In case you haven’t drafted your new year digital marketing strategy or set up an editorial calendar yet, or you simply need new tools to help you get launched, I’ve put together this quick digital marketing guide to help you get started. It includes links to past posts as well as new nuggets to help you get started, or to fine-tune plans already in place.
In this digital marketing guide, you have everything you need to draft a strategy, create a strong social media network, and create and publish amazing content. Listed is important information on how to monitor brand mentions and social comments, likes, and shares. In addition, I describe a couple of new apps and tools in the sections Image and Video Creation and Monitoring Your Digital Assets.
Set up Your Strategy
Before you start filling out your social media posting calendar and blog schedule, you need to have your strategy in place. The following posts will help guide you in setting one up or fine-tune the one you have ready.
3 Steps to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
An 8-Step Social Media Strategy to Generate Leads [infographic]
How to Approach Digital Marketing in the New Year
Your New Year Social Media Strategy: Analyze, Rinse, Repeat
Find Your Target Audience
You’ll need to know where your target audience hangs out online before you start posting and sharing content. Here are a few posts to help you find them.
Take Action: How to Define Your Social Media Target Market
Take Action: How to Define Your Social Media Target Market, Part II
5 Ways to Find out Where Your Target Audience Socializes
Social Media Sharing
Now that you have your digital marketing strategy in place, check out these articles for social media posting tips, and ways to schedule and share your content:
Easy Ways to Share New Social Media Content
The Top 5 Social Media Scheduling Tools
Best Social Media Apps for Mobile Marketing
How to Not Be Boring and Add Value to Your Social Media Sharing
12 Awesome Social Media Marketing Tools That Will Save You Time
Apps to Make Your Social Marketing Efforts Simpler
Create an Editorial Calendar
If you like to blog on the fly, that’s fine, but a good content marketing strategy necessitates a well-planned editorial calendar. The following blog posts cover planning a content marketing strategy, an editorial calendar (with a free template), and ways to execute your strategy.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy | via Jay Baer
Supercharge Your Blog with an Editorial Calendar (with Free template)
This post, How to Manage Your Projects with Trello, covers an app to manage projects, including editorial calendars. I find that Trello and Asana are lovely free apps for creating an editorial calendar.
Writing Tips
Now that your calendar is in place, it’s time to start writing. Stuck? Follow these writing and blogging tips listed in the posts below:
Blog Ideas That Don’t Require Writing Hundreds of Words
A Pain-Free Method on How to Write a Blog Post
5 Free Blogging Tools That Will Change the Way You Write
Image & Video Creation
You’ll need some compelling graphics to go with your excellent blog posts. The following covers ways to find images and graphics apps that make creating images and videos a breeze.
9 Graphics Apps to Create Amazing Images for Your Blog
How to Find Free Images for Your Blog | Video
Additional apps that will help you with your graphic design and creation needs:
Visme: This online platform enables you to create stunning infographics, social media and other Web graphics, reports, ebooks, presentations and more. What’s cool is you can animate elements of your graphics. Take a look at my post 7 Ways to Improve Bounce Rate to see an infographic I made with Visme. Plans start at free to $20 a month, which is very reasonable.
Enhance: The social media scheduling platform Hootsuite offers a great companion app Enhance, to create images on your iOS device to publish with your message posts. I use it to edit or change scheduled images. You can search for stock photos and add watermarks, filters, text, icons, borders and more.
Publishing a Blog
If you don’t have a blogging platform in place, here are a couple of ways you can go about setting one up. I prefer WordPress, but Blogger and a few other platforms will do just fine:
Learn How to Create a Blogger Page, Los Angeles | Video Webinar
How to Install WordPress to Build a Website or Blog
Monitor Your Digital Assets
Now that you’ve got all your content and social media posts published, you’ll need to keep an eye out for comments, criticisms, likes, and shares. The following tools will help you do this, and at the same time respond without having to log in to each social media platform.
Social Monitoring
HootSuite:This is the most comprehensive social media monitoring app that the Crackerjack Scribe team uses. We schedule and manage all social media posts for our clients to all the major social channels with this platform. With Hootsuite we can monitor Facebook and Twitter inboxes, comments, mentions, and shares.
We also track Instagram posts by hashtag. So if you use a brand hashtag in a campaign or all your posts, you’ll be able to track anytime someone makes a comment on or shares your posts.
It’s also easy to assign a team member messages or comments to follow up on or to email a client an important conversation in Hootsuite.
Agora Pulse: If I were to use another social media marketing platform it would be Agora Pulse. This app offers a beautiful interface and inboxes for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter where you can monitor and reply to messages and comments.
You can also get information on Twitter and Instagram users and follow them back right from within the inbox. What’s super is it shows you recent activity from individual users on Twitter and Instagram, including how many times someone has liked your posts for the latter.
Other platforms that offer monitoring:
Sprout Social
Zoho Social
Brand MonitoringSetting up a Google Alert for your brand name is a great way to track mentions of your company on the Web. Set up is easy, all you need is a Gmail account.
In Summary
There you have it, a comprehensive digital marketing guide that will help you set up a digital marketing network, create and publish content, and keep track of all your content and brand mentions.
You’ll be able to get a leg up on the competition by setting up your digital marketing strategy and having all your tools in place. This digital marketing guide should help. Let me know how it works for you or if you have anything to add in the comments section.