How I Plan a New Marketing Strategy

Analyze past metrics

Before embarking on a marketing plan, it’s important to know how the business is currently performing. Otherwise, we’ll have a weak sense of knowing whether the marketing plan is really working, or whether any increase in sales would’ve happened organically. These marketing metrics can change from an industry or product perspective but here are some general metrics I look.

Metrics

Acquisition data
Behavior data
Content data
Technical data
Loyalty data
Revenue/conversions data

Define goals

I’ll use goals to help determine and allocate the appropriate amount of resources (time and money) to our digital marketing plan. As digital marketing is completely measurable and can be anticipated to a certain extent, setting goals should also help us track our monthly results, allowing us to improve our key metrics over a period of time.

Goals

Build trust
Attract new users
Improve loyalty
Increase conversions

Persona research

It’s really important to think about the type of customer we wish to serve. Getting a bad customer can often be worse than not having that customer at all. It’s also important to know who we want as a customer so we know how and where to find them, which will have a big impact when it comes to targeting our marketing efforts.

We will need to appeal to the specific personality type of those people who are interested in our company. It will be good to have data about our buyer personas but keep in mind that these are fictional characters. Getting to know our ideal customer is a delicate process that requires lots of attention. Here’s some data I’d like to collect.

Audience

Age
Gender
Education
Job Title
Income
Device
Browser
OS
Location
Language
Interests

Competitor research

In order to compare our success in the industry, knowing our own metrics is not enough: we should take a look to see how our main competitors are performing as well. By evaluating certain key metrics, we’ll be in a better position to position our brand effectively.

Let’s make a list of our competitors and analyze their strategies from broad to narrow subjects. For example, auditing a competitor for organic traffic data to backlink data to see an overview of their SEO strategy and where they’re getting their link juice. Then we’ll be able to decide what we can do to position ourselves and outline a better-targeted strategy.

Keyword research

Keywords are phrases and words that our prospects use to type into a search engine, in order to find a solution to their issue.

For small businesses and start-ups, it is usually better to choose long-tail or low competition phrases rather than single words, as this will increase our chances of ranking for the term.

When selecting our keywords, we should test them against the following criteria;

Relevance to our brand
Min. monthly search volume
Level of competition

Ideally, we’re looking for keywords that have a combination of low competition, a high number of monthly searches, and are relevant to our business.

Select keywords that people can actually search for
Perform competitive keyword analysis to grow our list
Monitor search trends and keep an eye on what people are searching
Be sure to check keywords on a regular basis and optimize as necessary

SEO strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of two parts: on-page SEO (modifications our website) and off-page SEO (external efforts affecting our website).

On-Page SEO: Modifications on our website

On-page SEO is a constant effort as the website evolves, and may be adapted over time if necessary to improve search engine relationships.

Meta tags
URL
Title
H1/H2/H3/H4/H5/H6
Media alt text
Body content
Internal linking
External linking
Responsive layout
Page load speed
Crawl/robots

Off-Page SEO: External efforts affecting our website

Off-page SEO deals with getting other websites to link to our website. This is carried out after the website is live and should be an ongoing task.

Link quality
Link anchor text
Business relevance
Outbound link no.
Page authority
Domain authority
Secure (SSL)
Social share

Content strategy

When it comes to maintaining an online presence, we must ensure that we include useful and unique information on our website. We should carefully consider the content included on our website. The more quality content we include, the more likely we’re to be found online, and have more pages indexed in the search engines for a range of keywords.

The following pages are recommended for any website as a minimum:

Home
About
Products/Services
FAQ
Testimonials/Reviews
Contact
Blog/News
Privacy Policy
Terms and Conditions

Blog strategy

Blogging is the most important part of ensuring a successful content marketing campaign. By constantly updating our site with new and useful information, we are greatly increasing our chances of reaching our goals.

It is worth noting at this point that certain posts, such as how to guides and lists, usually perform well. However, we should still carry out tests to see which articles are;

Read
Shared
Commented

Formats

Case studies
Charts/Graphs
Company News
Content Curation
Ebooks
Giveaways
Guides
Helpful Apps / Tools
How-to’s
Infographics
Interviews
Lists
Original Researches
Podcasts
Polls
Predictions
Press Releases
Q&As
Slideshares
Surveys
Templates
Timelines
Videos
Vlogs
Webinars
White Papers

After a new blog post is published, the promotion has an important role in increasing the visibility of our content.

Internal promotion

Make sure users can comment
Share post on own social media channels
Email post to your subscribers

External promotion

Outreach bloggers, reporters etc.
Submit the post to relevant forums
Submit the post to related social bookmarking sections
Share on social media groups, communities etc.

Landing pages

A landing page is a page that allows us to collect our visitors’ information and allows us to convert visitors to leads. When creating our landing pages, the main things we should remember are:

Use clear titles, descriptions, and layouts
Structure the form with the visitor in mind
A/B test
Focus on conversions

Any content we’ve created already can be leveraged to help us start generating leads. One great way to convert traffic into leads is to offer something of value (our asset) in exchange for contact information, via a landing page.

The first thing to remember when it comes to social media is that this is a great place to engage our prospects or customers; they are in a comfortable, relaxed environment, browsing in their leisure time, chatting with friends and looking at stuff from a variety of sources. This means that they are more likely to be receptive to messages they receive from us. However, there is a high chance of getting blocked too. Setting up a strategy with the user in mind is crucial to start well.

In being active on social media accounts, our aim is to build relationships, establish connections and engage in conversations. The main sites we need to be active depends on the audience we want to reach. Just because Facebook is popular, doesn’t mean that we should be there. There are many other social media channels for each business type.

Other channels

There are lots of marketing channels to test and get traction from. But we’re not going to cover them all because it depends on the audience and stakeholder decisions to follow.

Channels

Affiliate
Community
Email
Events
Offline
Partnerships
PR
SEM
SMM
Viral

Measurement & analysis

There are a lot of different statistics that we can measure over a period of time to determine how successful our marketing campaigns are, and how we can optimize the results. It’s important to define and track goals with our analytics tool of choice.

We must be sure to measure our conversion rates, as well as overall numbers, from each traffic source; this includes social media, SEO, blog, landing pages and other marketing channels. Once we have the data in front of us, we can decide which activities to continue, which needs tweaking, and which we can stop altogether, as we’ll have a clearer picture of what’s working and what’s not.