How to build a digital marketing roadmap for your brand
The digital world is vast. Think of it as another planet with different communities, cultures, and interests. All of this creates an interesting opportunity for brands to meet their marketing objectives of driving awareness, as well as increase engagement and sales opportunities. However, it could be equally daunting for new entrants for the same reason it’s exciting – it’s a vast space and you might not know where to begin.
If you happen to be a new entrant or you’re looking for some insights on re-envisioning your digital journey and growth, we created this piece specifically for you.
At the end of this read, we are confident that you’d have all the knowledge you need to enable you to create your own digital marketing roadmap.
What is a Digital Marketing Roadmap
A digital marketing roadmap is a blueprint for the totality of a brand’s online marketing efforts. It shows how the brand intends to leverage all available digital channels from social media, to websites, emails, search engines, and everything in between to achieve its set marketing targets.
There is no one-size-fits-all digital marketing roadmap for all brands as brands are intrinsically different. Brands have different archetypes, purposes, products, target audiences, and a lot more differentiating elements. As such merely copying and pasting competitor tactics may lead brands straightway to failure.
Hence, designing a digital marketing roadmap must be a deliberate exercise, aided by research.
How to create a digital marketing roadmap
With the right direction, designing an effective digital marketing roadmap could be easy. Here are a few steps easy that you must take when designing your digital marketing roadmap.
1. Define your objectives
This is inarguably the first step you’d need to take in creating your digital marketing roadmap. This exercise answers the question “why?”. And answering this would set the tone for creatively thinking through how these objectives can be achieved.
Objectives can be long-term or short-term. They can range from increasing brand awareness to increasing brand engagement among the target audience. For some other businesses, a major objective could be securing sales whilst for content creators, an objective could be increasing listeners, readers, or viewers.
When your objectives are defined what needs to be done becomes clearer.
2. Define your targets/audience.
The digital landscape is home to people within different age groups with varying interests, preferences, and user behavior. These people also have associated with different online communities. Understanding this audience dynamics and defining which group of people you would like to target will help to make marketing efforts fruitful.
3. Know your competitors
It’s not a healthy practice to imitate competitors or obsess over them. However, it’s good to keep an eye on them and see what they’re up to. Monitoring competitors can help you uncover vital information such as;
- Social media strategies
- Best content forms
- SEO keyword insight
4. Identify relevant digital channels
The best approach is to know where to find your audience and establish your presence on those platforms. Search engine marketing has become increasingly popular due to the amount of traffic recorded on this channel on a daily basis. As such, search engines have become an important channel for all brands, and marketing professionals are spending heavy budgets on exploring this channel.
However, there are other channels that might be more specific to your unique audience. For a B2B agency, you might want to establish a strong presence on LinkedIn. Understanding the channels that are relevant to your audience will help with meeting your targets.
5. Plan and create content
At this point, you already know what you want to achieve, what your competitors are doing to achieve the same or similar results, who you need to target, and where you can find them. So, you have enough information to determine your content strategy.
A content strategy will cover your unique content direction, defined content pillars, selected platforms as well as publishing schedules.
At the end of these five exercises, you would find that you have a clearly defined direction for your online brand activities geared towards achieving your marketing objectives.
After these exercise it’s also important to check for the following elements in order to ensure maximum practicability;
Top 5 key element of a good digital marketing roadmap
- Strategy: The goals of the digital marketing team, including how you plan to attract and convert more users
- Initiatives: High-level programs or campaigns that support those team goals
- Time frame: Details on how long campaigns will run and when work needs to be completed
- Activities: What tactics will be used — such as paid search, SEO, social media, and email marketing
- Execution plan: How you plan to execute all strategies.
Need help with creating your unique digital marketing roadmap? Say hello to marketing professionals at Printipy and set up a consultation session or Find out more about Printipy at https://printipyagency.com/
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