SWOT analysis
Prior to developing a marketing plan, it is important for you to conduct a SWOT analysis of your firm to check how healthy your business is. This internal and external analysis serves as a useful tool to determine the strengths and weaknesses and make you aware of any imminent threats towards your business as well as opportunities for your business to drive growth of sales, revenue and audience reach. This allows you to get a clear picture of your business’s current position in the marketplace.
Here are some examples of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as analysis factors for a digital marketing industry:
Strengths
· Effective brand recognition
· High availability of skills including SEO, strategic planning, copywriting, etc.
· Extensive reach through social media platforms
Weaknesses
· Limitations regarding access to skills
· Lack of sufficient budget
Opportunities
· Market gaps
· Strong relationship building with publicity sources
· Getting access to new marketing tools and technology
Threats
· New competitions in the industry
· Introduction of new regulations that affect marketing practices
· Growing rate of rolling employees
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Establish your marketing goalsOnce you know your current state in the marketplace, you start working on establishing your goals to get a clear idea of what your future actions would be. You should focus to meet your goals and plan accordingly. Define your marketing strategy
Once your business objectives have been set, now you need to proceed in order to achieve them.
Personalising your business strategy is a crucial thing. One strategy will not work for all business types. So you need to design your own marketing strategy and carry out your plan. Here are some factors for defining your marketing strategy:
a. Create your buyer persona
First you need to segment your audience — know who you shall address, know their tastes and preferences and the right places to meet their requirements.
b. Clear positioning
It is important for you that you are very clear regarding your audience reach and your value proposition, that is, why should the audience choose you over others. You should know the channels where your audience is present and implement ways to communicate with them in most unique ways.
c. Content marketing
Creating a content strategy is important for attracting customers and improving your brand awareness in the minds of the users. You also need to map out a specific communicating plan for content marketing for every single platform. You can use tools such as keyword research, social posts and design a content calendar for effective content marketing,
Analysing customers and competitionsWhile planning for your marketing tactics, you need to define your customer or buyer personas. You should understand your customers well and create content according to the needs, behavioural patterns and concerns of various audience groups.
Only when you get a detailed insight into your users, then you can start planning your online content strategy to make it more effective and connect with more potential and relevant customers.
Another important factor is analysing your competitors. In today’s online world, competitors are a click way. So make a list of your competitions, know who they are, how are they outdoing you and find out ways to compete against them.
Define tactics for implementing in future You need to plan out various strategies depending on your marketing objectives such as email marketing, social media, SEO strategies, web optimisation, paid media advertising, CRM, etc.
But today due to the emerging online world, the number of channels is increasing day-by-day as well as the customer information you can gather from these platforms is becoming much wider and extensive; therefore, it is crucial for the marketers to use automation tools for automating marketing campaigns.
With these strategies, you can create several campaigns and personalise your messages depending on your buyer persona thereby increasing your success rate by taking your customers to the final funnel of purchase.
Evaluate your performance
After you have created and implemented your online marketing strategy, your actual job begins now — analysing your results. This is the secret for the successful optimisation of your marketing performance and budget. You need to gauge every single action using key performance indicators (KPIs) to check if you have achieved your desired RoI (Return on Investment).
Conclusion
The online world is evolving at a rapid rate. Therefore, you need to keep a constant lookout and identify room for improvement of your performance.
These steps should be kept in mind while creating your marketing plan. Do not leave anything to fate or chance, you need to look for ways yourself for better positioning and boosting your online presence. Try out new tools to simplify your work and improve your performance and make your marketing campaigns successful.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
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