How to Maximize Marketing Agency Profits

A marketing strategy is a plan for concentrating and achieving a particular marketing-related goal (or goals). It considers what your company is already doing well and what you're missing in relation to the goal you set, increasing your likelihood of success.

Strategy vs. Tactic

Your goal is your destination; your strategy is the focused, attainable plan to get there. The specific, measurable actions you take as part of your plan to ensure you accomplish your goal are known as tactics. Any plan, marketing-related or not, has the following three components:

• A description of your problem

• A strategy for addressing the challenge

• a series of focused actions required to implement the policy.

Depending on the size of your company, your marketing plan could have a number of moving pieces with various objectives. Having said that, developing your approach can occasionally feel overwhelming. In order to keep you focused on accomplishing your goals, remember these three actions whenever you feel overwhelmed by your marketing plan.

Let's now examine the approach for digital marketing.

An internet presence can be built using online channels including social media, paid search, organic search, and other web-based mediums like your website. A digital marketing strategy is a plan for doing this. Increasing brand exposure and luring in new clients are the two objectives of digital marketing tactics.

A solid digital marketing plan enables your company to use carefully chosen media to accomplish specified digital goals. "Digital marketing strategy" and "digital marketing campaign" are frequently used interchangeably, much like marketing strategies and methods. How do they vary then?

In the parts that follow, we discuss that.

A digital marketing campaign

The building blocks and steps in your digital marketing plan that help you get closer to a particular end goal are called campaigns.

For instance, you might run a digital marketing campaign on Twitter if the main objective of your digital marketing strategy is to increase lead generation through social media. To increase the number of leads you receive from Twitter, you may share some of your company's top-performing gated content there.

1. Build your buyer personas.

2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

5. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.

6. Monitor and report.

Buyer personas, which depict your ideal customer(s), can be developed by investigating, polling, and speaking with your company's target market.

It's critical to highlight that this data should, if feasible, be based on actual data, as making assumptions about your audience might lead to a misalignment of your marketing plan.

Your research pool should be made up of a variety of customers, prospects, and individuals outside of your contacts database that fit your target demographic in order to gain a complete picture of your character. For your own buyer persona(s), however, what kind of data should you compile in order to inform your digital marketing strategy?

That depends on your business; it may change based on whether you sell to businesses or consumers, or if you sell expensive or inexpensive goods.

Quantitative and Demographic Information Location:

To quickly determine the region from where your website traffic is coming, use web analytics tools.

• Age: Depending on your line of work, this information may or may not be pertinent. But if it is, the best way to acquire this information is to look for patterns in your prospect and contact database.

• Income: Since people could be reluctant to divulge this information via online forms, it is advisable to collect sensitive information such personal income through persona research interviews.

• Job Title: This is mainly pertinent to B2B businesses and something you can get a general notion of from your current customer base.

• Goals for Qualitative and Psychographic Data: Depending on the problem your product or service addresses, you may already be aware of the objectives of your customer persona. Speak with internal sales and customer service representatives as well as actual customers to confirm your presumptions.

• Challenges: To gain a sense of the typical difficulties your audience members encounter, talk to consumers, sales and customer service representatives, and any other personnel who interact with customers.

• Hobbies/Interests: Inquire about the interests and hobbies of your target demographic and clients. To inform future content and partnerships, it's useful to know if significant portions of your audience are also interested in fitness and well-being if you run a fashion business, for instance.

• Priorities: To learn what matters most to your target market and customers in regard to your business, speak with them. For instance, knowing that your target market appreciates customer assistance more than a competitive pricing point is crucial knowledge if you own a B2B software company.

You may build accurate and extremely useful buyer personas for your company by combining all of these information.

Decide what digital marketing tools you'll need and what your goals are.

Your business's core objectives should always be connected to your marketing objectives.

For instance, if your company wants to boost online sales by 20%, your marketing team's objective might be to increase website leads by 50% over the previous year in order to help you achieve that achievement. Whatever your broad digital marketing objective is, you must be able to use the appropriate digital marketing tools to gauge the progress of your plan as you go.

For instance, HubSpot's Reporting Dashboard collects all of your marketing and sales data in one location, allowing you to rapidly assess what is effective and ineffective in order to modify your approach moving forward.

3. Assess the digital channels and resources you already have.

Consider the big picture first when analyzing your current digital marketing channels and assets to decide what to include in your strategy. This will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed or confused.

