You Should Know This Before Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy!
Looking back at this semester’s digital marketing class, thanks to which I started writing this blog, in this post I will use the knowledge and insight learned from this course to talk about the different important aspects to consider before creating a new digital marketing campaign. I will talk about the five most important things that in MY opinion are necessary to establish for anyone wanting to create a digital strategy, especially considering the climate we currently live in with the worldwide pandemic.
1. Define your goals
The top priority for anyone wanting to create a new digital strategy is to establish concrete project objectives and goals. These can range from for example wanting to increase sales or build brand awareness and recognition, target and attract new customers or simply increase revenues. Without having a clearly defined goal for a campaign, there is no point in attempting to create a strategy. A clear vision of the desired outcome has to be set, where all activities will revolve around reaching that predefined final goal!
2. Know your audience
After establishing a goal, the second most important thing to consider is “who is your audience”? Which customer segment are you targeting? male/female, millennials/gen Z, students/fulltime workers, specific demographic segment, income segment, etc. There are hundreds of ways to group target audience but the right segment must be chosen for the desired campaign. When the segment is chosen, deep research must be conducted to be able to identify what the customers what, what they might need and gain as much insight as possible A great tool to clearly demonstrate a specific target audience is creating an audience profile of the “typical” customer.
Knowing the interests of the customer is essential to create an effective strategy, it is important to educate the customers instead of only trying to force sell them a product/service. The strategy should effectively be a pull strategy that will attract the customer and “pull” them closer to the business without trying to forcefully push an idea at them.
3. Create good content and select the right platforms
When the goal and target audience are defined, it is time to think about the content. What kind of content do you want to put out there? Relating this to the goals and objectives of the strategy. Content is the KEY to overall digital marketing. Content has to be educational, interesting but also engaging, the type of content that starts a conversation is the best! However, one should not forget that all content put out there should always reflect the business’s personality and the image you are trying to portray to the public. Well thought-through content will also increase interactions. To organize and not get overwhelmed by all the content you want to show to your customers, creating a content calendar will help with the planning.
During this stage, you should also consider the different channels to use when trying to connect with customers and not only use one channel. Consider which will be the most effective as well as which will have the most reach and the biggest chance of starting a conversation. We live in a digital world where we can easily get overwhelmed by all the information being thrown at us, therefore, considering the right channels and touch-points for customers whether that is social media such as Instagram or Twitter, email marketing, paid search or display advertising is key!
4. Choose the right KPI’s and know how to measure them
Everything must be measurable! Before the whole process of creating a new digital marketing strategy begins, measurable values, or key performance indicators, KPI’s, must be selected which will show the efficiency of the set objectives and determine if the chosen strategy in terms of the content and use of different channels is effective. KPI’s can be for example generating online leads or trying to drive customers to store, customer lifetime value, brand awareness rates, and many many more.
The right metrics then have to be selected to measure these KPI’s. There are many different types of metrics from social media metrics such as reach, engagement, comments to conversion metrics such as cost per conversion or click-through rate, channel metrics, or consumption metrics. There are already many metrics that companies measure and track such as revenue growth or different profit margins, but while conducting a digital campaign and creating a strategy for that, it is imperative to select the right types of marketing metrics which will be valuable to the company and will demonstrate how effective their efforts have been so far. If metrics show bad results, it is time to reconsider the use of different platforms or perhaps changing the content, or perhaps the wrong KPI’s have been selected.
5. BE ADAPTABLE!
One of the most important things to consider when creating any new strategy, campaign, or plan for the future is for the team to be able to adapt quickly and without major difficulties. Considering the current situation of COVID-19 and the problem it caused for so many businesses all around the world, tough times have happened in the past and are always going to come in the future, therefore, everyone has to be ready that not everything in a marketing plan or everything in a strategy will be possible and not everything always goes as planned. You have to be prepared for these unexpected situations and have a system in place which allows adapting to different unforeseen scenarios such as the COVID-19 pandemic. No one expected that the start of 2020 will also be the start of a major virus outbreak. Many businesses are having big problems with dealing with it but there are also other businesses, which work in real-time, that are managing to work through this hard time and adapt to the current conditions of the world, still trying to impress and please their customers.
Without only talking about the pandemic, plans have to also be made which correspond to the different online privacy changes which are a hot topic in recent years. After CCPA has been introduced in the US at the start of 2020, more states and more regulatory acts regarding online privacy and data collection can be expected to come our way so be ready! Work in real-time and try to think ahead.
Finally…
Of course, there are many other important aspects one should know and think about before creating a digital strategy for example for a new campaign. However, personally, I think the five points mentioned above are some of the top priorities to consider especially in the environment we live in at the moment.
