Digital Marketer | Ecommerce Specilist

My photo
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
An ambitious creative and career-focused individual with extensive experience in Digital marketing and social media, spanning a wide range of Education, Finance, Furnish and IT. I Specialized in Digital Campaign and optimization, On-Page and Off-Page optimization, Ecommerce, Keyword Analysis, Email marketing, and community management. I'm proficient in using the Canva, Google tools and i have obtained Google certifications in both Analytics and Ads (AdWords). Identified and executed improvements for processes, content, and lead generation. Collaborated with Content Team to promote blog posts and guest posts. Provided market research, forecasts, campaign results, and consumer trends. I currently hold an MBA in Marketing, from Visvesvaraya Technological University and I am certified as a qualified marketer and sales in my past organization.

Tuesday, 15 November 2022

Digital Marketing Life Cycle: The 5 Stages Explained

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.




No comments:

Post a Comment

Importance of Digital Marketing

 In today's business environment, digital marketing is essential and provides a wealth of advantages and prospects for businesses of all...