1- Define your objectives with words and numbers
What do we mean by this? Your objectives must be achievable and measurable. It is also very important that these objectives are as low as possible and detailed.
For example, if a 5 percent increase in sales is equivalent to an increase in turnover of 100,000 euros, this can be reduced by the number of customers, taking into account an average invoice. If I billed for each customer one thousand euros, I will need 100 new customers to reach that turnover goal. And how can I reach 100 new customers or how can I retain 100 new customers? Well, I certainly should impact a lot more people. I have to reach my target audience in a massive way. And how will I reach my target audience in a massive way? Through impressions in digital media and through clicks and traffic to my social networks and my website. This is important to measure taking into account the average cost per click in your industry. Do the calculations and set realistic objectives taking into account the increase in sales you intend to achieve and the proportional investment.
We leave you an example of objectives that we ourselves have lowered and calculated through a spreadsheet. You can use it, you can modify the figures and try to define what your objectives would be.
2- You must know your target audience
How can you know your target audience? By defining it through different tools, either by defining your buyer persona, the day in the life of, the customer journey, or others.
There are different theoretical traditional marketing tools to define exactly who that target audience is, what they do during the day, what channels they visit, what social networks they are on, how you can impact them at the moment of purchase, etc. Again, we leave you different examples here in the link below so you can try the different theoretical tools and see in which channels you can impact your target audience.
3- Control and analyze your competition
What do we mean by this? We mean that you identify which is your most advanced and digitally mature competitor, analyze them from top to bottom and identify potential opportunities. In other words, if your competitor is more advanced than you, they are probably already doing the right things. What you need to do is not copy them,. Instead, be very attentive to what they are doing to try find both channel and content opportunities to position and differentiate yourself from them. How can you find channel opportunities? Well, analyze your target audience as we said before and see where your competitor is, what channels they are on. If you identify that your target audience is on YouTube and your competitor does not have any kind of presence on YouTube or TikTok, these can be two very interesting channels where you can position yourself.
The other way to identify content opportunities is to run the website through Semrush, which is a tool where you can see exactly what keywords your competitor has indexed in the top positions of Google. You have to enable the top 5 positions because they are your competitor’s main traffic sources and you will be able to see what keywords they are getting traffic for. Analyze them and see if you have a chance to rank for similar words or for totally different words.
In several weeks, you will also see a column called Keyword difficulty, which shows the ranking difficulty for the same keyword. The goal is to filter those keywords with less difficulty and more search volume because these will give you much more visibility. Once you have these keywords identified, what you have to do is develop content related to these keywords and post it on your blog. This is roughly what is called a keyword research.
4- If they can’t find you, they won’t be able to buy you
This is pretty straightforward. Remember a few years ago, if you didn’t appear on television, you didn’t exist? Well, it’s exactly the same with Google. If people search for your brand and don’t find you in the first positions of Google, you don’t exist for them. That means they won’t be able to be your clients. So, what you have to do is to focus on positioning your brand at the top when people search for you. This is easy if you have a website that is optimized for search engines. Make sure your website is well crafted and well-optimized to help people find you if they search for you.
5- You should not be on all social channels and networks
It is a mistake to try cover all channels possible because you will not be able to put all your energy and efforts into them. You are not going to have enough authority in all of them. So focus on maximum of two or three channels and focus your performance where you know your target audience is going to be.
6- Focus on the customer needs
What do we mean by this? If your potential customer doesn’t know you, he won’t search for you directly on Google. What you have to do is to find a content strategy to make yourself known.
A few years ago, brands focused on creating a one-way content strategy in which they advertised their brand, products and services. This is now a thing of the past. You have to provide value or entertain your target audience even if this means moving away from your brand, product or service. For example, if you have a brand of beauty products or facial care products, it makes no sense to show the cream because you will not provide any different kind of value. We are so resistant to this type of publications and advertisements that we don’t even read the name or pay attention to it. On the other hand, if you make a video explaining the benefits of a good the skincare routine, providing a list of tips, or collaborating with an influencer in which your target audience trusts, they will probably pay attention and see the company that is sponsoring the video. In this case, you will no longer be an unknown and you will be able to activate other levers of your digital marketing strategy such as marketing on other channels.
7- Design a digital measurement plan
With what objective? In order to measure how far or how close you are to the objectives you set at the beginning when defining your strategy. If we go back to the example at the beginning, we set a goal of a 5 percent increase in sales.
It is important that you review your digital measurement plan at least once a month to see if you are off track and make preventive plans to get as close as possible to the goals you initially set. The purpose of this exercise is to take preventive actions and not have to wait six months to take rectifying actions. In this case you have to analyze exactly what is happening so that you can detailedly report the frequency of publication of other channels that work better for you and those that work worse. Based on this, you can increase investment in those that work better so that you have a return on investment as soon as possible.
These are the seven steps you should take to create a digital marketing strategy for your SME. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below or write to us at our website Cronuts.digital.
