Mark Crompton: How to build your Digital Marketing Strategy
The first thing to do when you start building your digital strategy is to remove the word digital. It’s strategy. Full stop.
Having a strategy is key, you can’t just bounce around from day to day, week to week. You need to believe in your vision and that needs to be expressed as your strategy, then you can do business. In short, if you don’t have a strategy you have no business and you won’t be here next year.
The first thing you need to think about is who’s the audience and perhaps more importantly what are they interested in talking to you about, that takes you to step two; the content you need to create and produce. Once you have that you then need to look at what are the digital channels or platforms you have to communicate with that audience. The last part is then about how you measure and react to that data in real time. If you have those four components you have your digital strategy.
1. Know your audience
To find out who’s your audience is easier than you think. Start with Google Analytics In-Market Segments, this will show you users who are already actively searching and comparing your brand to alternatives in the market. Next try Similar Web to get some comparative insights into your competition the free version will give you some information on monthly web traffic, trending keywords and even how your competitors are spending money on paid-for content.
At the same time it’s important to understand who are your brand influencers, who talks about your brand, who talks about the topics centred around your brand. Identify, track and follow these people to build up a view on content thats engaging for your target audience.
2. Choose relevant content
Normally, you’ll find that only around 25% to 50% of the content you have is actually relevant and engaging for a user. So to figure out what content your audience engages with is not about having a long term strategy or long term editorial plan. You need to be looking at data and using digital tools so that you can see how your content is actually doing day to day, create a digital control room. In the past you would create a single message, publish and then sit and wait to see if it resonates. With Digital you can create hundreds of messages, tailored to markets, regions or even specific behavioural and attitudinal segments that you can tweak in real time.
3. Pick the right platform
So you’ve know your audience and the content thats engaging them. Now its time to choose a digital platform to pass your message, but first you need to consider the following:
- Is my objective to generate sales?
- Is my objective pure brand awareness?
- is my objective lead generation?
Digital platforms to generate sales
- eCommerce
- Display Ads
- Paid Social media
- Responsive websites
- Mobile Apps
Digital platforms for brand awareness
- Email marketing
- Digital advertising on websites
- Paid Social media
Digital platforms for Lead generation
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Mobile marketing
Now that you have your channels, its time to form a common narrative between all of them so customers can’t get lost or receive mixed messages. When you’re preparing your content plan and marketing strategy for the year ensure overlaps across digital channels to maximise messaging consistency. You need an omni-channel approach.
4. Measure and analyze
Digital gives you the means and freedom to measure and analyze in real time. But you should be going one step further, by using tools that can analyze and interpret that data for you and even automate some of your processes.
The easiest tools to use to measure and automate your website performance and web content engagement is by using Google Analytics and Google DataStudio. Google DataStudio enables you to pipe in various different data sources and create shareable analytics dashboards.
Here’s a nice example from the team at Zimamedia.com, https://datastudio.google.com/s/nfKRm2JWByY Simply select your Google Analytics dataset and instantly begin to segment your audience.
Google DataStudio allows you to perform blended analytics, enabling you to blend for instance Youtube data with Facebook Ads if you wanted to see how a piece of creative is performing across multiple channels.
Understand your audience better by using Behavioural and Attitudinal data
Using DataStudio you can build advanced models like this Psychographic Analytical model made by me. Psychographics are interesting because if you’re targeting audiences purely on demographics, you might end up sending the same message to people who really have very different world views. For example just because two people share the same gender, have similar ages and live in the same country doesn’t necessary mean they will respond in the same way to the same message.
This analytics model uses the OCEAN five-factor personality model. OCEAN being an acronym for:
- Openness. How open you are to new experiences?
- Conscientiousness. How much you care about order and habits and planning in your life?
- Extraversion. How socially minded you are?
- Agreeableness. Whether you tend to put your needs ahead of society and community or vice versa.
- And finally Neuroticism, a measurement of how much you tend to worry.
Conclusion
Big Data is fundamentally changing the way that Digital marketing and online communications are being done. Back in the 1950s, creative was top down. Brilliant advertising executives came up with creative concepts and pushed them on to an audience in a hope that they would resonate. Today we can use Big Data to understand exactly what messages each specific group within a target audience need to hear, long before the creative process has even started.
Whether its a complete Digital Strategy for a brand or a single paid social campaign, always ask yourself the same four questions.
- Who is my audience?
- What content do I have to engage with that audience?
- What channels do I have to share content with my audience?
- How can I measure and analyze content engagement in real time?
If you have those four elements, you have your digital strategy. Full stop.
