Digital Marketing has become an essential part of the mix.
So how can we design an effective and easy to follow plan?
Here is a brief 6 Step Approach for your Digital Marketing Strategy.
Step 1 - Identify What Products & Services to Market
First things first! Identify what products or services you want to promote. Are they the most profitable ones or the ones that need a little push?
Write down a small brief where you clearly identify your products and services, your business, the business units involved and your brand value proposition.
Step 2 - Set up Your Business & Marketing Objectives
Have these clearly defined from start!
Business Objectives
Think about your overall business strategy.
Do you want to enhance your product offering, enter a new market, increase customers’ values, find new distribution channels?
Define what you are looking to achieve in the next 2 years.
Marketing objectives
Align these to your business objectives along the different stages of your funnel.
Do you want to gather insights from your customer base, build your brand, promote new products, drive up-sells and cross-sells, improve your online presence or customer experience? You can do a lot with marketing, and not necessarily with a large budget.
At this stage you may also want to do a digital audit of your business. How good is your digital presence on social media, website, email compared to others? How engaging is your content and how frequent your communications?
Step 3 - Segment, segment, segment!
Here you shall identify your customer segments.
When segmenting, use demographics, psychographics (interests) and technographics (use of technology) and some of the following:
Type of product
Consumer behaviour to purchase (in store, online or a mix of both?)
Customer lifetime value (which customers are more profitable for your business?)
Once you have identified your customer segments, create a targeted strategy for each.
Step 4 - Generate Ideas and Pick the Best Ones
Here is your chance to be creative before implementing your plan.
Have one or more brainstorming sessions with your team to generate initiatives in line with your objectives.
You can group your ideas by customer segment. For example, engaging content with one segment, product visibility for another segment and so forth.
Once you are happy with your ideas, take a breath, then select the ones that offer more opportunities, better ROI and are more cost effective.
Think also: are your initiatives quick wins or big plays? Read here for more on this.
Step 5 - Roll up Your Sleeves: Execute!
Here you need to plan your resources and execute your outbound marketing.
For outbound consider:
traditional marketing (i.e. TV, print)
online (paid digital)
BTL (below the line) - > PR or event marketing to enhance your brand and audience.
As for your resources and skills, think about:
Functions that can help you implemenet your plan: Sales, Digital, Operations, IT?
Outside partners: contractors, distribution partners
Skills required to make it a success: do you need to outsource content marketing or PR, for example?
Step 6 - Define your KPIs
Here briefly design how your metrics look like and what success means to your digital marketing strategy.
There are a lot of metrics you can consider and you can apply one or more of these to your strategy for each segment identified.
You can read more on Digital Marketing and ROI here.
Metrics can be divided in 4 groups:
Audience Metrics - which audience did you reach?
Channel Engagement Metrics - what level of interaction did you obtain?
Universal Engagement Metrics - how did marketing enhance the relationship between your brand and your customers?
Financial Metrics - did marketing improve the bottom line?
Now draft a clear metrics plan and press the Start button. Good luck!
So, how do you design your digital marketing strategy?
It would be great if you could share your experience here.
Thank you for reading!