Businesses large and small are hopping onto digital marketing efforts to get more clients and customers. These can include efforts from SEO to social media, and even then, fine-tuning the digital service to be in line with your business objectives needs careful research and auditing.

You may be under the impression that all that is required of digital marketing for small businesses is filling your website with blogs and posting a few pictures on social media. Will this give you the results you’re hoping to achieve? Probably not. A great strategy is a sure way of getting results you want.

Time goes into developing a great strategy

With the help of digital marketing experts, whether you approach a freelancer, or a full agency will help you obtain an audit of your business’s industry, your existing efforts, and of your competitors.

These results are then brainstormed to see how your business objectives can be considered within the industry in order to stand out. The ideas are then developed into the strategy.

Great strategies follow the SOSTAC approach

The SOSTAC method is a brilliant approach to developing a digital marketing strategy, providing a logical order for identifying what your strategy will need to tackle.

• Situation: This looks at where the business is at the moment. Is it new, is it failing?
• Objectives: What you want your business to achieve needs to be detailed and the overarching strategy needs to always link back to that.
• Strategy: A strategy outlines how the objective will be achieved.
• Tactics: The strategy is the overall action plan and tactics detail small measurable steps of how to reach the strategy’s goal.
• Action: This includes determining the tasks that will get you results. This could be posting blogs, going ahead with paid advertising, and anything else that links to digital marketing campaigns.
• Control: How else would you know that your strategy is working if you don’t measure its success? Continuously measuring and monitoring results will give you the information you need about whether you need to re-evaluate the strategy or keep going with it.

It can help you set up business goals

Deciding to join the digital wave could mean you have identified an opportunity for your business to improve. While the primary objective, i.e. increasing sales, will remain the same, a digital strategy will help you in identifying actions for that objective.

These action plans can then be established as elements for new business goals. The aim of the strategy is to find ways for digital marketing activities to fit in with your overall plan.

A great strategy can help you remain accountable

Once you know what your strategy entails in order to be successful, you can hold yourself accountable to the details and action plans for that specific goal.

Great strategies also outline a timeline for each task, which means you can analyse each item over a certain period and track what is working and what may need restructuring in the future.

It can be adjusted to suit your target audience

Digital marketing agencies are able to think the way your audience would too, converting your idea into a strategy that your audience would find relevant to them.

As much as your business objective is relevant to you, acquiring that audience requires putting yourself in your audience’s shoes. In the strategy, personas based on demographic information are developed.

You can then delve deeper into each persona by identifying problems they may have relating to what your business has to offer. Through this, you can identify what will influence them to reach out to you.

You can find problems you may have missed

When you have no sense of direction in terms of what you want to achieve, you can often miss problems that could come up in the future. These can go from not having enough resources to reach your goals, to misidentifying your audience.

The best tools are included in digital marketing brainstorms and recommended in the strategy to help with finding problems and combating them before they become larger and more difficult to manage.

Digital marketing for small businesses is great for keeping up with evolving trends

Online trends are ever changing, especially through the influence and behaviours of online audiences.

Digital marketers are experts in identifying these behaviours and are able to include opportunities for your business to stay ahead of these trends, which is why strategies should be broken down and applicable to shorter time periods – they are then revisited and reworked for innovating efforts.

It’s easy to want to be on board with all these trends just because they are “what’s in”, but this could result in a disintegrated marketing effort.

The failure of most businesses is due to not developing a strategy, and this includes failing to evaluate your means, not identifying and using your opportunities and losing audiences through inconsistency, and not knowing what measure in terms of what is successful.

If you want to learn more about how we can help you develop a great strategy, get in contact today