Digital marketing strategy. You can't establish your brand without one.You know that you should have one for your business, but it can be hard to write one when you don’t know where to start or you’re short on time! Your business' reputation is important, so you have to do it right!In today’s article you’re going to learn a simple, low cost digital marketing strategy that will:

• help attract new leads to your business; and
• remind previous customers that you exist and attract them back to your business to buy more stuff.

Sound good?Let’s get right into it then.(Before we start, you might also want to check out our article on AI tool Craiyon as well as our article on digital marketing strategies for FEC businesses and our guide to web marketing experts)

Want to know what our simple digital marketing template strategy is?

• Step #1 - Determining who your target market is
• Step #2 - Write content that your target market will find educational and useful
• Step #3 - Take high quality photos to accompany your content
• Step #4 - Email content to past clients
• Step #5 - Publish content as a blog on your website
• Step #6 - Share URL link to your new blog on social media platforms
• Step #7 - Ask people to link to your blog article.
• Step #8 - Relax and then repeat next month

Below, I’ll explain to you step by step how to execute the simple digital marketing strategy above in more detail...But first off, what is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Your digital marketing strategy is basically a plan than says:

1. what your goals are (for example attract 10 new leads per month);
2. who your target market is (for example “business owners” ); and
3. what channels online you will use to reach them, digitally.

For example, your goal could be to ‘attract 10 new leads per month’, your target market might be business owners and the channels that you could use to reach might be Email, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn and Search Engines.The reality for most companies is that they know they want to generate new business, but they don’t know where to start on the execution side on their digital marketing plan. So, for this digital marketing strategy, I’ll assume you want to generate more leads and revenue for your business.

Resources You’ll Need to Execute Our Simple Digital Marketing Strategy:

• 2 hour of writing time;
• A business email account;
• Email software (a FREE Mailchimp account works fine);
• A good camera (borrow from a friend) or photographer;
• Social media accounts (business and personal) with followers on platforms your target audience is active on; and
• A website you can publish blog articles on.

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Step #1 - Determining Who Your Target Market Is (Month 1 only)

Before implementing any marketing you need to understand who your target market or ideal customer is.This is done by brainstorming who the buyers of your products or services are and what characteristics they have. Write a list of your target market’s characteristics including:

• Individual consumer (B2C) or Business (B2B)
• Age bracket
• Gender
• Level of education
• Industry they work in
• Job title they have
• Size of business they work in
• Which online platforms do you think they use? (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc)
• Priorities
• Interests/Hobbies
• Challenges/problems they face (For example, time poor, low budget, not tech savvy)

For example, your target persona might have the following characteristics:

• Business (B2B)
• 40-55yo
• Female
• High school to University
• Accounting
• Owner/Senior accountant
• 0-10 staff business
• Linkedin and Facebook
• Provide a high quality service to their customers, use digital marketing to attract new business
• Challenges: tech savy, but don't know where to start when it comes to digital marketing strategy and execution.

Now, you may end up finding that you have more than one target market personality characteristics, so it might make sense to map out multiple target persona characteristics. With this information we will be able to better craft content that is both appealing and useful to our target market, and be able to publish this content on relevant platforms where our target market visits.Using the target persona example above, if we were trying to sell digital marketing services to accountants, we might write an article called "Digital Marketing for Accountants" and publish this on LinkedIn.If you want a tool to help you generate your personas, you can check out Hubspot Make My Persona:

Step #2 - Write content that your target market will find educational and useful.

Keeping the characteristics of your target market that you identified in step #1 in mind, write a 500-700 word article that demonstrates your experience, knowledge and skills in your industry.Take the opportunity to help educate your target market on issues relating to the products or services that your business sells. Work out what their biggest pain points are, answer questions that you’re always hearing from customers and write an article explaining the answers in an easy to understand way - like you’re having a conversation with a potential client.Brainstorming content writing ideasIf you’re struggling to think of ideas for writing your article, you can research the kinds of questions that potential customers are asking by using a tool called Answer the Public.

The tool lets you search your topic and provides you with lists of who, what, why, how questions generated by Google user’s search suggestions.

When I checked “digital marketing” in Answer the Public, the following questions came up that looked interesting:

• is digital marketing the future
• how to improve digital marketing strategy
• how to create digital marketing strategy
• what are online marketing strategies
• is digital marketing important
• how can digital marketing help your business
• how can digital marketing increase sales
• what digital marketing includes

As you can see above, these questions from Answer the Public could be easily used to create super useful content for my target audience.Writing catchy headlines for your contentAnother aspect of writing is getting people to read your content by using a catchy title. “How to”, “case study” and “list” articles tend to work well for this exercise and if you can call out your target market in the headline - even better!If you’re struggling to come up with a catchy title for your content, head over to Tweak Your Biz's headline generator.

It's a free title generator that takes your topic and generates a list of article headlines you can use.

Using the example of “digital marketing strategy” I found the following ideas with the generator:

• Digital Marketing Strategy: Do You Really Need It? This Will Help You Decide!
• 14 Days To A Better Digital Marketing Strategy
• Fascinating Digital Marketing Strategy Tactics That Can Help Your Business Grow
• 8 Reasons Digital Marketing Strategy Is A Waste Of Time

I know what you’re thinking, what if my industry isn’t sexy and it’s hard to come up with interesting articles?Well this tactic works well for boring industries to - check out what happened when we searched “accounting” (apologies to all the accountants out there, but you’re helping me prove an important digital marketing example to help people learn) for a headline:

• Accounting Doesn't Have To Be Hard. Read These 10 Tips (tip #1 could be hire a professional accountant)
• Accounting Is Your Worst Enemy. 10 Ways To Defeat It
• Are You Embarrassed By Your Accounting Skills? Here's What To Do
• Marriage And Accounting Have More In Common Than You Think
• Being A Rockstar In Your Industry Is A Matter Of Accounting
• Give Me 10 Minutes, I'll Give You The Truth About Accounting
• How To Lose Money With Accounting

Step #3 - Take high quality photos to accompany your content

Massive blocks of text are really boring for readers.To make your content more engaging and interesting, take your own high resolution photos of you, your business, your products and your staff. You can get some really high quality photos these days on some phones, or borrow an DSLR camera from a friend. Alternatively, you can find a professional photographer at reasonable rates that can come to your business and take photos for you on the freelance photographer portal Snappr.

I generally try and avoid using stock photos, but if getting your own images is too hard, they can be a great alternative. You can download royalty free stock photos from these websites:

• Pexels - https://www.pexels.com/
• Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/

Step #4 - Email Content to Past Clients

Now that you’ve got your content and images, you’re ready to digitally distribute via our first digital marketing channel: email.To save time you can send emails in bulk with email software that allows you to blast out your message to multiple email addresses. There are plenty of email software providers to choose from, most people tend to go with Mailchimp due to their generous free accounts for up to 1,000 subscribers.

Once you’ve selected your email software, you’ll need to add in the email addresses of all your previous clients. You can do this quickly by exporting email addresses from your address book or accounting software (Xero or MYOB) or your online store (Woocommerce, Shopify etc). If you don’t have these databases, you may have to manually add by sifting through old client emails.Now that you’ve got your email software (Mailchimp) loaded with emails, you’re ready to send your first email!

• Example email template to send your content (from Step #3):Subject line:[use your article title]Body:[Add an introduction paragraph to introduce your article and what they will learn]“Hi Name, in today’s article I’m going to share with you…”.[Copy and paste your content in underneath]

Then, run a “test email” to make sure everything is sending as you’d hoped. Make any changes and then “hit send”!Email channel: complete.

Step #5 - Publish Content as a Blog on Your Website

Now that your email subscribers have been sent your fresh content, it’s time to publish on your next digital channel: website blog.If you’re using a CMS platform like WordPress (or Squarespace, Wix, Joomla, Drupal etc) this is super easy.In WordPress dashboard, go to "Post" > "Add New".

Add your content:

• Headline into the title;
• Body text into the text;
• Image into the feature image;
• and other images into the body text.

SEO tips to help the content and your website rank in search engines like Google:

• Determine what topic (or Keyword) your content is mainly about (for, example “digital marketing strategy”)
• Include topic in URL, Meta Title, Meta Description, Image file name, Image alt tag
• Link to using text within your article to other relevant pages within your website and other useful resources on authority websites (for example industry or related government websites) around the web.
• Meta description is the text that shows up in the search engine results, under your Title and URL. Write a meta description that includes your topic and entices the reader to want to click.
• Install SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to help - https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/.

Preview the blog post and once you’re happy with its appearance, hit publish.

Website blog channel: complete.

Step #6 - Share Blog URL link on Social Media Platforms

Now that your blog article is live, it’s time to start getting some website traffic from social media!This step will be pointless unless you have social media accounts on platforms that your target market use with followers. So before sharing, you should build up the number of people following. The quickest way to do this is similar to your email list - add past clients to your social media accounts.LinkedIn: I find using my personal account (Brett Melville) works better, go ahead and make a “connection” with every past client that you can find in the search bar.

Once you've found people you've worked with previously, go ahead and connect with them so they start to see your posts.

Facebook: Although algorithm changes over the past few years have meant fewer business page posts are shown to users, find all past clients and “invite them to like” your page. Also consider starting a personal profile just for your business purposes.Write a short post to introduce your articleOnce you’ve increased your social media accounts’ followings, write a short introduction and post the link to your blog article on all of your social media accounts. Respond to any comment engagement that you receive on your posts.

Social media channel: complete.

Step #7 - Ask Other Website Owners to Link to Your Article

Search engines still rely heavily on quality of backlinks to determine website rankings.Whilst your article may be super useful and a well written resource sharing your expertise, if other people aren’t talking about it (or linking to it) online, then your ability to attract ‘free’ traffic from search engines will be reduced.While writing good content is a great starting point for attracting links, you need to do a little more to get other website owners to link to your content.A strategy you can implement to gain links is referred to as “resource page link building”. Where we find websites that have “resource” pages on our topic and we attempt to help the website owner by finding broken link errors on their website and then ask for a ‘link’.

Resource page link building steps:

1. 1. Go to Google and search this query “[topic] intitle:resources”, in the example below we have used "accounting" intitle:resources

1. 1. Find a resource page that seems to be linking out to other websites content (ideally similar to the article you've produced).

1. 1. Go to a broken link checker like Dead Link Checker, search the URL of the website you found above and 'check' for broken links.

1. 1. Find the website owner contact details.

1. 1. And write the website owner an email from your business email (not gmail) letting them know they have broken links:“Hey [Website Owner Name],I noticed that [Link that is broken] link on [page name] is broken...looks like the website doesn’t exist.I thought you might want to replace it.I’ve recently create a [name of your resource] which might be a good replacement? Let me know if interest and I can send you the article to take a look.Cheers[Your Name]”The aim is to get an interaction with the website owner in order to get them to add your website link to their site.This process can take a little time when you're getting started. You’ll most have to send 10-20 of these emails in order to get 1 link - so be patient.

If you manage to get links from another website you can benefit in two ways:

• Traffic directly from another website; and
• Increase search rankings (depending on the quality of website you get a link from and competitive of topic/keyword).

Search Engine Optimisation / Off Page SEO: complete.

Step #8 - Relax and repeat the steps next month

Congrats, you’ve completed our simple digital marketing strategy for this month. Now sit back and relax until next month. Then repeat the steps again.

Conclusion

In this article I’ve walked you through a simple 8 step digital marketing strategy that will help your business remain engaged with your past clients and help to attract new clients to your business.Consistently applying this simple strategy each month should result in your business receiving additional engagement from both previous clients and people they know, which should help generate leads for your business to convert to sales.I find this strategy works well and generates leads for my business each time I roll it out.Now I’d like to hear from you...Which step are you going to try first?Are you already doing this?I’d love to know of the results you’re getting from your digital marketing, either way, let me know by leaving a comment below.