How to do digital marketing: the 6 essential steps

According to a study, almost half of businesses recognize that digital marketing contributes 41% to their turnover. That is a lot. But what this means above all is that every business should implement a digital marketing strategy. We give you the essential steps to get started!

Digital marketing: what is it?

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Also called e-marketing, webmarketing, or even digital marketing, digital marketing allows you to promote your service or product on the web to a targeted audience. To do this, you rely on marketing tools and methods and techniques, such as inbound marketing, Growth Outbound, advertising campaigns, SEO referencing...

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8 essential steps to succeed in digital marketing

Step 1: Determine your goals

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You need to define the goals you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy.

These goals can be, for example:

• Increase the reputation of your company;
• Increase your turnover;
• Attracting new prospects;
• Generate traffic;
• Improve the loyalty of your customers.

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⭐️ The Growth Room Tip: To help you set these marketing goals, you can use the SMART method, which maximizes your chances of success. With this marketing method, you respond to 5 indicators according to the targeted objective: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Temporarily defined.

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Step 2: Know your targets

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Depending on your marketing goals, you need to identify your targets. There are two main ones:

1. The primary target or core target : these are the people who will directly want to buy the product or service.
2. The secondary target : these are the people whose opinion will influence buying behavior.

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We can add a third target (tertiary target) which corresponds to people who communicate directly about your product/service (sponsors, a brand that promotes a particular product...).

Your actions and tone will differ from one target to another.

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Step 3: study your competitors

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You must make an accurate benchmark of your competitive universe. In other words, you need to know the latest trends, and identify possible opportunities.

To do this, you must focus on companies with market shares similar to yours and comparable characteristics (sector of activity, size of the company, geographical area, level of range...). It is essential to meet your goals.

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Step 4: Define the differentiating value of your products/services

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Knowing who your competitors are is good, but it's not enough! You need to stand out from them so that prospects will choose you over someone else.

It is therefore necessary to set up a differentiation marketing strategy so that you can develop an offer that is unique to your business.

The end goal? That your product or service is perceived as superior to the competition

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Here are some examples of possible differentiation on the web:

• Free delivery costs;
• Free return costs;
• free trial period;
• comparative study;
• Loyalty fund;
• More products;
• Guarantees;
• A responsive and pluralistic after-sales service;
• Made in France.

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Step 5: Select the best acquisition channels for your business

As a reminder, a digital marketing acquisition channel is a way through which a prospect, customer or simple visitor can get to know you and interact with you. Here are the different acquisition channels for your digital strategy:

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Natural referencing (SEO)

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Effective and sustainable, SEO requires time and patience, however!

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The advantages:

👉 Qualified visitors;

👉 Clicks are free;

👉 Long-lasting results;

👉 A high click rate if you are positioned in the top 3 results.

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3 best practices to add to your SEO strategy:

👉 The SEO content writing for a blog;

👉 A fast site that loads in under 3 seconds;

👉 Positioning on keywords with a purchase intent so that visitors are easier to turn into customers.

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Paid referencing (SEA)

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According to your advertising campaign budget and your goals, SEA allows you to quickly increase your ranking on search engines. Concretely, you buy specific keywords and include ads on the web when you search for these keywords.

The advantages:

👉 Ultra precise targeting;

👉 Rapidly increase its visibility;

👉 Results measurable with the click of a button;

👉 Performance tracking.

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3 best practices to add to your SEA strategy:

👉 Strategic selection of keywords by avoiding overly competitive queries;

👉 A good Copywriting ads to attract attention;

👉 Do A/B testing to optimize ads according to results.

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⭐️ The Growth Room Tip: To choose your keywords well, you can use the Google Ads keyword planning tool. It is 100% free and will allow you to discover new keywords related to your market. You will also be able to get estimates on the number of searches.

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Community management

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Community management consists in animating, engaging and managing a community around the communication broadcast on social networks.

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The advantages:

👉 Increase your brand image

👉 Building customer loyalty

👉 Ensure customer relationship management

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3 best practices to add to your community management strategy:

👉 Conduct systematic monitoring;

👉 Use different formats;

👉 Interact with your community.

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Social media advertising (SMA)

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This involves carrying out targeted advertising campaigns on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and more recently Tik Tok.

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The advantages:

👉 Target a specific audience;

👉 Rapidly increase traffic and sales;

👉 Large audience and choice of targets.

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3 best practices to add to your social ads strategy:

👉 Test several channels to find the most suitable one (s) for your business;

👉 Identify the publications that generate the highest engagement rate with effective messages to be inspired by them for your advertising campaigns;

👉 Create mobile-friendly ads. Remember that 3.25 billion active users on social networks access these platforms from their smartphones.

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Influencer digital marketing

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Here, you use the media power or influence of a person to promote your business digitally. 90% of Internet users on the web say they are discovering new brands and products thanks to YouTube.

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The advantages:

👉 Gain notoriety;

👉 Improve your engagement rate;

👉 Develop your sales.

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3 best practices in digital influencer marketing:

👉 Partner with good influencers who are aligned with your values;

👉 Communicate well on your campaigns to boost ROI;

👉 Follow trends, especially on Tiktok, which is often a precursor.

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Step 5: identify transformation channels

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The digital transformation or conversion channel encourages the visitor to perform the expected action (purchase, subscription...).

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User experience (UX)

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Thanks to a good UX/UI, you streamline the customer journey on the web, you improve the readability of products/services and you make yourself more accessible on the digital market.

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Retargeting (remarketing)

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This digital marketing technique allows you to offer advertisements based on the user's navigation.

To do this well, consider creating several targets, an adapted landing page and building innovative ads to avoid advertising fatigue!

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Emailing/email reminder

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Cheap and interactive, emailing is effective if you get to the point, integrate storytelling techniques and call-to-action.

👉 To help you write good email campaigns, here are 7 examples of really effective emails.

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Step 6: Analyze performance

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The most important point in digital marketing: reporting! You should definitely analyze the performance of your actions. To do this, you need to set good KPIs (performance indicators) to monitor.

👉 Are you having trouble defining your KPIs? Read our article on 10 marketing KPIs to track.

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