2022 is well underway. If you have an existing business and have not yet launched your digital marketing strategy for 2022, you need to start – now! For new businesses, it is vital that you understand the core ingredients of a digital marketing strategy. While these essentials tend to remain the same even as trends come and go, the way in which they are applied can change depending on the online atmosphere.
Set Goals
To reach a target, you need to set goals. Setting little goals that need to be achieved before you can reach your target will give you a clear vision of the path you need to take. Think of where you are and where you want to be. Knowing how you want to end 2022 will help you define the plan to get there. Here are a few examples of goals to set when thinking about your 2022 marketing plan:
- Increase social media followers by X number.
- Increase closed sales by X percent.
- Reduce customer returns by X amount.
Having quantifiable goals is important. While qualitative goals can be set, measurable and tangible goals keep your strategy focused. You can see the targets being met. These smaller quantifiable goals also provide you with important data points that can be used to form a larger picture that informs decisions for other core aspects of your business development and growth.
Content calendar
Consistent publishing on social media is essential to your brand awareness. For example, a brand might make it well known that every Tuesday at 3 pm CET they will release an article examining a core aspect of the industry. This keeps people engaged with their brand. Even if the article for that week is not as in-depth or high-quality as usual, the importance is on the connection that is made through regular customer contact.
One of the key aspects of a successful digital marketing campaign is a content calendar that has two layers – a quarterly topic/subject calendar and a yearly publishing guide.
The subject calendar keeps content teams on track for selecting the subjects that audiences are resonating with and allows some flexibility for addressing current affairs or industry concerns.
The annual publishing guide creates consistency for your messaging. You might plan to publish on social media channels of your choice daily, monthly, or in whatever time frames suit your industry and reach goals. When you plan, your audience comes to know what to expect and this makes it easier for them to engage with your brand.
Define a Budget
Many small and medium-sized businesses struggle to define an annual marketing budget. A digital marketing annual budget can be minimized by focusing on producing high-quality content and publishing using the free channels that social media offers. PPC and targeted campaigns are a small investment using SM, so having a budget dedicated to this promotion type is usually with it for medium-sized businesses. The best way to determine a budget is to examine your business history, or if you are a new business, examine the history of your competitors.
- Did your Google PPC campaign meet your targets?
- What channel was your biggest brand awareness driver?
- Are your competitors’ SEO strategies more or less successful than yours?
These data points guide your business towards the avenues that will be most beneficial and help you define a marketing budget. As a new business, it is important to create a digital marketing budget that is flexible but has a defined ceiling. There are many creative ways to use social media for digital marketing that costs you in-house for content production but do not require you to pay online hosts, which overall, reduces your costs.
First-party Data First
Consumer privacy concerns have finally forced traditional third-party data collection to end. Safari and Firefox have banned website cookies, and by 2023, Google will no longer use them on Chrome, which represents nearly 70% of the market share.
This means that brands need to focus on their first-party data. This is the customer data gathered from sources like completed on-site purchases, surveys, customer feedback, and your CRM. This data is valuable and should be mined for insights. It provides the image for your ideal customer.
Your first-party data provides key insights about your customers so that you can tailor content to their preferences, predict their behavior and target your market within clearly defined parameters. The reason affiliations and sales of data have yielded so much revenue in recent years; it is valuable. Take control of your data, keep it organized, have it analyzed and use it to further your digital marketing, and grow your business.
