When starting a small business or you are running one, having a well-defined business digital marketing strategy framework is a must. Today there are many small businesses. Since 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses, strategic marketing is one of the ways to succeed in business.
Therefore, as a small business owner, you should create a good marketing strategy.
What is a Small Business Digital Marketing Strategy Framework?
A digital marketing strategy framework is a plan of action that outlines how you will promote and advertise your products or services to your target audience. The digital marketing models define marketing processes and workflows. They help you to identify and define your target audience, understand their needs and wants, and develop a plan to meet those needs.
Notably, irrespective of your business idea, strategic marketing determines the success or the failure of the business. Therefore, small business owners should prioritize marketing and not leave it to large companies.
Now, let’s explore the steps you must take to create a small business marketing strategy.
Ways to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy Framework
1. Define Your Target Audience
Before creating a marketing strategy framework, you need to define your target audience. Your target audience should comprise people most likely to buy your products or services. When determining your target audience, consider their age, gender, income, education, location, and interests.
Notably, there are digital tools you can use, such as Google Analytics, social media performance analytics, or customer surveys, to gather crucial statistics about your audience.
2. Set Your Small Business Marketing Goals
Once you have defined your target audience, the next step is to set your marketing goals. Mainly, your marketing goals should align with your overall business goals. Importantly, you should define timelines within which you accomplish those goals.
For example, if your business goal is to increase the state’s market coverage by 20% within one year, then one of your marketing goals may be to increase website traffic by 20% or generate at least 50 new leads each month.
3. Research Your Competitors
To develop successful digital marketing frameworks, you need to understand your competition. Usually, most products you sell are already offered by other business owners unless you have invented a product from scratch.
Therefore, you should study and understand how your business competitors market their products. Find out what marketing tools they use and how they describe their products, among others. Also, assess their products and see whether there is a market gap. Also, you will be able to formulate a unique selling proposition that answers the questions the targeted audience is looking for answers to.
4. Develop Your Unique Selling Proposition
When developing a marketing strategy, you should always aim to stand out. One of the ways you can succeed in marketing your products is by ensuring your prospective customers can quickly identify your brand from a pool of businesses offering similar products or services. You can quickly achieve success by writing unique product descriptions.
Effective selling prepositions should be about the value and the benefits your products or services offer. Also, you should mention the problem your product will solve.
5. Set Your Budget
Usually, resources are scarce; hence you need a budget to prioritize activities and maximize the available resources. One of the primary resources to be careful of is finances. You need to set a budget that will cater to marketing expenses based on the size of your business. A budget will help you have a picture of how much you can do with your funds without compromising on other crucial business operations.
Setting a budget for your marketing strategy is essential to ensure you spend your resources wisely. Therefore, when developing a budget, consider the cost of each marketing channel and allocate your budget based on the media that will have the most significant impact on your marketing goals.
6. Choose Your Marketing Channels
The next step is to choose your marketing channels based on your marketing budget, the targeted audience, and the effectiveness of the specific media in marketing the products.
The easiest way to choose suitable marketing channels is by testing and assessing the effectiveness of various marketing channels available, including social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, and more.
When beginning, please choose the most relevant channels for your audience and align them with your marketing goals. Importantly, continue analyzing the performance of the few marketing channels you have used and retain the ones with high conversions. Also, you can focus on the best-performing marketing channels and a lot more resources to those.
7. Begin Your Actual Marketing
Creating a small business strategy is not complete without actual marketing. Therefore, you should plan and begin implementing the best marketing campaigns. Notably, the budget you have allocated for marketing will determine the kind of marketing you will choose. For instance, if you have a bigger budget, you can do paid digital and traditional advertising and content marketing.
Notably, content marketing is a critical component of any marketing strategy. It involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers. To develop your content strategy, consider the types of content that your audience is most interested in, the topics that are relevant to your business, and the channels that you will use to distribute your content.
8. Track Your Results
Once you have implemented your marketing strategy, you need to begin tracking the effectiveness of the marketing strategy. Usually, not all marketing strategies will work. Therefore, it’s essential to track the marketing strategy’s performance and make adjustments where necessary. Check the outcome of your marketing efforts to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Notably, there are many tools you can use to monitor the performance of your different marketing models, such as Google Analytics, that you use to monitor your website traffic, conversion rates, and other vital metrics. Use the information to make adjustments to your strategy as needed.
Conclusion
By defining your target audience, setting your marketing goals, researching your competition, developing your USP, choosing your marketing channels, developing your content strategy, setting your budget, and tracking your results, you can create a successful marketing strategy that drives business growth and multiplies your business revenue.
Lastly, creating a small business marketing strategy framework requires a significant amount of research, planning, and execution. Also, it cannot be easy to do everything all by yourself. Therefore, if you are not a marketer or don’t have enough time, you can outsource the marketing work to a digital marketer.
