Oct 07, 2018
You’ve decided that your brand needs a digital marketing strategy, but where do you start? This is where a digital marketing strategy comes in handy; however, according to Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy. We can’t stress enough how important this is for your brand. Your overall brand marketing plan must include a digital marketing strategy and must answer the following questions:
To answer these questions, we’ve created a digital marketing cheat sheet for you so you can begin crafting your digital marketing strategy:
1. Situation Analysis
This lets you understand and assess where you are in the competitive digital landscape. Take a look on what you’ve done in the past and see if it’s working for you. You can measure your current situation in terms of your customer, sector, and competitor.
Customer: How are your digital activities reaching your customers? Are they engaging?
Sector: Is your sector rating digitally? If so, how are you ranking within this sector?
Competitor: How are you ranking compared to your competitors?
The goal of the situational analysis is to give you an idea of the successes and failures of your past digital marketing efforts so you can improve them. For this, you can use social listening tools like Google Alerts, Alexa, Brandwatch, Klout, Socialbakers, and/or Hootsuite.
There are a lot more social listening tools online, depending on your needs, so feel free to go ahead and explore.
2. Audience
Probably one of the most crucial parts of any marketing strategy is defining your audience. You have to know how they think, act, and where they go. Nowadays, the success of any marketing strategy is completely reliant on how your audience reacts to your campaigns. In order to give them what they want, you have to know the following:
Age: What’s the age range of your customers?
Demographic: Where are they located?
Behavior: What are their habits and interests?
An interesting way of defining your audience is by creating a specific picture of who they are. For example, John Doe is an 18-year-old student who’s studying in a private university. His interests are skateboarding, indie music, and horror movies. He enjoys watching concerts and going to the theater.
By knowing these information, you’ll be able to depict who you’re talking to. You’ll be able to connect with them more if you speak their language, so this part is of utmost importance to your strategy.
3. Objectives
Now that you’ve seen how you did and figured out who your brand is talking to, you can now set your objectives. Make sure you’re objectives are SMART – specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely.
Setting your objectives will provide more structure to your plan, and will make it easier for you to measure your campaign’s success.
The most common objectives are the following:
– Awareness
Brand awareness is important not just in the beginning of your campaign, but continuously all throughout. Even if your brand is known, there will always be a potential to reach more people.
– Lead Generation
This objective is quite transparent. If your goal is to expand your database or audience network, then this objective is for you.
– Conversion
This can be anything you want it to be – whether it be clicks, app downloads, video views, form submission, or sales, this objective sets your sights on reaching your KPI’s.
4. Channels
Your objectives are good to go, and now you’re off to the meatiest part of your strategy. This part is where you decide where you should place your campaigns. Will your core be on social media or do you want to expand on other programmatic buys?
Deciding which channels to tackle will depend on your target audience. For example, if your audience is mostly women, it will be a great idea to get a business Pinterest account, where majority of the users are women. If you’re seeking to employ people, LinkedIn would probably be best for you.
Depending on your goals, mixing different channels together optimizes the potential of your campaigns and spreads your budget to reach a wider set of audience.
5. Measurement
The last part of your analysis will contain your KPI’s and modes of measurement. This is where you provide a numerical counterpart of the goals and objectives you provided. For this, you can use tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite to measure the success of your campaigns.
Here are some of the usual parameters included in the report:
Have any thoughts on this? Feel free to send us a message.
Dot Digital PH is a digital marketing agency based in the Philippines. We offer social media marketing, web design and development, content creation, pay-per-click ads management, and digital marketing strategy and consultancy.