5 stages of digital marketing

Do you have any plants at home? If so, when you bought the plant from the store what went in to initiating care for it? Did you plant it in new soil? Put it in a new pot? Did you then water the plant immediately after potting it to encourage deep, healthy roots that will anchor the plant?

The question then becomes, how do you keep the plant alive? You don’t just water it that one time and cross your fingers in hope that it never dies. We all know that you must continue to water a house plant every few days in order to get it to flourish. The same thing can be said for your digital marketing campaigns. You see, at M3Growth we understand that campaigns are not built once and then left alone in hopes that they are successful. Digital marketing campaigns must be treated with the utmost care; continuously watering them, pruning them, and ensuring they get enough attention to flourish. Because of this, we wanted to walk you through the Life Cycle of a Digital Marketing campaign to show you what all a successful campaign truly entails.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing refers to using data to help target a desired audience through technology. These types of marketing campaigns are set up to be objective based and are intended to achieve a specific business goal.

The term ‘Digital Marketing Life Cycles’ comes from the notion that every campaign goes through 5 stages of life. It is when these 5 stages are executed well, your campaign objectives will be fulfilled.

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

Running a successful business is not just about having the best product, it’s about leveraging the best marketing techniques to reach your desired audience so that they may be converted to leads. A marketing budget is undoubtedly important for any business, but it’s crucial for you to spend your marketing budget in the right way in order to make the most of it. When a digital marketing campaign is done right, it becomes the most effective and monetarily reasonable way to get customers in your door.

Technology continues to grow which is enabling businesses to connect to their audience more than ever before. Did you know the average adult spends 23.6 hours a week online? With that said, it is no longer enough to only have a website or to run unfocused Ad campaigns. The internet is becoming entwined with everything we do, leaving integrated digital marketing no longer optional for your businesses marketing strategy. Let’s face it, businesses in the modern economy needs digital marketing to grow and thrive among their competition.

5 Stages of Digital Marketing

A digital marketing campaign has many different moving parts that work together to help grow your business. Though digital marketing campaigns have more moving parts than we have time to discuss in this blog, we are going to focus on the 5 main stages of digital marketing in order to help you better grasp the overall life cycle of a marketing campaign.

Those stages are:

  1. Setting-Up and Defining Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The goal of this stage is to gain understanding of your target demographic. We suggest starting this stage by writing out your current business objectives. Then follow it up by taking an in-depth look into how your marketing channels are currently performing, and work to define what a successful marketing campaign would mean to you. Focus on discovering the goals you would like to achieve through your campaign and dig deep to discover the challenges you might encounter in the process. As you lay all this information out to reflect on, make sure that your campaign adds value to those who will stumble upon it.

The next step in the creating stage is developing a content strategy. In order to do this, we encourage you to answer these questions:

  • Who are you creating content for?
  • What problem will your business/product solve for your consumers?
  • How is your business/product unique?
  • What type of content do you want to focus on pushing out?
  • What platforms do you want to focus on for pushing content to your audience?
  • How do you plan to create and publish your content?
  • How will you measure success of your campaign?
  1. Implementation and Traction

The concept for this stage is simple. Once you discover the basics for your campaign in Stage 1, you are then tasked to develop a plan to build momentum for your campaign. In order to build a digital marketing campaign, we suggest using the information you collected in step one and focus in on your target audience, positioning and content strategy. The way you develop momentum with your campaign will be dependent on the overall goal you chose.

During this stage it is very important to focus on building a relationship with your consumers. Aim for engagement and conversations that will lead to success. Be sure to collect as much data as possible during this step by ensuring you have analytics and conversion tracking set up for future campaign purposes. When you know what leads your target audience to engage with you, that knowledge will be beneficial to your business long term.

  1. Conversion and Expansion

Stage 3 brings about the time in your campaign where you look at how digital marketing strategies have been performing by tracking your conversion goals. By measuring the success of your current campaign strategy, you will be able to find the spots within the strategy that need to be improved, spots that are performing exactly how you want them, and strategies that need to be scrapped from the campaign all together. This will allow you to increase impact and conversions, helping your business to thrive.

We suggest reflecting on your campaign during this stage too. You may find that your campaign trends show you areas that need to be tweaked slightly. We encourage you to pay close attention to that data as it will help you make educated decisions that will lead to flourished success.

  1. Leave your Comfort Zone

At this point in the digital marketing life cycle, Stage 4, we continuously see clients who refuse to leave their comfort zone. They feel that what they are doing is working, so why would they change? We understand the desire to continue a path that you are already on, especially if it’s working. But you would be doing yourself a disservice if you cannot find ways to continuously improve your marketing.

The world of digital marketing is dynamic and ever changing. The ability to be adaptable in your strategy is vital to stay head of your competition. Stay open minded to growth and keep your focus on the end goal for your campaign.

  1. Reap the Benefits & Repeat

This is not a stage that all campaigns reach, but when they do it is incredible. Stage 5 is ongoing, and success is found through analysis and adjustments of the campaign. You are at the point in your digital campaign in which you have enough data to truly define what led to conversions for your desired audience. You can then use this data to further enhance your campaign, building it out further, or even just using it to help create successful future digital campaigns. Though this is the final life stage, it is one that is continual.

We have briefly painted the picture of a successful digital marketing lifecycle, but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to implement a successful digital marketing campaign on your own. That’s when we come in. Our digital marketing team of experts are ready to take your business to the next level without you needing to take the time to assemble your own team. In fact, in choosing our digital agency you’ll have more people working for you to help accelerate your campaign results. Give us a call for your free consultation to find out how we can work together to get your brand discovered!