If you’re new to the world of online media marketing, it can be hard to know where you should first focus your efforts to achieve your marketing goals.
After all, by now you’ve probably read so much about content marketing strategy, business marketing, social media tactics, search engine tips, and reeling in that customer base– that you’re just left feeling overwhelmed and not sure of what needs to be done.
When you feel like this, it’s important to take a step back and create a marketing plan.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can create an online marketing plan and marketing strategy for nearly any type of small business and how you can use this plan to hit your marketing goals.
We’ll examine how you can build a rock-solid marketing plan from the ground up and how you can adapt your digital marketing plan, if changes need to be made. From content marketing strategy to claiming space in the social networks and even inbound marketing – it’s time to hit those business goals.
By the end of this post, you should feel less overwhelmed and more confident about how you can take your small business and get media marketing online.
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Let’s begin with a closer look at your digital marketing strategy.
The difference between Goals, Strategy and Tactics
When you’re creating a digital marketing plan, it’s important that you understand the difference between marketing goals, marketing strategy and tactics.
When you do, you’ll be better able to adapt your digital marketing approach and conduct a successful marketing strategy.
On top of that, you’ll also be able to better judge how you can implement things that you learn from various articles that you might read in the future.
So, what’s the difference between goals, strategy and tactics?
A business goal is the overarching result that you’re looking to achieve. It’s often what you focus on first, as shown above.
So… a goal of yours might be to drive $100 per day in revenue, using media marketing or social media marketing.
Strategy is high-level thinking related to how you might achieve that goal.
So…the digital marketing strategy might be to get people through a conversion sequence, where they’re then eventually sold a product.
Tactics are the specific set of actions that you take, in order to achieve the strategy.
So, your social network tactics might include spending $20 a day on Facebook Ads, using Lookalike Audience targeting.
A lot of the media marketing content that you’ve probably read by now focuses on tactics, rather than goals and strategy.
For example, a blog post discussing the social media marketing goal of how you’re going to get more Facebook Fans, doesn’t always include strategy, in terms of how you can turn those social network fans into $100 per day in revenue.
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As a result, after reading such an article, you probably tried to get more fans via that social media site and quickly gave up, because you didn’t see how obtaining fans would contribute to the larger picture of generating revenue. Therefore the article wasn’t such a valuable content piece to you because it only covered one aspect of the larger social media marketing plan.
When creating future media marketing plans, based on content that you have read, it’s important that you know how to set marketing tactics apart from strategy and business marketing goals.
When you can, you can instantly work out the steps, from A-Z, about how that marketing tactic will help you achieve your business goal.
As you’ll discover in this post, you can always change your tactics to help achieve your content marketing strategy and goal.
If Facebook Ads aren’t getting enough people into your conversion sequence, so that you can generate $100 a day – change your tactic and your attention to another social network and use YouTube Ads instead.
You’re not changing your goal or your marketing strategy – just the set of actions that you’re using to achieve your strategy and goals.This makes for a great digital marketing strategy as it will also help you to reach your target audience and gain more potential customers.
Note: When you’re working on this stage of your media marketing plan, it also helps to decide on a figure that you’re willing to spend, in order to achieve your goal. Having that figure in mind will help make it easier to select the tactics that you can take advantage of.
Okay, so now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s move on to the next section – understanding your target audience and potential customer.
Understanding your end target customer
As with all digital marketing and especially online marketing, it is absolutely essential that you know who your end target customer is.
There’s so much noise on the internet and you need to find a way to break through and get your marketing strategy efforts to the right people.
And, you can only do that when you know who the right people are.
If you know who the right people are, you’ll be able to customize your tactics, so that they’re bringing you the best possible results.
The ideal way to understand who your customer is, is by creating a buyer persona. When you create a buyer persona you will also understand how to adapt your editorial calendar and content creation in a way that speaks to that person.
