How Can I Create A Digital Strategy Today?
When the pandemic swept across New York in early March, I was concluding my Spring semester and entering my Summer semester at New York University. The pandemic quickly and drastically changed individuals’ lives and forced companies to adapt to the “new normal”.
The new normal meant social distancing, people staying inside their homes, people spending more time online socializing and, importantly for brands, reduced the potential to market to consumers in person.
With this shift in consumer behavior, many brands are shifting their focus to digital marketing.
So what is digital marketing? The short answer is it’s a continual and meaningful conversation with customers, using digital marketing tools, in order to accomplish an actionable and measurable marketing objective.
Meaning, based on your brand or company, you are engaging with current or potential customers on a daily basis, to help or solve their problems by persuading them to take action. The best strategy is one that serves your customers and brand.
To create a successful digital strategy, you must keep in mind these five tips. Foundation, platforms, channels, strategy, and trends.
1. Just like a well-built home, you need a strong foundation. This is where your storytelling and content come into play. Your customer’s path should be the following, based on a good foundation:
Awareness>Interest>Consideration>Purchase>Retention> Advocacy
In order for your customer to follow that path, your content should be a story with purpose. You can create a great story by knowing your audience, solving their problems, learning their core values, and providing an action for them to take.
In this foundation, great content is your core and helps to measure your success or failure. Content can take many forms like blogs, images, videos, Tweets, Instagram stories, Webinars, podcasts, infographics etc.
2. Carefully and strategically selecting your platform will ensure you are choosing the right stage for your content. You want the user experience to be perfect for your audience and user friendly on any device sharing your content.
3. Channels are where you will promote your stories and ideas and how you can monitor your success. Some ways you can do this is through email campaigns, paid media, social media ads and native ads. With these digital tactics you can specify your target customers in a way that is cost-effective and easy to measure.
4. Once you have built a strong foundation and determined the platform and channel, you must look into a plan or method that will help you achieve your goal over a long period of time. This will be your strategy. Being aware of your content and channels will enable you to determine the right digital tools to execute your marketing objectives. You can do this by having a “big idea”. This big idea should be in line with your objectives and is a creative pitch to encourage your customer to take action.
5. Lastly, you should do your research and make sure you’re keeping up with current trends. In your specific industry, know who the key players are and what they are doing. Use this knowledge to come up with ways to improve on their ideas and do things differently. Take advantage of knowing what people are saying and create an action. Trends are constantly changing and you always want to stay relevant or create the next big idea.
A marketing strategy in today’s current climate can be challenging, with everything digital and consumers kept at a distance. However, more and more the marketing world is heading into a digital direction. To be successful, we need to keep in mind what our customer is seeking and most importantly encourage a reaction, through strong storytelling, with smart objectives and tactics.
