How To Create A Digital Strategy For Your Business That Works

If you are looking to expand your business beyond your local network you need a digital strategy. Networking with friends and family is certainly a great place to start, but often that is very time consuming, and usually, only so many people in your network are actually an ideal customer for your business. This is where a digital business strategy is key to help you reach that next level in your business. In this post, you’ll learn how to create a digital strategy for your business to attract more targeted traffic, leads, and sales with digital marketing.

What is digital strategy?

Have you ever wondered what is a digital strategy and how can it help you to grow your business? Well, a digital strategy is all of the marketing efforts in your business that take place online.

There are two major marketing strategies a business can implement, offline marketing and digital marketing. Both can be effective to grow your business, and each has advantages and disadvantages.

Traditionally businesses were built belly to belly and offline through networking and traditional advertising like TV advertising and newspaper advertising. While those can certainly be effective, in today’s day and age, digital marketing, and a digital strategy can help small business owners compete with major players even on a small budget.

Your digital marketing strategy will consist of a variety of digital strategies such as social media marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, and paid advertising on social media. One key to understanding that is when you choose what digital marketing strategy to implement in your business, you ideally should start with one and master it, before adding on more.

When you try and add in too many digital marketing strategies at once you can spread yourself too thin to get results. Most small business owners try and do everything and every platform and become a jack of all trades, but a master of none.

Why have a digital business strategy

In these uncertain times, having a digital business strategy is more important than ever. The days of attending networking events offline may become a thing of the past, or at the very least they might not return for a while.

With a digital marketing strategy, you have the benefits of being able to promote your business right from home. Plus, one of the biggest reasons new business owners struggle with offline marketing is that they don’t have excess time.

Marketing offline can be effective, but it can also be very time-consuming. The beauty of a digital marketing strategy is that you can create content that works for your business 24/7 while you are doing other things.

As a small business owner, having a marketing strategy that can grow your business without your constant supervision and time investment is crucial. Small business owners and entrepreneurs need to juggle many aspects of running a business at the same time.

Also, when it comes to marketing vs advertising online for your business, both can play a critical role in your digital strategy. Typically most business owners should start with marketing. Once your organic marketing strategy is getting results, then you can scale up to advertising.

The foundation of your digital strategy – your website

The foundation of any digital marketing strategy should be your website. A website works as your business hub and it is an asset that you own and can build up traffic to over time.

Your website design is also important because it needs to be professional but also functional. Most people design their website to look nice, but often miss the functionality to generate leads and sales for their businesses. Be sure to check out this post on website design tips for more details on creating a website design that works to build your business.

Other marketing strategies like social media marketing or paid advertising are going to be a part of your digital strategy, but you don’t necessarily own those platforms like your website. Social media marketing, for example, can work great, but platforms can change, or become a pay to play platform such as Facebook. With Facebook, your business pages used to get a lot of exposure, but now you really can only get decent exposure through running Facebook ads.

With a website, you can create a content marketing strategy that utilizes blogging and SEO to develop a steady flow of leads organically on a platform you control. A website is also a great place to sell your products or services passively.

Definitely make sure you have your own website as a foundation for your digital marketing strategy.

Marketing tools you need to create a digital strategy for your business

An essential aspect of how to create a digital strategy for your business is having the right marketing tools in place. A website is your foundation, but there is a lot of leverage when you can combine your website with other marketing tools. Some key foundation tools you’ll likely want to get if you are just building your digital marketing strategy are an email autoresponder, sales funnel system, and a CRM.

An email autoresponder will allow you to automate some of your followup processes when you generate leads. It also gives you leverage with the ability to send a broadcast to your entire list at once. If you don’t yet have an email autoresponder for your business click here to get a free 30-day trial of one I use and recommend. Plus, you might enjoy the video below on building a passive income with email marketing.

A sales funnel system like Clickfunnels can allow you to create a professional landing page and sales funnel without having to be a website designer. They have done for you templates that can integrate with your email autoresponder and can help you generate leads and sales on autopilot. Click here to get a free 14-day trial of Clickfunnels.

A CRM is a customer relationship manager. This is a powerful marketing tool and essential for your digital strategy because it will help you follow up with your leads.

The fortune is in the follow up. Share on X

A CRM can help you keep track of your lead’s progress in your sales process and using one effectively can help you increase your conversions.

How to generate leads with your digital strategy

With the above marketing tools in place, you have the perfect setup to start to generate leads with your marketing strategy. Most people without a solid lead generation strategy in place have to resort to cold calling.

I don’t know about you, but I hate cold calling, and with the right lead generation strategy in place, you can quickly generate leads without cold calling. The first step of an effective lead generation strategy is to create a lead magnet. Depending on your business this could be a free quote on your services or something free to download in exchange for a name, email, and phone number.

A couple of simple lead magnets to create are an ebook, MP3 download, checklist, or PDF download. For example, if you were looking to generate real estate leads, you might create a lead magnet for first time home buyers.

It could be a 20 step checklist of everything you need to know before buying your first home. This could include things like the downpayment you should have, how to improve your credit score to qualify for a loan, explaining what PMI is, etc.

