If you’ve read our previous blog post titled, “Is a Digital Brand Presence Important?” you know why it’s important for your brand to have a digital presence. However, the actual process of creating a digital brand presence can be confusing, frustrating, and take lots of time. Here are 5 things to focus on when you’re creating a strategy to grow your digital presence.

Identify Your Goals

To create an effective digital presence, you need to identify what you want to accomplish by having a digital strategy. Ultimately the goal is to market your brand and its offerings, but there are smaller, specific goals that can help you verbalize how you will accomplish that. Your goals could be to increase brand awareness, turn viewers into leads, sell more products, get more email subscribers, more blog readers, etc...

You can have several different goals for your digital marketing strategy. Identify your top three goals and create your strategy based on these. You can always adjust or add to your goals throughout the process–and you will. Marketing strategies always need revisions and updates as time continues.

Understand Your Audience

Before you can begin to design digital content, you need to understand who you are speaking to and how they relate to your goals. Hopefully as a business you have already established who your target audience is. If you haven’t, check out our blog about “Defining Your Target Audience.” Take a look at the audience research your company has, and find out what digital platforms your audience spends time on, what they are looking to gain from those spaces, and how they communicate within the specified platforms.

You have to figure out tangible ways to reach your audiences through digital marketing channels and incorporate them into your strategy. You may have different audiences for different goals, and that’s ok. The important thing is to understand who each audience is and to create personalized strategies to reach them, aka, which platforms you decide to use and what content you create.

Create Content that Resonates with Your Audiences

Now that you know your goals, understand your audiences, and which platforms you will be using, you can create content that will resonate with your audience. This could be creating (or updating) a website for your brand, putting together a Facebook Ad campaign, or setting up video shoots of your product.

The first step to creating effective digital content is to create a content strategy. This includes scheduling, how you will portray your brand (take a peek at your brand guidelines), who will be making the content, and how it will be optimized for the best results.

Use Keywords

Speaking of optimizing your content, you’ll want to incorporate SEO and keyword research into your digital brand strategy. Keywords are words that are specific to your industry, product/service, or include questions that your audience might ask.

Search engines use keywords to help guide users to the content or company that they need. If the question, “is marketing important?” is a common search query, then you should include this phrase in your content as a keyword. When people search this phrase, your content is more likely to show up in the search results.

To start your keywords strategy, figure out what search terms your audience is using, what keywords are helping your current digital presence, and which ones are common in your industry. There are plenty of software such as SEMrush, designed to help you create a keywords list and help you learn how to incorporate them into your digital content.

Evaluate and Revise Your Strategy

All strategies need to be evaluated and revised periodically. The digital marketing landscape is always changing and so are consumers. Sometimes it takes a few tries to figure out what works for your brand in the digital world. As you continue to use the strategy you’ve created, you’ll see where the gaps are, what is or isn’t working, and through continued research you’ll hopefully be able to make the necessary updates to have a successful, digital marketing strategy.

In Summary

Establishing a flourishing, well-known digital presence takes time, energy, commitment, and revisions. Ensure that you’ve identified all the proper components that are involved in creating a successful digital presence, and as your business grows, your strategy will too.

Check out our website for a personalized consultation and we can help you create a digital brand strategy that will elevate your brand to the next level.