Module 10: Digital Marketing Strategy

Module 10: Digital Marketing Strategy Digital Strategy Fundamentals - A key foundation of digital strategy, that you will learn, is that it is primarily about understanding your audience, their behaviors and how you might craft new behavior that involves your brand, product, or services online Digital strategies - A digital strategy involves a mix of setting goals, executing tactics and attempting to achieve high level business results. It is also a blueprint for your use of digital. From the start, everyone should be aware of, and committed to, a clear purpose and clearly identified success outcomes Before we really dive deeper into strategy, you first need to understand the core elements of digital strategy development, and there's five of them: - - Objectives - Channel strategy - Content strategy - Media strategy - Tactics Objectives usually fall into three main categories: - - Awareness - Consideration - Conversion and Retention Objectives: Awareness - Firstly, we need to identify the awareness levels of our product or brand. We can do this by doing some keyword research using our brand name or product name in tools like the Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends as well as our own knowledge of the market Objectives: Consideration - If there is some awareness of our product but the market is cluttered or our product needs differentiation, we can use reach and frequency of messaging to drive recall of the USPs (unique selling propositions) or ESPs (emotional selling propositions) of our product to encourage consideration in the decision-making process of our consumers. Objectives: Conversion and retention - Ultimately, we will want to drive sales or conversions for our brand or product. These can be online or offline and will build on the awareness and consideration-based activities from the previous two stages to encourage people to take action and buy or convert. Finally, for retention - keeping previous customers engaged to encourage brand advocacy or repeat purchases - it is generally accepted that it is easier to drive sales from people who have already bought from you than to attract new customers so the retention objective should be considered high value. Channel strategy - The channel strategy is understanding how you're going to use all of the different digital platforms that are available to you. It is about understanding what's possible with the channel, what formats you're going to use, and how you're going to use the features of that channel - how to be used most effectively and how you're going to target the audience engaging with it. The content strategy is what you're going to put in those channels. So this strategy is informed by your overarching digital strategy. - The content can be: - What you put on your site - What you put on your social media - How you tweet Media strategy - The media strategy is often overlooked by smaller brands because it's a complex area to understand. Also, bigger brands often overlook the investment required within digital to be successful. So the media strategy is how you're utilizing your paid activity. How are you reaching people with ads? H Tactics - Tactics are the individual executions that are a part of making up your strategy. It's important to recognize that quite often when somebody says, "Our strategy is to do this," they could be, in fact, talking about tactics Understanding the outputs - In summary, the purpose of your digital marketing strategy is to use your available resources (channels, tools, and people) to deliver on an agreed objective while meeting expectations. Creating a strategy to deliver on your objective can be achieved by understanding available resources, setting timelines and budgets, looking at current and past activity, and assigning ownership of activities and KPIs to team members or stakeholders. There is a three-pronged approach to understanding the outputs of a digital marketing strategy: - - First, you must establish the foundations of your strategy; what are you trying to achieve and how do you intend to achieve it? - Second, you must have a strong familiarity with your current digital strategy, expectations, and the resources available to you. - Third, you need to confirm the crucial requirements in running your strategy, the budget you have access to, and who exactly is in charge of the key decisions Philosophies of digital strategy - All advertising can be digital, but not all digital can be advertising. Digital represents the medium through which you are communicating, or the channels your audience are consuming information through. How this can be achieved is by understanding that there are a number of philosophies of digital strategy. - - Digital as content - Digital as advertising - Digital as participation - Digital as a balance of all three Overarching Strategy: What is it? - The overarching strategy should be a simple and clear sentence that anyone could understand, even if they are unaware of the full plan. Your overarching strategy should be based on a core insight. You need to gather as much information on your audience, channels, and products, for example