5 things you need to know before creating a digital marketing strategy
What’s the most important thing in a digital world: the answer is attention.
Fingers scrolling up and down, the universe spread out on a tiny digital screen. As a marketer, we must face the truth that not everyone is our audience. Learning to choose and select is the first lesson of digital. However, although we all stick our heads in front of a small screen, it doesn’t mean we read whatever appears on the screen. The brain detects the energy level, saving energy for the most valuable information. In the world of algorithms and manipulation, how to find our position and, most importantly, how to be seen by our audience?
Before posting anything online (warning: everything going online, stays online eternally), there are five things you need to know:
Content —
Marketing is storytelling. An intriguing story embeds the soul of a brand. By selling a belief, the audience would not feel like “they are paying for a product” but “contributing a small piece for her/his own life”. Personally, I think content is way more underestimated. In terms of producing good content, creativity is positioned in the last few steps. Knowing your target audience, and understanding your product are the first mission.
Dove does not need hundreds of pages to describe how effective the product is, instead, the brand tells its audience to appreciate the beauty they were born with. Victoria’s Secret was once the beauty standard for U.S. women, and now the brand is forced to rebrand. Both brands target female body anxiety, but Dove chooses to encourage women to accept who they are — -because they are naturally beautiful. The message hits right on the soft spot of consumers: every product teaches women how to be beautiful, but none of them tells women “You are beautiful.” Content is communication. Transferring the correct messages, and well done is twice done.
Reach & Search
Paid ads sometimes give people a sense of delusion: the ad will be seen, and the content surely works. There is a great difference between “to be seen” and “to be engaged” and the second one is what a content producer should achieve. Yes, we still cannot get rid of content. After all, it is the basic foundation of digital marketing.
To increase reach and search, providing high-quality and valid content is the key although organic content is placed a few spots away from the paid ads, good content can still gather impressions and drag the brand back to the top. UCG is a digital version of word of mouth. Based on this knowledge, explains why influencer marketing has been adopted by many brands: brands need content to help them reach customers.
Retention & Engagement
Digital marketing means non-stop changes. Most time it is harder to retain old customers than attract new ones. To maintain a benign relationship with customers, make sure every message should be consistent and relevant. Email marketing stands firmly in digital marketing because it is the most effective tool to maintain engagement. Nowadays with help from AI and other algorithms, brands can personalize their messages based on different segments of people. By nurturing relationships with existing customers, the brand enhances customer loyalty, meanwhile, loyal customers are more intended to interact with the brand, for instance, by leaving feedback and comments on social media. Those positive interactions can be translated as “extra credit” on the internet, and eventually boost search ranking.
Credibility & Consideration
One of my favorite phrases says, “Marketing is a promise”: whether it is online or offline. Reputation can collapse in one second, and when something goes online, it takes more than a “delete” to withdraw. Balenciaga’s campaign is a good example: you cannot make anything that implies sex and children at the same time, that is the rule. After the crisis, Balenciaga deleted everything that it had to delete, but the sabotage was completed. It takes time to win customers back, and they might not be back. There is no best solution other than to avoid it from occurring, but if it does the brand can do nothing but self-introspection: do you consider from the customers’ perspective before the strategy is made?
Objective, Metrics & Evaluation
You cannot start a strategy without a clear objective. Setting a precise objective points out the direction of every tactic. From a digital perspective, an objective can be increasing website traffic or rising brand awareness. Back to the beginning, a digital battle is attention competition. Also, an objective has to be measurable: budget calculation predicted performance, CTR, CPC…etc. By analyzing the performance, the brand identifies the effectiveness of a strategy. Those numbers reflect feedback from customers and also offer future direction. After evaluation, it is easy to make adjustments to optimize certain areas for better results.
