Are you ready for digital marketing?

In order to be successful in digital marketing, it is important to start with a solid foundation. Make sure to tackle these first four steps before determining your messaging and platforms.

Set Goals
Ask yourself, “What problem am I trying to solve?” Make concrete, measurable, and achievable goals around your answer. For instance, maybe your problem is simply that not enough people know about your brand. In that case, your goal might be to build brand awareness by building a stronger online presence through consistent use of social media.

Develop Buyer Personas
If you don’t understand enough about who you’re trying to reach, you’ll struggle to deliver a message that’s relevant enough to cut through the noise. Start developing avatars by thinking about who your customers are and then grouping them into three or four buckets. Use the worksheet below as a guide for creating your own customer avatars.

Watch Your Competition
Understanding what your competitors are doing in the digital marketing space can help information your decisions. Jot down your top competitors and look to see what social media platforms they are using. You can find this out through their website or by typing their name into the search bar on individual social media platforms. Scroll through their posts, stories, tweets, etc. to see what hashtags (a word or words at the end of a post starting with #) they use and to see which posts, if any, seem to get a lot of interaction from customers. This is an opportunity to learn from both their successes and failures. Take notes on your observations and keep them in mind when deciding on platforms and developing your own content.

Know Your Brand (both in words and visually)
In one of our latest blogs, we wrote on the importance of visually knowing your brand and how to make sure you document that. Check it out here. In addition to making sure your digital strategy is visually consistent, making sure the language you use to describe your business and products/services is consistent is also critical. Use the worksheet below to help you document and refine your brand in words.

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