You cant get more business and riches just by crossing your fingers and walking through hoping. You need a well-laid plan to make all that happen. The first task you need to do is to create a well-defined, clear plan when formulating your digital marketing strategy. You can create a plan which specifies the sales, leads, conversions and the number of page views you want to achieve by the end of a quarter, 6 months to a year. It can be anything that makes some sort of impact on the business and that which is measurable.

If there is no prior planning, you wont have a clear way to measure these impacts, and it will be really difficult for you to create an effective online strategy. Once you have established what your goals clearly are, then you can create a road map of the various digital marketing strategies you want to use, to achieving that goal. For example, if its brand awareness and generating new sales, content marketing is the best way to go.

I strongly believe that defining your goals well is the best way to start anything, let alone your digital marketing strategies. If you want to change directions later, you can always change and redefine your goals too later. But always start with real goals rather than a digital marketing strategy itself.

A successful digital marketer is always curious to know more. You need to have the thirst to get more knowledge about the new concepts in digital marketing as well as have a creative desire to experiment them. This is required to find out what works best for your site.

Besides that, certain SEO tactics which work today can be declared spam tomorrow. If you want to know all these, its important to stay up-to-date with evolving SEO trends in the industry. Besides the challenger, innovative spiritand innate curiosity helps to enhance the skill set of you, as a digital marketer.

The best digital marketer is one that puts himself into the shoes of a customer. Only then is it possible to identify what it is your customer wants. While creating a piece of content or building an ad, ask yourself what you would like to read or see on it. Instead of thinking how to get an increase in sales, ask yourself what would wow or delight you as a customer. Yes, having a customer-centric mindset is as easy as asking various questions. Identifying the WOWfactor can help your approach and your strategies to be more customer-centric.

There are other ways to be customer-centric and thats involving your customers itself. They are the greatest resources you can have for planning a successful digital marketing strategy. Analyze what moved them to make a purchase. Regularly ask feedback for their experiences on your site or with the products and services they have availed from your business. Pick on your customers brains as to what they are really looking for in the industry and incorporate their ideas into your strategies.

Social media has now changed the SEO game. Social media is the new turbocharger that soars your contents ranking on search engines. Google+ was created by Google to track the social signals emitted out of sharing and to weave the effects of these signals into search.

An efficient digital marketing professional uses social media to not only share great content but also to engage the audience. Tweets, retweets, facebook likes and interaction like these on social media accelerates thediscovery of great content. Its also a great practice integrating your website with Twitter cards and Facebooks Open Graphs that uses Twitters and Facebooks own meta tags for social promotions.

Mobile phones are where most of your audience will be. A successful digital marketer has certain policies for mobile marketing. Conveying your messages to where people are, is a basic part of an online marketing strategy. Mobile friendly and responsive web pages which are viewable without panning and zooming is a must for your website. Apps for shopping that have a wallet function and exclusive offers on apps can ensure aconstant relationship with your customer.

To promote your brand and for generating new leads, you can advertise your business on various apps. Ultimately, not building your online marketing strategy revolving around mobile phones will make them a big flop.

Of course, there is no use of constructing a digital marketing strategy if your content is not shown in front of the right audience. One of the best qualities of a successful digital marketer is selecting the audience he needs and targeting them. A customer-centric mindset helps you to find out the type of customers you are looking for.

After you have identified who your customers are, find the channels which they use and hangout often. These channels can be YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. And then direct your resources to all these target channels. The more you know your customers, the more trouble-free and easy it gets to do these.