If I need to convince you to get into digital marketing, then let’s face it, you’re behind the curve.

The real question is: do you have a digital marketing strategy? More importantly, do you know how to plan, track, evolve and measure that strategy?

The truth is, many companies have what they’d call digital strategies…but it’s not what we’d call a digital strategy. For starters, it probably isn’t written down. A properly written digital strategy should assess all potential channels and highlight the opportunities. It should draw a connection between your audience’s needs and the goals of the business itself. This, in turn, becomes your road map to success.

So what should be included?

Customer profiles

Build a picture of the different customer types that your audience contains. What are their drivers and challenges, what keeps them up at night, what sort of content do they like?

Competitor Analysis

Check out your competitors. Look at the type of content they produce, the channels they use, their calls to action. What could you do better?

Social Media

Firstly, what does your current engagement look like? E.g. likes, shares, how often do you share content and does it have a good call to action (to drive conversions)?

Lead nurturing

You need to start milking your database. Don’t just let your contacts and leads sit there. Reach out to them regularly using different touch points (web pages, social content, email etc.) to entice them to buy/convert.

Paid media

Paid ads aren’t just about targeting people ready to buy, it’s also about growing your audience’s awareness and nudging them down the sales funnel.

Strategic Initiatives

Detail the tactics you are going to use to reach your marketing goals. Your strategy is your plan to achieve a goal, your tactics are the means by how you’ll execute that plan. For example, you might decide it’s best to get outside help for your SEO campaign, and hire FATJOE to do the work for you. Or perhaps you know you need to focus on a particular element of what you do or a product you sell. Knowing this before you get started is crucial. 

Content Calendar

Outline the topics and types of content you’ll be posting, and when, in order to execute your strategy. You can refer back to this on an ongoing basis, allowing you to prep for upcoming posts.

Of course, your business goals will change as you learn from your successes, failures and insights, but the important thing is to base the respective changes to your digital marketing strategy on hard data – that means accurately measuring all the typical stats that digital, and especially content marketing, call for things like: engagement, likes, shares, traffic, click-through-rates, cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, etc.

The platform we use is called Omniboard. Frustratingly very few of the tools out there few centralize all the data in a way we found useful as experienced digital marketers. In addition, most tools are designed to be used in conjunction with others – which is fine, if you’re a digital marketing expert, but even then it’s very time consuming and balls can easily be dropped. Because many of our partners white label our services and rely on us to be the experts in their in-house teams, we needed a better solution – so we developed it ourselves! It’s called Omniboard – it puts all the relevant data in front of you in real-time allowing you to constantly evolve campaign tactics in an intelligent, meaningful way. It also makes success measurable, being very easy to run reports that provide our partners’ customers with clear evidence of the successes.

Include the above 7 things in your digital marketing strategy and you’ll be providing your company with something that not only aligns to marketing, but to tangible revenue generation and ROI. It will also enable you to hold people to account as well. And of course, if you get tired of doing it all manually, try out our very own Omniboard.

Bogdan Stevanovic is an entrepreneur, marketing consultant and founder of Aquare, a digital marketing agency that specialises in partnering with traditional agencies to boost their digital offer. Over the last 10 years, Aquare have run successful campaigns for over 400 businesses, and in the process they have built one of the industry’s most powerful web-based tracking and campaign optimising tools, Omniboard.