What do you know about digital marketing strategy?

Author:

Dasha, marketing director

Published: February 1, 2017

Time to read: 4 min

Nowadays, the most popular opinion is there are two kinds of industries. Those that have changed under digital technology influence and those that have yet to change. Such deal is connected with the Internet expansion and penetration the same as mobilization. This phenomenon has reached levels that affect the rules of life and doing business. And this is true of most of the developed countries, however, post-soviet states have faced with this challenge.

Changing the rules of the game in the digital age, respectively, influence the business approaches. Digital strategy availability is a vital component of the competition. But a clear understanding the theory of a digital-strategy is not all. The theory and practice go hand-in-hand.

DOES YOUR COMPANY HAS A CLEAR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY?

Digital marketing strategy planning

According to the statistic of Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence, 2016), many organizations are doing digital marketing, but they don’t have a strategy. The reality is that digital channels are still relatively new, so many businesses haven’t responded. A majority of organizations responding now use a planned approach to digital marketing, but many still don’t.

DIGITAL STRATEGY. WHAT IS THIS?

It is noteworthy that there isn’t well - established and universally digital-strategy determination. The most popular are:

  • plan to achieve the company’s goals with the help of digital tools;
  • the process of identifying, formulating and implementing digital opportunities that’ll give your organization a competitive advantage;
  • and even this option from the master digital marketing Mark MacDonald:
  • digital-strategy - is “the answer to a simple question: how can a business benefit using information and technology to improve human productivity?”

Choose the most appropriate definition or combine them. Anyway, you’ll come to the conclusion that an effective digital strategy should be based on facts, reliable economic data, astute business judgment and pragmatic approach.

STRATEGY OF PROMOTION BY MEANS DIGITAL TOOLS

To start with, the important fact of the digital-marketing is the development of the strategy. After all, it’s necessary to determine the points of the strategy before you write down on paper or monitor screen, organize and structure your thoughts. Also, you’ll be able to understand what information you are missing and need to analyze for settings strategy’s goals.

The benefits digital-strategy will bring:

  • increase return on investment, especially integrated with overall corporate strategy;
  • increase sales and customer loyalty while reducing costs through the preparation and analysis of new insights;
  • improving the customer experience and increase the value of the product / service with the help of “digital” opportunities;
  • creating a new simple-to-use sales channels at the same time efficient and cost effective service;
  • increasing flexibility of decision-making.

DEVELOPING OF DIGITAL STRATEGY

Some general advice to keep in mind when planning

  • start with the customer. Build your plan around customer insights and needs –
  • not around your products and tactics;
  • keep it flexible. Situations and plans change, especially online, so ensure plans are usable by a clear vision for the year and keeping detail to a shorter term 90-day focus;
  • set realistic goals. Include specific SMART objectives in your plans but keep them realistic by basing them on insights from your analytics, so they’re easy for others to buy into;
  • keep it Simple! “Jargon light” is best. Again it helps others buy into what you’re saying.Creating a structure for your plan;
  • keep plans up-to-date. Review and update regularly. We recommend 90-day planning of key activities and review against analytics dashboards.

Below I worked out some instructions for developing your own digital-strategy. It doesn’t pretend to be postulated, but shows the simple and structured planning approach.

  • Setting goals. Target digital-strategy based on business goals throughout the organization.

  • Define your audience. Determine your primary and secondary target audiences and conversion groups.

  • Determine USP (unique selling proposition).

  • Analysis of technologies and tools. Analyze available to the company’s external and internal digital tools and channels, as well as the available tools, but not used yet. Set up goals, objectives and key challenges for each channel (website, social networks, mobile devices, CRM, ERP, etc.)

  • Contents. Content strategy is a separate point, where you define the language, audience, methods and time of delivery of content. The purpose is communication with the customers.

  • Designe and Management. Prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance, as well as deadlines, budget and other available resources. Distribute them between the teams and set KPI’s.

  • Achievement and success. Decide how you’ll check and evaluate the results of each step and the overall success of the project.

  • Analysis and correction If you think having passed the previous 7 steps, you’ll complete the work out the digital-strategy, you are deeply mistaken. Analyze each action, find the ‘gaps’ and make changes to improve efficiency. Done? Now do it again. And continues to do so further. Remember, if you want to get a correct view of the promotion, set up correct Google Analytics setting.

The developing the digital strategies can help to create a positive customer experience that works for the company’s brand. Strategy creates a clear and flexibility way to make decisions and quickly respond to market changes. As a result, today’s all-always-connected-with -all world of digital-strategy directly influence on business strategy in whole.

Author:

Dasha, marketing director

Published: February 1, 2017

Time to read: 4 min

Contents: