There are a thousand ways to skin a cat, so they say, and the same goes true with digital marketing.

Experts have likened a digital marketing strategy to cooking, where you, the chef, is in command as to how much of everything should be there for that perfect gastronomic creation; in marketing sense, the engagement and the sales it brings in. The ingredients would be search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing… the list goes on to also include digital advertising and so on that you put together for a customized formula.

So how do you embark on a workable digital marketing strategy? 

You will have to start somewhere, and in this case that would be putting a face to your customer. In other words, defining your market, identifying with them, knowing them like the back of your hand, understanding their spending capacities and behaviour, their likes and pet peeves. Digital marketing gurus call it “buyer personas,” which goes beyond mere qualitative and quantitative data – age, occupation, gender etc. 

Don’t fret. There are online tools you can use to put a finger on it and get you started. Next would be setting measurable goals. It’s not enough that you say you want to achieve this and that: boost engagement and roll out some events to launch a new product for instance. You need to measure the engagement or social media traffic like say what percentage more of how much engagement there was in the past three months. Bear in mind that you need to make it measurable or quantifiable so that you could measure progress of your efforts.

Another component of a working digital marketing strategy is blogging/vlogging. It is where everybody is these days. It involves high-quality content that could boost traffic to your website and make for a robust social media presence.  All that is needed is to routinely update the blog so that visitors get accustomed to it, which in turn brings your platform or website on the top pages of Google when someone types a keyword to search for something. This helps a lot in terms on marketing campaigns.

Meantime, marketing automation is a must for every digital marketing campaign so much so that it takes you by leaps and bounds because it helps you automate the various components of your strategy - from content marketing to email marketing, even in generating leads. Now, it's a whole world of mobile phones. You would not want to be left behind and be the last to be seen on everyone's phone. Mobile phones are great marketing tools. Everyone has them, glued to them for the most part of the day. So, embark on a plan to optimize your mobile reach by way of speeding it up and making wonderful page designs to ensure that people who lands on your site through their mobile phones will have a great experience to pass on.

Another thing to consider meanwhile when drawing up a digital marketing strategy is your connectivity to your customers. Your website should have high traffic to generate results and this can only happen when customers are not stymied by unnecessary hindrances trying to get to you. Remember: engagement is the rule and your business can only rely on it so much - from getting honest feedbacks to interpreting them as per your brand.

Still another thing to consider would be your company's unique selling proposition (USP) - how different is your business set-up from the rest? Why would people go to you instead? And no better way to get to the bottom of this than by asking the customers themselves, synthesize the information and infuse it into your marketing content. Lastly, while some experts have likened an effective digital marketing strategy to cooking, others also prefer to compare it to a motor engine - one that needs to constantly be checked to see if all component parts are working and if not, then trouble shoot to optimize results and keep going somewhere.

With this checklist, you'd soon be hitting the road with a digital marketing strategy.