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Not every brand is an e-commerce model, and even the offline stores can have a solid digital marketing strategy

From Atul Mathur

Running a successful business is a tedious task these days. Being an entrepreneur is not that easy because you have to look at everything yourself. Operations, sales, marketing, product development or finance – you have to be an all-rounder. But with a good digital marketing strategy, you can at least reduce the burden on good sales and get cash flow up and running. So here is a step-by-step process for creating a successful marketing strategy if you are new to the online world –

Identify your goals – Most brands cannot gauge what they want to achieve with digital marketing and then most fail at the first step. It is imperative that you sit down and write down the goals you want to achieve by investing the time and effort promoting your brand online. Below are some of the common goals for most brands:

• Brand Awareness – For those who do not want to sell their products directly, brand awareness is one of the most important goals to work on. Is your brand known to your target group? Will they be confident enough to buy from your website? If the answer to these questions is no, the first thing you need to do is work on reaching your prospects and creating a brand reminder.
• Sales – Well, this goal is on everyone’s lips as soon as they jump on the entrepreneurship bandwagon. It is by far the single most important KPI brands are focused on and should be. However, it’s important to focus on growth and scalability alongside sales.
• ROAS (Return on Advertising Spends) – Unless you’re an Amazon or Flipkart, which can take huge losses with investor money, a company can only survive if it’s profitable in most cases. 99% of businesses are bootstrapping so it is important to keep an eye on your marketing spend as a brand can suffer huge losses if marketing spend is not kept under control.
• Store Visits or Traffic – Not every brand is an e-commerce model, and even the offline stores can have a solid digital marketing strategy. Therefore, store visits or the number of visitors should be the most important goal for offline shops. Facebook and Google give you the ability to target the right audience to bring them to your business based on their location. Shopping mall visitors can be targeted to a coffee shop such as Starbucks based on their geographic location.
• Lead Generation – For IT services, hospitality, healthcare, and many other service-based industries, generating leads is becoming a very important part of their business development strategy. Today, most social media platforms give you the option to optimize your ads for lead generation and focus on generating a high quality potential customer base.
• Find your target audience – You know your customer best! The idea is to find out who is going to buy your product or service. Are they men or women or both? What is your age group? Where are they, tier 1, 2 or 3 cities? What are you most interested in? Are they wealthy buyers or average buyers? Is it iPhone users or regular Android users? Answers to these questions would help refine your client and guide them the best way.

Define your competition – Who are your five biggest direct and indirect competitors? What is your marketing strategy? Which platforms are you actively investing in? The answers to these questions would, in most cases, help you develop your marketing strategy. In my experience, I’ve seen most brands overlook some of their competitors’ very important strategies because they’re focusing on something else. Be it an off-page strategy in SEO or influencer marketing on Instagram, you may be missing out on fundamentals that will help your competition thrive digitally.

Determine your marketing budget – Based on your appetite for generating sales for your brand, you’ll need to set your marketing budget. For example, if as an ecommerce store you can only send 10 orders per day, then decide accordingly how much you want to spend on advertising. As the old saying goes, never keep all your eggs in one basket. So, split your budget across multiple channels to find out which ones are right for you. After three months, take stock of which platforms offer you the best ROI and move your budget accordingly.

Choose the right marketing platforms – It is easiest to do when you can follow all of the above steps including setting your goals, finding the right customer personality, and identifying your competition. Based on these steps you can develop your digital marketing strategy –

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is a technique that allows you to rank your website on Google or other search engines for your money keywords, also called search terms. SEO is one of the most affordable and effective digital marketing activities for any brand, big or small. It’s completely organic and you don’t have to spend a dime on Google or social platforms to generate traffic or sales on your website. Just identify the right keywords for your website, generate new content around those keywords, tweak your on-page SEO elements, and start your off-page link building plan and you’re good to go. However, if you are not tech savvy, it is better to hire an expert to implement your SEO strategy as it takes some technical knowledge to get started. The only downside is that it would take you at least three to four months to build traffic to your website and then organic sales. However, this is a platform that will give you free and incremental sales for a lifetime if you get it right.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – As a brand owner just starting out, with limited resources, time is key, and therefore most of the entrepreneurs I’ve met are impatient to generate income for their business. No one in this world is patient enough to wait three to four months to generate business. They are booted and hungry for their first SALE. For those impatient with the time it takes SEO to get started and make your first few sales, social media marketing can give you the perfect start. You can set up your marketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, adjust your daily expenses, get the best creatives and you can get your first customer on board in just a few hours! There have been some new social media platforms lately like Snapchat, Tik Tok, and others, but the 90% lion’s share is still held by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest Then I would suggest that you go with Facebook and Instagram first kick off. Finally, keep your Facebook and Instagram feed healthy by actively posting Stories, Reels, Posts, etc. to keep your active followers interested in your brand.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Unlike SEO, you can opt for SEM and bid for your money keywords and generate sales and leads for your business. Of course, you need a separate advertising budget for this and choose your keywords carefully in order to achieve maximum value for money and the best ROI.
• Email or SMS Marketing – If you have a list of customers you want to target digitally, your best bet is to take an email service like MailChimp or Omnisend (with an SMS option) and send them emails regularly – Emails to make sure they remember you and bring you business at an extremely low cost. Unlike paid media like Facebook or Google, email marketing lets you get repeat business from your loyal customers at a very low cost per conversion. Just make sure your emails are relevant, to the point, and have a good subject line for higher open rates. Better open rates, higher click rates, more business every email generates for you.

Digital marketing is extensive and offers many different ways to generate business for any brand. However, it’s important to choose the right strategy according to your budget to make sure you don’t overdo your marketing spend.

(The author is the founder, LocaGlobe. Views expressed are personal.)

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