So that you have a clear understanding of your current owned, earned, and paid media, gather what you have and categories each asset or vehicle in a spreadsheet.

Framework for Owned, Earned, and Paid Media

Use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to classify the digital "vehicles," assets, or channels you're already utilizing and determine what's a good fit for your strategy in order to accomplish this efficiently.

Media You Own

These are the digital assets that belong to your brand or business, such as your website, social media profiles, blog posts, or images. Owned channels are those over which your company has total authority.

This may also refer to some of your own off-site content that is not housed on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).

Acquired Media

The exposure you obtain through word-of-mouth promotion is referred to as earned media. It doesn't matter if it's content you've posted as a guest on other websites, PR work you've been doing, or the customer service you've provided. The praise you get as a result of these efforts is called earned media.

You can gain media attention by having your material shared on social media and receiving newspaper mentions and great reviews (e.g. social media channels).

Free Media

Paid media refers to any channel or tool you use to interact with your buyer personas.

This includes platforms that charge you in exchange for more exposure, such as Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (such as sponsored content on other websites), and others. Now that you understand more about what this framework entails, let's look at an example.

Imagine you have some owned content on a landing page of your website that was created to help with lead generation. You know you should use other parts of the framework in addition to owned, earned, and purchased media.

Plan and audit your campaigns using owned media.

Owned media is at the core of digital marketing, and it nearly always takes the shape of content. That's because almost every communication your brand conveys—whether it's through an About Us page on its website, product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social media updates—can be categorised as content.

In addition to enhancing your brand's online appearance, content assists in converting website visitors into leads and consumers. Additionally, SEO-optimized content can increase your search and organic traffic.

Owned content should be included in your digital marketing strategy no matter what your objectives are. Choose the stuff that will help you achieve your goals to begin with.

Your About Us page is probably not going to be included in your strategy if your aim is to produce 50% more leads through the website than you did last year, unless it has previously shown to be a lead-generation powerhouse. Here is a quick approach you may use to determine what owned content you need to achieve the objectives of your digital marketing plan.

Examine the stuff you already have.

Make a list of all of your current owned material and rate it according to what has previously worked the best for achieving your current objectives. For instance, if you want to increase your lead generation, rank your content based on which articles brought in the most leads the previous year (such as a blog post, E-book, or site page). The goal is to determine what is now effective and what is not so that you may design future content with success.

Determine where your current content is lacking.

Determine if your content has any gaps based on your buyer personas. Create some if, for instance, you run a math tutoring business and your research indicates that one of the biggest struggles your customers have is discovering efficient study techniques. Your content audit may reveal that E-books housed on a specific kind of landing page convert incredibly well (better than webinars, for example).

You can decide to include an E-book on "how to make studying more productive" in your content creation plans for this math tutoring business.

Make a plan for producing content.

Make a content development plan outlining the content that will be required to assist you achieve your goals based on your findings and the gaps you've found.

This ought to contain:

• Format for a title

• A goal

• advertising channels

This can be a simple spreadsheet and should also contain budget information if you're planning to outsource the content development or a time estimate if you're producing it yourself. The purpose of the material and its priority level should also be included.

Plan and audit your campaigns for earned media.

You can determine where to focus your time by comparing your previous earned media with your present goals. If generating leads and traffic is your aim, consider where they are coming from and rate each earned media source from most effective to least successful.

Tools like the Sources reports in HubSpot's Traffic Analytics tool can be used to gather this data. You might discover that a specific piece you wrote for a trade publication increased qualified visitors to your website and increased conversions. Or, you can find that LinkedIn is where the majority of people share articles, which boosts traffic.

Based on past performance, the goal is to create a picture of the earned media types that will (and won't) assist you in achieving your objectives. But don't discount something new simply because it hasn't been tried before if it's something you want to try out.

Plan and conduct a paid media audit.

Similar steps are taken in this process: To determine which of your current paid media (such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is most likely to help you achieve your present goals, you must examine it across all of the platforms.

If you've invested a lot of money in AdWords but aren't getting the results you wanted, it might be time to tweak your strategy or give up on it entirely and concentrate on an other platform that appears to be working better.

For additional information on how to use AdWords for your digital marketing plan, consult our free guide.

Organize your online marketing plan.

After careful preparation and investigation, you now have a clear understanding of the components that will make up your digital marketing strategy.