Media mix and budget allocation for building a digital marketing strategy

To plan an effective digital marketing strategy:

• You first need to research your audience and set goals that support the business overall.

• Next, you review your existing media for gaps, select marketing channels and plan the content you'll use to reach your goals.

• Finally, you'll create a plan to measure and analyze results.

Once you've completed your research and set your goals, it's time to work out a strategy. That means you're using what you've learned to guide customers through each stage of the digital marketing funnel with the most effective tactics and media mix.

Media Mix refers to the combination of digital channels used to reach your goals and how you divide your budget among them. These are all the activities that go into your marketing funnel.

To select your media mix you'll first review your existing media content to find out if there are any gaps after that, you can decide which channels to focus on what content and campaigns to run on those channels and how to allocate your budget. Let's try an example.

Imagine you're part of a team that's working with a high end jewelry retailer who wants to drive a 30% increase in revenue within three years.

You know that jewelry customers can take a long time to go from awareness to purchase. So you pick marketing goals that support movement through the funnel, bringing in new customers and nurturing existing leads more effectively. These are upper and middle funnel concerns that should boost sales over time. That means you'll need to concentrate on raising awareness and encouraging consideration to achieve them.

Here's a simplified version of a digital marketing strategy for these goals. To increase awareness and draw in new customers your team puts 40% of its budget towards upper funnel efforts. From your research you know that video ads are the most effective way for

raising awareness among your target audience. Another 40% of your budget goes to driving leads in the middle of the funnel, use this money to engage customers across different channels like social media and a paid ad campaign to reach customers who are actively researching jewelry purchases. The last 20% is for serving product focused ads to website visitors and email marketing. The goal of the email campaign is to turn those leads you

nurtured in the upper funnel into paying customers. Each part of your funnel is important, but most of your budget goes to the top and middle sections to help you reach new customers and nurture leads.

Once you have a strategy in place, you can start creating the content you'll need to run your campaigns. That includes everything from email templates to video animations, ad copy, and banner images. You'll learn more about creating all that content later in the program. Lastly, you'll need a plan to measure and analyze the results of your efforts so you know how you can improve in the future.