We’ve condensed the most important points into 5 simple topics you can start applying right now.

1. Profile your target customer

The more you know about your audience, the cheaper and easier it is to attract them — this statement is constantly being reassured after each new campaign in Digital Marketing.

And the reason behind that is obvious. When you understand your customer habits, wishes, and, especially, expectations, you can narrow your strategy down to what matters to them.

To do that you will need more from your target customer than age and class. You will need aspirations, desires. You will need to know their routines.

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your audience. It has a face, a voice, a life. It has its pains and is actively trying to solve them. One or a few buyer personas can help you define a better scope and never deviate from what is important to your customer.

2. Understand your current situation

Now that you know your customers better, how about learning more about yourself? If you are starting to plan a new marketing strategy development, this is the best time to revise what you have been doing until now.

First, you and your team can start with the basics: what is the essence of the product or service your company sells? Who are the competitors and what are they doing?

You can also start analyzing your financial situation, especially the budget available for your next campaign. Will this money be available at once? Will you need to show some results to keep the investments going?

3. Conduct a Marketing SWOT

A SWOT analysis is a popular and effective method of key points assessment in a business so you plan and execute strategies aiming directly at them.

So, how about doing a SWOT especially for that? It will not only help with our last item (knowing the business better) but will also help you to find creative ideas for very specific demands in your promoting plan.

So, let’s explore these four points (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) and see how they are applied to marketing.

Strengths: Here you can list what the company is already doing right to advertise and which assets are available to improve on.

Weaknesses: Where is your business failing in reaching and engaging your audience? In what social media are you absent? What kind of content isn’t resonating with your leads? What you have to do is to be objective and accurate: identify a problem, know its roots, and plan how to correct it.

Opportunities: Digital Marketing is a dynamic environment, with new channels and new communication ways appearing every time.

Threats: In the same way, innovations and changes in habits can be approached as an opportunity, it also can be identified as a threat.

4. Research distribution channels

So, here we start the planning phase. Create great content is always the center of your Digital Marketing strategy but how these messages reach your audience is also quite important.

Again the word optimizationis relevant to us. There are a lot of distribution channels available and they all offer some benefits in participating.

But they also demand different kinds of investment in time and effort. And there is a lot of them. So how could you give equal attention to so many? This is another reason why we put the customer as a first step. Knowing which websites, portals and social networks they consume the most is a way of focusing on research and strategic planning on those with more potential for engagement.

Then you have to go deeper. After pinpointing the channels, you need to understand how they work, the best ways of sharing content on them, the relationship their public have with free and paid advertisement, etc.

5. Develop a strategy

When you get to this point in marketing strategy development, you already have a better understanding of:

• your persona;
• the company’s financial and structural situation;
• the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing team;
• the opportunities and threats to attack;
• the better distribution channels to invest.

So, now you have everything you will need to start your planning for real. This is when you gather your team, have ideas, and make decisions:

Type of content; Also related to knowing your persona and your budget, an important definition now is what type of content will be more engaging to your audience.

Frequency of content; Digital Marketing depends a lot on relationships and emotional connections. Especially in social media, a brand needs to be seen as a close friend, a constant presence in their lives. To do that, you need to have a frequency. A great marketing strategy development is done with a tight schedule — a structure to produce and distribute content. That way, you optimize the marketing workflow and reduce costs and time spent on it.

Brand Persona; If you created a fictional character to represent your target audience, why not do the same to represent your company? A buyer persona helps the marketing strategy by defining a cohesive voice to all content you produce. It makes content easier to elaborate and reproduce, with clear and simple guidelines.

We hope these 5 steps will help you plan your marketing strategy!

Contact me today for a consultation.

Alejandra Granados, SOLUMARK®