Digital Marketing Strategy Before Tactics

Knowing the impact and benefits of doing digital marketing strategy for their businesses, entrepreneurs are now focused on getting the right mix of virtual marketing tactics. However, the problem arises when digital marketers are too much glued to the tactics done before strategy. It should be the other way around.

Impact of Tactic-centered Digital Marketing

As digital marketers, you should first have a clear understanding of what your business and your target audience are before executing your business plan.
Focusing on implementing your tactics before your overall marketing strategy may impose a negative impact on your business and may be the cause of failing to achieve your goal.
Take a battlefield for example. Military generals first survey the field, review everything else and decide what to do — where to attack, which force should go first, and when to start their attack. Then when that strategy is already agreed, these are then sent by the messengers of every force. These troops will then decide their tactics — whether to deploy their archers first and send the infantry afterwards or vice versa. 
However, when the military generals don’t have any strategy, each troop will surely use random acts of aggression against the enemy because they don’t have any idea how to go about it.
For this reason, here are the negative impacts on focusing too much on your digital marketing tactics rather than your strategy:

• Absence of Clear Goal

When your overall team don’t know what your goal is, achieving it will surely be difficult.
It is important that you should know the problems that you are trying to solve, the prospects that you are trying to sell your products and services into, and how you should connect with them so that they will really buy your products and services.
However, when you haven’t asked yourself this first, this will really result to unfocused efforts and difficulty in achieving your business goals. 
Your marketing tactics should be aligned with your digital marketing strategy. By doing this, it will guide your decisions and make it easier for you to identify where you should spend your resources into. Without a strategy, your team’s effort will surely be wasted as they don’t know the goal of each tactic. 
It is also important that you should have a well-defined goal. This should always be connected with your strategy and make sure that your team knows this so that on whatever task they do, they know where their efforts will go, understand its importance, and it will be easier for them to achieve it. So, do your research and make a creative, effective and efficient strategy. 

• Inconsistent Brand Message

In building your brand, you must have your unique voice and message that should be consistent on all of your digital marketing campaigns. 
Brand voice and message is all about bringing a specific feeling through your message that remains across your brand’s different digital channels while providing a consistent and reliable content.
Making sure that it is consistent is of utmost importance as this is what makes your business different from your competition. When your brand achieve this, you will surely increase your business recognition, build brand awareness, create better connection to your prospects and customers, and increase your revenue. 
However, without a strategy, this makes it harder for you to provide compelling messages that will gather the interest and will speak directly into your ideal customers. 
With this, you need to make sure that your team really knows your brand voice and that every content provided in any digital channels is really aligned on what your brand voice is. 

• Wasted Resources

If you don’t have a clear and well-planned digital marketing strategy, you are surely wasting your time and money because most of the time, you are just guessing and you don’t have a clear idea of what is it you really want for your digital marketing campaign.
For example, you might be wasting a lot of time focusing on using different social media platforms when you can only use one social network and increase your brand presence in that same site. 
This is why you should really take your time in building your marketing strategy and plan how you should implement your tactics so that your budget will really be spent effectively and ensure that you will only focus on activities that will help you generate the highest return on investment. 

Importance of Digital Marketing Strategy

Tactic is also an important aspect of your digital marketing campaign. However, you should not use it without even planning your strategy beforehand.
The example above about the importance of strategy and tactics in a battlefield clearly identifies the difference between both terms. You should understand that digital marketing strategy is where you should play and how you can win the game while the tactics refer to how you deliver and execute the strategy in order to succeed.
This is why business owners and digital marketers need to follow a systematic process. First, build a map of your prospect and market in the form of segmentation. Then, decide which segment to go and how to position your brand. Lastly, create a clear strategy with a specific goal for each segment. Only then, when you have a clear goal, target, and strategy will you be able to start thinking about your tactics and the tools needed in every strategy.
According to Smart Insights, 45% of businesses are doing digital marketing without a defined strategy. This is strongly a negative sentiment into these business owners because they are using different digital marketing tactics without having a clear idea of what is it they really want to achieve.
For this reason, we have gathered the top reasons on why you should create a strategy for your digital marketing campaign:

• Alignment of Company Direction

It is of utmost importance that your marketing tactics and campaigns are all aligned with your company’s direction. With a well-planned digital marketing strategy, you will have a clear and strategic goal that will help you achieve the direction you want for your company.
Of course, one thing that is always associated with your strategy’s goals is your list of objectives. These are essential aspects in achieving your company’s goals and by doing this, it should also be SMART which means it should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound. Setting a SMART goal will be discussed further later.
Do keep in mind that both of your goals and objectives should help you set realistic targets.

• Increase Online Value Proposition

Online value proposition is what your customers think about your brand. This is closely tied to your brand positioning which identifies your business against the competition.
Using a digital marketing strategy will help you increase your value proposition online as this carefully analyze what your brand and audience are. This is why it is important for you to clearly communicate the content and experience you can offer to each digital platforms. 

• Strengthen Audience Connection

Using different tactics and tools will always be useless when you don’t know who your audience or prospects are. However, with a strategy, this can help you identify this beforehand.
The digital platforms are different than the traditional one. In this place, there are various types of customer profile and behavior. So, you have to know these people first before showing your newest products and services. Although, Google Analytics can help you with the quantitative value of your audience, you also need to use online audience survey tools to identify the weak points of your campaigns and address it. 

• Save Money and Increase Revenue

With your digital marketing strategy, you will be able to oversee problems beforehand and use the appropriate tactics and tools for each campaign. Once you create your strategy and pinpoint everything before making your campaigns public, different resources will then be used directly to its appropriate campaign. You will also be able to use your resources to the most effective methods. Thus, you will be able to save your money and increase your business revenue. 

