Marketing Bangor Strategy Step #7: Report and Optimise
One of the things that makes digital marketing so powerful is the ability to pivot and adjust. You don’t have to create a digital marketing strategy and stick to it literally. For example, if an ad isn’t delivering results, pause it and try a new visual or tweak the ad’s copy. If your website isn’t converting visitors, run an A/B test with different calls to action. For example, you can test a “learn more” call to action against “sign up now” to see what performs best.
Digital Marketing Bangor: How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency?
What’s the Best Solution for Results-Driven Digital Marketing in Bangor?
Three simple things: thinking strategy, thinking sales process/customer journey, and working with a specialist local agency to shape your entire online presence to make sure it works towards your business goals. That’s why we love helping local companies discover business growth through tested and proven digital marketing knowledge.
For a really simple way to visualise your customer’s journey online, simply picture a local car showroom. Then take a look at your competitors’ digital marketing efforts. How many are the equivalent of a showroom salesperson walking straight up to a new customer and saying, ‘buy this now’?! Basic sales training would suggest that asking a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question at such an early stage is a recipe for a lost sales opportunity. Your business deserves better.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Their Journey
Instead of being pushy and salesy, put yourself in the customer shoes. Think of ‘What are the digital stages of awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy for your potential customers?’ In a physical sales environment, these steps are a tried-and-tested approach. Why should online buyers be any different? Useful content, landing pages, reviews, eCommerce, mailing lists and customer social sharing can be used to give your audience the time and space to buy when they are ready and maintain a relationship with your business.
Much better than a yes or no ‘buy this now?’ hard-sell.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Their Individuality
In a physical shop, you wouldn’t expect a customer you know to be an impulsive, early adopter and someone who likes to research to behave in the same way. Similarly, online audiences should be given the same scope to be themselves. Segmenting of customer groups, with tailored content, can be one way to make this happen. Otherwise, the content seen across your digital presence should make it possible for buyers to react in their own way.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Your Experience
You already know what a great sales process looks like. How? You have been on the receiving end of one! Think about a time when you were truly impressed with a sales process, then break it into the steps above. How could this be replicated online for your audience? If you’re unsure, ProfileTree can draw up a digital marketing strategy customised for your business, your potential buyers, and your company goals. Let’s take time to understand your buyers together. Then go above and beyond. Every time. We’ll show you how.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Ask Why
Simply being ‘nice to do’ isn’t a good reason for an investment of time and money in digital marketing. Thinking about the outcome you need, one designed to have a positive impact for your business, is a first step to success. You wouldn’t invest in assets for your business without the right reasons. We’ll help you make sure your digital foundations are in place.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Ask How
Copying something your competitors are doing means that method will only work until technology or customer behaviour moves on. Instead, be innovative with your ‘how’ and think about futureproofing with newer technologies and platforms. We can help to reveal the right questions to make sure your digital efforts are tailored around YOUR business.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Ask What
The temptation to over-share company news is almost an automatic instinct. But ask if your content is useful, entertaining, and shareable before pressing ‘publish’. Keep editing and keep asking yourself ‘so what?’ for as long as necessary. We’ve built out company on content and LOVE to show local businesses what we did with live results showing our successes.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Ask Where
Don’t forget to segment your audiences and tailor your activity to suit. Your social media and Google insights can help draw up customer personas to make sure your message isn’t just clear but aimed at the right channels and potential customers. Taking a step back, with the help of ProfileTree, can make your online world perform beyond your expectations.
Digital Marketing Bangor: How Much Does Digital Marketing Cost
Working with so many different businesses over the years taught us to work with different budgets and requirements. We have created multiple packages for each of digital marketing services. Of course, every project has its own requirements but generally, we use your requirements and budget to come up with a suitable digital solution. In other words, you set the requirements, we tailor a package within the limits of your spending. Contact us for a free quote and a digital consultation about your digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing Bangor: Ready to Book a Free Digital Marketing Audit?
A digital marketing audit is where one of our expert team members go through your digital marketing channels such as social media pages, website user experience, and SEO performance and analyse it to give you a brief of your brand’s digital well-being. Fill the form and send us your questions, we will be happy to answer all of them. Please do let us know if your business is registered in Bangor. Alternatively, you can book a chat with one of our team members to audit your digital marketing channels for free and find out how we can help you establish a strong digital marketing presence in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.
More Services: Social Media Marketing Bangor, SEO Bangor, Content Marketing Bangor, Digital Training Bangor
