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Digital Strategy 101010

Good Thinking | May 25, 2016 | 2 min read

Let’s keep this quick. You should have one overall marketing strategy for your brand. Then look at digital and determine what role it’s going to play. As you know, digital is a two-way conversation. As such, you will need to address the following components:

  • Website
  • Search engine marketing-both organic and paid
  • Content marketing
  • Social media marketing, which encompasses Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
  • Building your community on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, etc
  • Display advertising (from banners to Google images)
  • Email marketing
  • Tracking and analyzing

Digital is about building a relationship over time. It’s about audience engagement with the right message in the right place and when the target is ready to consume the message. It will grow and change over time, and you have to be ready to change with it.

Below are the questions I’ve found make a helpful development guide:

What is your business problem?

a. Are you launching a new product?
b. Are you building awareness or do you have to sell to be successful?
c. Who are your competitors and what are they doing?

Who is your target?

a. What is their customer journey with your product?
b. Who are they? Women, men, age, likes, dislikes, what media do they use? If they are mostly on their smartphones and live downtown, having a billboard on the highway will not be very useful.
c. Social listening tools can really help you understand how your brand/product is viewed, how your target interacts with it and where and what they are saying.

What is the marketplace like?

a. How will your product fit in?
b. What unique qualities does it have?
c. What problem are you solving for?

What is success? Make sure you have clear and realistic success metrics. And don’t over do KPIs. There are a myriad of data points to track in the digital world. Determine early on what is most important to your brand, otherwise you will be swimming in data. And you’ll be drowning.

a. Is it a click through from a banner?
b. Download of content?
c. Sharing content?
d. A sale?
e. Signing up for an email?

Are your offline and online strategies working together?

Is your plan flexible? Digital is not one and done. You will learn from it and you will need to evolve quickly and frequently.

Have fun, be objective, be curious and ask questions.