Developing a Marketing Strategy for B2B Business
According to Katadata, internet penetration in Indonesia as of June 2021 has reached 76.8%, that means there are now more than 200 million internet users in Indonesia. In order to continue to exist, your business must also be managed in digital media.
Have you started yet?
Strategy is very important to compete in the digital media world and ensure the success of your business. To achieve business goals, analyzing the data you already have and creating a measurable digital marketing strategy plan is a very important start.
Understanding Digital Marketing Strategy
What is a digital marketing strategy? What makes it different from the usual marketing strategy?
Marketing strategy is a plan to introduce or remind a product or service to customers in order to achieve certain business goals. While the digital marketing strategy is a continuation of the marketing strategy that will help your business in the online or digital world through digital media that is tailored to the goals you want to achieve, such as; digital advertising, website optimization, email marketing blast or social media management. When you develop a digital marketing strategy, media selection and how to manage it must be aligned with the company’s business plans and goals.
Before finding out more about how to choose the right digital media, let’s discuss what strategy actually means and how it’s different from tactics.
What Do We Need in Developing Digital Marketing Strategy?
Strategy is a realistic plan and idea to achieve company goals within a certain time. While tactics are methods used to implement strategies that are usually short term and specific and also measure their level of effectiveness. In the digital world, a digital marketing strategy can be described as a complete journey map with starting and ending points, while digital marketing tactics (which are usually called campaigns) are vehicles used to achieve a goal.
The strategy is to choose digital media to be used. While tactics, is to arrange activities to be carried out in each digital media.
There are three things that must be done in developing a strategy.
First, what are your business goals and analyze what challenges and obstacles that you have to meet in order to achieve these goals. 1) What do you want to achieve? 2) What do you need to grow your business? 3) When do you want this goal to be realized?
By answering these questions that will direct the selection of effective strategies.
Second, you are looking at several possible solutions to answer the challenge.
Third, design realistic and measurable plans to achieve these goals.
Steps to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Learn More About your Customers
A good strategy is one that is based on data. Some of the following questions can be used as a reference to know more about your customers:
- Where is the location of the customer or target customer?
- What is his age, gender and occupation?
- What are their daily activities like?
- Why do they want to use your service or buy your product compared to competitors’ products?
- When did they buy it and what was the decision-making process for choosing the product or service you offer?
- What motivates customers to buy your product or service?
- Do they usually seek the opinion of others?
- Is there a public figure that your audience likes and why?
- What digital media do they usually use?
By knowing the dreams, life goals and motivations of your target customers, you will be able to choose campaign themes that are useful and helpful for your target customers. Interesting content will set your business apart from all the digital content that has been around lately.
Determine Business Goals and Choose Supporting Digital Marketing Tools
Your marketing goals must definitely support your business goals. For example, your goal this year is to increase your online revenue by 20%. This means that this year your marketing team must also at least increase 20% of the number of leads you get from online media. Then you can choose which online media to develop or, if necessary, prepare an additional budget for advertising.
Advertising such as social media ads, Google ads is suitable for short-term implementation and needs immediate impact. But for long-term investment, doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media management tailored to target customers is the most effective way to communicate and attract customers.
Analyze your Digital Assets and Media
Digital media is a vehicle for achieving business goals, if you choose the wrong one, it will affect the success of your strategy. So that business goals are not met. Developing a strategy by combining paid, owned, and earned media is very important for business success.
Paid Media
Google Ads, Display Ads, and Social Media Ads are examples of paid digital media, which are also commonly referred to as performance marketing, because its performance can be directly measured. Paid media will be successful if you know exactly what your customer is, such as: how old they are, where they are located, the device used, what language they use, and what motivates or attracts them, and what keywords they use, etc.
Paid media is the right solution when you need immediate results. But of course you will need to prepare a continuous budget and also routine maintenance.
Owned Media
Owned media is media that is owned and can be controlled by you. For example: social media, email newsletters, websites, Youtube channels. Digital media is very important to manage for the success of long-term and short-term strategies. The key to success in managing it is to implement the right content strategy, which is interesting and useful for your customers. The characteristics of owned media that are well managed will produce earned media results.
Earned Media
Earned media is when your business becomes the subject of discussion, is mentioned, or is reviewed in a media outside of paid media or owned media, because they are interested in products or services or topics. For example, when the CEO of your company is interviewed in the news media. To get earned media, a branding and public relations strategy is needed that understands what is interesting to the public.
Create a Campaign Plan in Digital Media
To have the right strategy is to plan the campaign tactics that will be used. What digital media will be used and become a priority? What message do you want to convey to your customers or the public? All of these will determine the success of your strategy. If the focus is on the awareness and or interest phase, the content strategy should be different from the one that focuses on conversion.
By running a campaign that is supported by using paid media, it will give results quickly, whether the marketing strategy you have planned is successful or not, so that the next strategy can be planned.
Have you implemented a digital marketing strategy? Contact us for the solution.
Stucel provides digital marketing solutions to customers around the world. Such as Indonesia, Angola, Japan, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and many more. For more than 15 years, we have developed more than 350 websites, managed more than 200 social media accounts, and helped more than 100 brands manage paid media.
With our experience, we will help you achieve a digital marketing strategy, so that business goals are more easily achieved.
