Introduction

Now that you have a great understanding on the different types of metrics and what they mean, let’s get into how we can use that data into making a great digital marketing strategy for your business!

---

What is included in a digital marketing strategy report?

A digital marketing strategy report is your gateway to growing your business with actual milestones. Its your way to navigate through all of the hurdles you will face in starting anything. May it be a charity, business, masjid, service oriented and even a small e-commerce brand. Without it, you’re a fish swimming blindly with no understanding on how you want to get to where you want. Don't be Nemo 🐠 (couldn't find a clown fish emoji) 

There are certain core chapters you should never shy away from. Each section will inform and strengthen your points when it comes down to the actual strategy so don’t shy away from doing the research.

Make sure to take analytical notes at each stage of your analysis and compile it together to note down trends that you have found, things that you can act upon in your strategy. It maybe obvious things you’re noting down at first but trust me once you’ve compiled all of your points, it will really help in forming your strategy.

---

Analysis

Data Analysis

Essentially this is you recording all of your data into very neat tables and graphs to show you your historical performance. The further back you can go the better it is. I would usually recommend seeing 3 years back to get an idea of seasonal peaks and dips. Like that you’ll know which seasons you can really go all out in getting the most out of your efforts. What I wouldn’t do is go way back because consumer behaviour trends are changing way too fast nowadays.

The data you need to analyse and record are:

• Website metrics (the metrics I mentioned in Fundamentals of Digital Marketing) – This will also include your revenue metrics and it may be a lot more comprehensive if you drill down to product/campaign specific metrics. There’s a lot more like even checking out which pages on your website has more traffic, bounce rate, etc..
• Social media metrics – Meta, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, wherever you are currently active and posting. Put it in here.
• Paid Ads Metrics – Meta ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, TikTok Ads, etc.. They all provide neat analytics you can export and record.
• SEO Metrics – Hopefully, you have already connected your website to Google’s Search Console which will give you all of your SEO stats.

Competitors’ analysis

A competitors’ analysis can be extremely comprehensive and detailed for those who know what they’re doing. However, if i ask myself which methods have used from what I had learnt during my MSc in Marketing, I would say SWOT analysis and Porter’s Five Forces.

That being said, do what makes sense to you but the things you should keep an eye out for include:

• What design direction have they gone in & what can I take from it when setting my branding direction?
• What are their unique selling points?
• How many competitors are currently in your industry?
• What do the customers say about them in Google & TrustPilot reviews

There will be more questions you’ll begin asking once you start digging down into the above and definitely try to keep on finding more out because at the end of this whole exercise you will need to ask yourself, why will my customers choose me? What sets me apart from these guys? or girls… 😁

Keyword Research Analysis

This is very important because from your website to your captions all the way down to your paid ads you will be trying to add these very important keywords to ensure you target the right audience. For that, if you fancy yourself getting a paid subscription for Moz, go for it.

I do it the old fashioned way:

• Typing away rigorously on Google Trends – Checking out recent traffic on those keywords and adding it into the list of keywords I want to target.
• Typing a few letters into Google’s search bar and seeing what pops up in the drop down – Google will show you what’s commonly being searched for so those are the keywords I’m definitely interested in.
• Doing what I just mentioned in the second bullet point but for YouTube.
• Things you naturally would want to search for – This is so underrated I’m surprised many people don’t this. If you want to understand what people are searching for to find products/services like yours you have to think like people and guess what… you’re also ‘people’. 🤣

---

Vision, Goals & Objectives

Now that you have done your core research and analysis

‘Digital’ Vision

Now a typical vision for an organisation is slightly different to a ‘digital’ vision. What I mean by this is whatever your organisational vision is, your digital vision supports it but provides an understanding of what do you want your organisation to become in the next 5-10 years from a digital standpoint.

Now you may want to be the leading “Islamic charity in support of orphans and widows globally“ but your digital vision could be “To inspire global generosity by building seamless digital experiences, trusted data systems, and emotionally powerful online storytelling — enabling donors to support orphans and widows anytime, anywhere.”

Goals

Goals are essentially condensed, high-level outcomes you need to achieve to realise your vision. We usually set 3-5 different goals to monitor for the year. Your goals will naturally emerge from the research you conducted in the analysis section.

Hopefully you already know what a S.M.A.R.T goal is which is how your goals should be formatted. If you don’t know what it is, Google it. 🤣 I try to keep my blog articles away from generally accessible information and focus on something that gives you value which you cannot find commonly anywhere else.

Finally, you should keep an eye out on whether your goals are overlapping with each other which you want to avoid. It generally means that you can further reduce and position your goals where they do not overlap with each other and are strategically targeting opportunities and fixing weaknesses you found in your analysis.

Another benefit of deriving your goals from the analysis you did is that your goals will be very unique to you and not general goals digital marketers tend to put down to get that quick buck and get the work done quickly.

Objectives

Now this is the fun part. For each goal you have come up with, you will now write down the objectives to achieve that goal. These are your big projects you need to achieve in the coming months. If you wrote down way too many goals, this is where you will see whether those goals are overlapping with each other if you find certain objectives are being re-written to achieve multiple goals.

Another issue with writing down too many goals is having too many objectives to achieve your goals. You may not have the resources to complete so many of your objectives leaving you not achieving your goals and ultimately your vision. So do be concise with your goals.

When writing down objectives, get your digital marketing hat on, remember all of those analytical notes I told you to write and begin resolving them with your objectives. The more objectives you write, the more projects you will need to manage so do be concise here too. Finally, those very projects will then move onto having tasks and sub-tasks which you will be able to begin assigning to your team members to do.

Once you have done writing your objectives for each goal make sure they are not overlapping with each other and they were defined based on the analysis that you did to ensure you’re not going to be spending time on an objective which wasn’t really resolving anything.

Objectives to achieve objectives

There are just so many times I have seen an implementation of a digital marketing strategy fail because during this whole process organisations do not realise their biggest challenge. Having the right organisational structure to achieve those action points.

Essentially, I am asking you to write objectives focusing on organisational re-structuring which will help you in achieving your other objectives. This might mean hiring or changing JDs.

---

The Timeline

Congratulations, you are now at the final step of really making this digital marketing strategy become the embodiment of all your hopes and dreams. This final step is by far the hardest for me because being unrealistic here means foregoing all of the effort you have done to get here.

You need to write down due dates for each and every objectives!

Why am I writing this section up all dramatically? Because if you don’t hit your first due date, this has serious demotivation vibes which makes you and your whole team question whether we should keep going on. A few more missed due dates gets you throwing the whole thing in the garbage. So please, for the love of Allah, be realistic with your due dates and treat every due date like its the end of times and you have to achieve it.

---

Conclusion

Well there you have it my dear friends, this is a complete article that goes over exactly what you need to do to getting your hands on a digital marketing strategy report that will keep your team busy in achieving growth. In Sha Allah!

If you have any questions or feel that adlance is the best fit in achieving your vision. Go ahead and contact us. I’ll be more than happy to do that meeting with you and go over it.