Tips in building a Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that you are already convinced of the importance of digital marketing strategy, you should already create a digital marketing strategy for your business. However, if you find it difficult to do so, here are the tips in building your digital marketing strategy before tactics:

1. Identify Goals and Objectives

To clearly determine which are your goals and your objectives are, let’s differentiate these two first. A business goal is what your company expects to achieve over a specific period of time while the objectives are the steps to achieve your goals.
Before doing anything else, you should first identify your digital marketing goals and objectives.
What do your business hope to accomplish? What are the problems you are trying to solve for your target market? How is your brand different from your competitors? What experience do you want to give to your clients?
You need to answer every questions above in order to clearly identify the direction of your business. 
Moreover, these two should also be SMART which means it should be:

• Specific – It should be detailed and is able to pinpoint the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Measurable – Your objective should have both qualitative and quantitative qualities that can be applied in creating a metric.
• Achievable – It should be used to improve your strategy’s and employee’s performance.
• Realistic – Your objective should be relevant to your business or your industry in general.
• Time-bound – It should be used within a time period for you to review afterwards.

Clearly identify your goals and objectives and keep it aligned in order to help you set up realistic targets.

2. Determine your Buyer Persona

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers and you can get this from your existing customer data and through market research. 
Do keep in mind that the data your need includes a combination of demographic and psychographic information. The demographic data is the quantitative aspect of your research which mainly includes the location, age, income and job title of your prospects. Meanwhile, the psychographic or the qualitative information includes the goals, hobbies, interests, and priorities of your customers. 
Make sure that in identifying your buyer persona, you should answer the questions below:

1. Who is your target market?
2. Specifically, who is your ideal customer?
3. What past clients think about your product and services?
4. What do they think about your brands?

3. Identify your Marketing Strategies and Tools

When you are done determining the top three key factors above, you can then identify your digital marketing campaign. These campaigns are your efforts to accomplish your online marketing goals on different digital platforms like social media, search engines, e-commerce and others. 

• Digital Marketing Strategies

Here are the top campaigns that will help you achieve your goals and objectives:

1. Social Media Marketing – You can accomplish this campaign by using and posting content on various social media platforms.
2. Search Engine Optimization – This is a campaign that you can achieve with the use of content and making sure that the structure of your website can be read by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 
3. Content Marketing – You can accomplish this campaign by creating content like blog posts, ebooks, and infographics across your website and promoting it to different platforms. 
4. Email Marketing – This is a campaign that you can achieve by promoting your content, products and services, and other important information about your business into your audience through email.
5. Search Engine Marketing – You can accomplish this campaign by advertising your brand in search engine websites. 

• Digital Marketing Tools

With every campaign, you should also use appropriate tools in order to accomplish it. Here are the top tools that marketers use in their digital marketing strategies:

1. WordPress – This is by far the most used website builder in the Internet. This tool can help you build your website and with its free plugins, you can easily navigate your website and provide valuable content to your audience. 
2. Google Trend – This is a trend search tool that will help you create content that are optimized for search queries. With this tool, you will have a better understanding on the latest trends in the industry. 
3. Hootsuite – Your brand’s social presence is really important. With this tool, you can already switch from one social media platform to the other in order to schedule different content and provide better customer service.
4. MailChimp – This is an email automation tool that will help you automate your emails so that you don’t have to edit and send one email at a time. 
5. Canva – This tool will help you create various visual content following the prescribed ratio in different digital platforms. 
6. LeadPages – Landing pages are the place where you convert audience into customers and for this reason, you need this tool to create your landing pages and make it mobile-friendly. 
7. Google Analytics – This tool will help you monitor and assess your website’s digital performance from onsite engagement, referral sources, and resource of unique visitors.

These are only some of the widely-used campaigns and tools that have already helped thousands of business owners and marketers online. With the use of these campaigns and tools, you will surely achieve your goals in terms of digital marketing. 

4. Make a Timeline

After choosing the campaigns and tools, you are then ready to create your timeline which will be the outline of your digital marketing strategy and tactics. 
Think of this as your digital marketing calendar. With this, you can easily manage all of the tasks under various campaigns. You can then check its task owners, deadlines and the related content under the task. You can also use different online applications like Asana which helps you manage all of your employee’s task in one place. By using this, you will have an end-to-end view of your digital marketing strategy. 
Do keep in mind that the purpose of a calendar is to organize and document your overall strategy. So, make your team accountable and evaluate your digital marketing strategy using this timeline. 

5. Allocate budget and tasks

Using various campaigns and tools requires a lot of resources and manpower. For this reason, you should allocate your budget and human resources appropriately. 
Although there are a lot of free tools on the Internet, you cannot deny that in order to take advantage of its benefits, it requires you to pay. As part of your strategy, you should evaluate these tools accordingly and make sure that in every tool and equipment you use, the money is distributed properly.
Other than the tools, you should also value your employees. Every task given to them must all be documented in your calendar. This should also be in line with their area of work. Lastly, make sure that all of the tasks are given to all employees accordingly. 

A Digital Marketing Company for You!

So, there you have it. These are the things that you should keep in mind in creating a digital marketing strategy before tactics. 
Both strategy and tactics are important aspects of your marketing campaign. However, you should follow a strategic process in accomplishing your campaign. This means that you should create a digital marketing strategy first before creating your various tactics under these strategies. 
However, if you find it hard to accomplish your brand’s digital marketing strategy, ESTRAT Digital Marketing Agency will help you solve this problem!
ESTRAT is one of the leading digital and social media marketing agency in the Philippines. The company will your business grow through relevant, up-to-date and effective Internet marketing strategies. This will ensure you that the company will provide you a professional service that is perfect for your business!
So, for your digital marketing problems, hire ESTRAT now!