For the audio recording, you can simply use free voice recording apps on a smartphone or your computer. As far as an ebook or checklist goes, you can use a combination of Google Docs and Google Drive to make one for free.

Check out the video below on how to create an ebook using that method.

Using a content marketing strategy

You might be wondering what it takes to have an effective content marketing strategy. The foundation of that answer is knowing your ideal customer. When you know your ideal customer, you can create content they actually want to read and consume.

You need to know their pain points, common questions, and goals related to your business as this will be the foundation of your content and digital strategy. This basis of knowing your ideal customer is only half the battle. You also need to use this information to determine the content that they are actually searching for.

This was a huge distinction that helped explode the organic traffic to my website. For years I created content that I knew would be beneficial to my ideal customers, but it wasn’t positioned in a way that they were actually searching for. Because of this mistake, I had a really hard time getting people to discover my content organically.

However, as you’ll see below in the SEO section, once I started creating content that helped my ideal customers that were combined with what they were searching for, my traffic exploded.

Content marketing also has the benefit of positioning you as an expert in your industry and it builds trust, rapport, and credibility. Content marketing also helps you by selling without being pushy or salsey. Instead, it sells through educational selling, which is extremely effective. Be sure to implement content marketing into your digital strategy.

Using a video marketing strategy

Another marketing strategy that can really help get your business exposure is video marketing. Video marketing is very powerful for several reasons. One reason is that it is one of the best ways to build trust and rapport with your potential customers.

Video marketing also functions a lot like the content on your website or blog in that it benefits from SEO.  Early on, I made the mistake of making content that was valuable but that wasn’t related to what people were searching for.

This meant that with hundreds of videos on YouTube, I wasn’t making any traction. Your video marketing strategy should start with keyword research at its foundation, and then build your messaging into it. Once I made the shift to doing keyword research first and then molding the content to it with a focus on quality, my results started to improve. I’d suggest that you follow this same strategy when you are creating content for your business.

Another benefit to video marketing is since it can be found via SEO, you can create the content once, and it can continue to drive traffic to your site 24/7. This is powerful when your time is limited as a business owner. You can make video content during your off-hours, and then it can work for you while you are focused on other aspects of your business.

When you use YouTube, you can eventually even monetize your channel, and it becomes like getting paid to promote your own business. If you aren’t using video marketing to promote your business I’d recommend starting sooner than later.

Interested in building a YouTube channel as a part of your digital strategy? Check out the video below and post here. How to start a successful YouTube channel in 8 steps.

SEO tips for your digital marketing strategy

If you are looking for passive traffic, leads, and sales developing a digital strategy with SEO is essential. SEO or search engine optimization can allow your website to be discovered on Google and other search engines.

Spend time creating an optimized piece of content on your website. When you do, it will continue to drive traffic, leads, and sales, possibly forever if done right. Optimizing and creating content is similar to building a YouTube channel. When each piece of content on your site is SEO optimized, it works like a billboard advertising your business.

You could put one billboard out advertising your business, your home page, or you could put out dozens. As you continue to create content it’s like putting out hundreds of billboards.  This is the strategy of using SEO and content marketing to grow your business.

Some basic tips are to start with keyword research to determine what your ideal customers are searching for. From there you want to focus on creating a quality piece of content of at least 1500 words or more. Your goal should be quality that through roughly answers the question or topic your keyword is focused on.

Understand that SEO is a long term strategy as well. You can’t create a blog today and expect it to go viral tomorrow. It could take a few weeks or even months for a page to rank. However, once it does, it can create a steady flow of traffic, leads, and sales. SEO is an essential step for how to create a digital strategy for your business.

Check out the SEO secrets infographic and video below to learn how to increase your organic traffic by over 30 times in 8 months or less!

Like this SEO Optimization Infographic? Here’s the embed code to share! 

<img class=”wp-image-7812 size-full aligncenter” src=”https://coachmikemacdonald.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Seo-Secrets-Checklist-Infographic-1.png” alt=”Seo Secrets Checklist Infographic (1)” width=”800″ height=”2000″ />

Have proper expectations for your marketing strategy success

The final step of how to create a digital strategy is to have proper expectations for your results. Building a digital marketing strategy takes time and it is not something that happens overnight.

Building a digital business strategy is a lot like farming. First, you plow the fields, which is like setting up your website, marketing tools, and creating your lead magnet. The next step is to plant the seeds, which is like creating content and developing your content marketing strategy.

After that, you water the seeds.  This is like promoting your content through SEO strategies, video marketing, and eventually paid ads. Finally, you reap a harvest, which is generating high-quality leads and sales through your digital marketing strategy.

Also similar to farming, this process takes time, but when you follow the system, you almost always have a harvest. A final thing to remember about how to create a digital strategy is that you will have a learning curve. When you understand that it is a process you are less likely to become frustrated. If you stick around long enough your marketing strategy will start to reap rewards.

Follow the above digital marketing strategies and your business will start to grow organically in no time!

Instead of struggling to implement a digital strategy for your business, hire us to do it for you! Click here to fill out a quick survey about your business to see how we can help you with your marketing and advertising.

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Mike MacDonald

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