The 5 Stages of Digital Marketing
Knowing the importance of digital marketing is one thing;
it’s another to understand how to use it to your advantage. Digital advertising
is not plug-and-play; it requires piecing together different aspects of your
business to see it grow and attain your financial goals. The 5 Phases of
Digital Marketing have no set timeline for each phase, and they are meant to be
viewed as a continuous working strategy, not a linear timeline, meaning that
once you reach phase 5, it’s time to head back to square one.
Phase 1: Setting Up and Laying Down Your Digital
Marketing Strategy
The first stage of the digital marketing lifecycle begins
with a strategy. Before starting a digital marketing campaign, you must first
develop and lay down a strategy that you think will work. To develop this
initial strategy, begin by figuring out your business’s goals, assessing the
challenges that you are likely to encounter, and determining what value you
want to add to anyone that will stumble on your adverts. Some important
questions you can ask yourself to help determine these items are:
- Who
is your target audience?
- How
are your products or services unique from the rest?
- What
problems do you want to solve for your customers?
- Which
is the best digital platform to create and publish your content?
- Do
you have any strategies to measure the success or failure of your digital
marketing campaign?
- What
type of content do you plan to produce and publish?
The goal here is to figure out what channels your efforts
should be spent in to achieve your goals by better understanding your audience
and the different stages of their customer lifecycle. You may want to develop a
working content
marketing strategy based on this information that can help support the
different channels your plan on interacting with. You also want to ensure that
you have analytics
set up on your website so that you can track and monitor data to help
inform future decisions. If you already do, try to use this data to determine
which channels have been most profitable to your business so far (organic,
paid, social, email, etc.). At the end of this phase, you should have the
foundation of a digital marketing strategy unique to your specific goals and
target audience.
Phase 2: Implementation and Traction
The first stage is understandably challenging, but it sets
you up for a smooth path to proceed for the second phase: implementation and
traction.
Using the information you gathered in the first stage, begin
to implement your digital marketing strategy. How fast or slow you go with your
digital marketing campaign depends on what you want to achieve in the end and
your budget.
The key here is to build a relationship with your target
audience while collecting as much data as possible through analytics. Let this
data begin to paint the picture of how your target audience is reacting to your
brand through the different channels you have chosen to pursue. Focus on
creating and maintaining healthy relationships with your target audience and
customers. To achieve this, engage with your audience, especially personally,
if you can. Ask them what they think about your services and how they think you
should improve. Your goal in this phase is to gain traction with your intended
customers, let them get familiar with your business and provide them with the
answers they might be searching for around your product or service.
People like to buy from people. So make it clear that behind
your website or business name, that’s what your audience will find.
Phase 3: Conversion and Expansion
Usually, the main aim of running a digital marketing campaign
is to convert your potential customers (your target audience) into actual
paying customers. After engaging your target audience for some time, you need
to strike when the iron is still hot. This phase is your opportunity to offer
an easy conversion point for your audience and push them into the next phase of
their customer lifecycle.
Perhaps you wanted to increase your sales, improve your
brand loyalty, or book more patients — this is the right time to convert and
expand your customer base. Consider serving targeted ads or customized email
offers to your audience to help move them along the conversion path. This is
also a good opportunity to offer referral programs to any customers who have
converted already to help expand your audience base.
While at it, pause and reflect on how your digital campaign
has been so far. Regardless of how successful your run has been, critical
analysis will show you some areas that need to be fine-tuned. Look at all the
data at your disposal, analyze it keenly and make decisions based on your
findings. Pay special attention to who has been converting and what the cost
per conversion has been for different audience groups you may have identified.
Phase 4: Understanding Client Desires
At this stage, you probably know whether your digital
marketing campaign has been successful or not. If it wasn’t, do not despair;
look at where you might have gone wrong and try to make amends. If you were
successful, do not let it get to your head or have you thinking that you have
it all figured out.
As we mentioned earlier, your data can paint a big picture
of what your customers desire. Pay attention to where they are dropping off in
your conversion timeline, what channels are most successful, and any messaging
that seems to particularly appeal to your target audience. If you put most of
your budget towards paid ads, but email
marketing is providing a better return, then that may be a signal that your
audience prefers more personalized or relational communication. Similarly, you
may find that much of your audience engages with your brand on social media,
but your emails have a low open rate. In this scenario, putting more resources
behind social campaigns may be more effective.
This is also a good time to reach out to your target
audience directly and ask them what they like. Send out a survey to gauge
levels of interest in new products or communication styles. Ask for reviews to
better understand how your digital marketing campaign is performing and what
can be improved.
Phase 5: Re-plan and Research
Now that you have the data, it is time to really make use of
it. Find the gaps in your strategies, as well as the wins. In many ways, phase
5 mimics phase 1 of The Digital Marketing Lifecycle. This is your opportunity
to adjust your strategy and better fine-tune it. Make sure your initial target
audience is really who you should be going after. Review the unique selling
points of your products or services and see if they are still viable. See if
your audience identified with any of your content more or less than others. Use
all of the information that you have gathered to adjust and get back in the
game.
Since digital marketing relies on technology, which is
continuously evolving, this is also your time to look for the latest trends in
your niche and evolve with them. Review competitors to see if they are offering
value that you currently aren’t, but have the capacity to. Look for new and
valuable platforms that may be making an impact that you haven’t been engaging
with (did someone say TikTok?). See if your organic performance (search
results) is up to par or if you could improve visibility in that area.
Do the research and adjust your digital marketing strategy
accordingly. Then head back to phase 2 and get in the game again.
