8 top tips for planning your 2018 digital marketing

As you settle back during the Christmas break you may start to consider your marketing for 2018 and how your business can further embrace digital in the coming year.

The first thing to think about is creating a digital marketing strategy. It can be tempting to dive straight in with different digital tactics, such as advertising, SEO or pay per click campaigns, however taking the time to think about your overarching goals and objectives first will pay dividends in the long run.

Here are eight top tips to help you kick start your digital marketing:

• Remember digital marketing is not a silo of its own. To get the best results you need to make sure it is integrated with your wider marketing and PR strategy so that you are delivering a consistent joined-up message across all your marketing channels.
• Decide what you are trying to achieve. Setting your goals and objectives will give your digital marketing direction and once you know where you want to be you can decide on the best tactics to get you there.
• Think about who you want to reach. Where do your target audiences spend time online? There’s no point trying to communicate with them in ways they’re not familiar with or on platforms they’re not already using.
• Think about your content. The key to effective digital marketing is having high quality, relevant content. Think about what your customers want and what they care about. Create content that helps to solve their problems and is easy to digest. Position yourself as an expert in your field.
• Create a content calendar. Decide what messages you want to deliver and when. Having a plan makes it much easier and will save you time in the long run.
• Make your content work harder. Chances are you’re already producing good content, you’re just not making the most of it. Think about the different ways you can share the same content to different audiences.
• Bring everyone on board. It’s important to get everyone in the business on board so they know what the vision is and how digital marketing can help to deliver it. It also means that they feed into the strategy and provide input on content and delivery.
• Measure and optimise. One of the advantages of digital marketing is that it is easy to measure your results and see what is working and what isn’t. Ongoing optimisation will allow you to tweak your activity and continue to improve results.

Digital marketing is very fast-moving which creates exciting opportunities but can also be daunting without a plan. Having a plan helps you to focus your time, energy and budget to achieve success.

If you need any help to help get the most out of your marketing investment in 2018, please do give us a call – we would be happy to help.