Top ten questions to ask yourself when planning a digital marketing strategy

How do I write a digital marketing strategy? Check out my top ten questions to ask yourself when planning a digital marketing strategy. Read about planning, structuring and monitoring your marketing

Planning a digital marketing strategy

Building a marketing strategy is a huge topic and planning a digital strategy is an integral part of that. Books have been written about it (huge brick-sized books) and plenty of coffee drunk and hair pulled out. Yet without a strategy, what have you got? You’ve got you randomly stabbing in the dark, tweeting stuff and emailing random people, and you’ve got you sporting your best blank look when asked if it worked. Nobody wants that.

A bit like my top ten questions to ask yourself when designing a website post, this one is a biggie. I’ve tried to overview as much as possible, so as not to scare anyone away, but (as before) each section requires quite a lot of work and thought. Again, I’ve written down the whole process in brief, if only so it doesn’t seem so horrifyingly daunting.

If you want far more depth than you ever thought you’d want, check out this comprehensive book on Digital Marketing, strategy, implementation and practice by Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick. I read it when doing my CIM marketing diploma, and found it easy to read and covered everything I needed to know about strategy (and more).

So, where should you start? At the very beginning, of course.

Top ten questions to ask yourself when planning a digital marketing strategy.

1.      What type of business is it?

As with designing a website, you need to ask yourself if your marketing strategy is dealing with business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), as it will have a bearing on what strategies and tactics you use further down the line.

2.      What are your overall business objectives?

You need to know the overall business objectives, so that this information can guide your digital marketing objectives later. Is the overall objective growth, customer retention or cost saving, for example?

3.      Where are we now? A situation analysis

When planning a digital marketing strategy you can’t get much better than the SOSTAC® planning framework, as outlined in the Digital Marketing, Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick book, mentioned above.

The first part of this planning framework asks you to perform a situation analysis and to ask yourself, where are we now? This could either be an enormous task (for a corporation) or pretty basic (if you’re a one-man-band). Below is a non-exhaustive list of things to consider, pick and choose the most appropriate for your circumstances:

·        Online marketplace

Do an assessment. What does the digital landscape look like for your specific niche? Is it bursting with competition? Do social media feature heavily?

·        Situational analysis

Think about your customers, competitors, internal capabilities, suppliers, resources (micro environment) plus any legal requirements, technology changes (macro environment).

·        Internet-specific SWOT analysis

No, not SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) law enforcement – but, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis. From the results of the situation analysis, decide which are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats. For example, the skills of your internal capabilities could be a strength, but your investment in new technology could be a weakness.

4.      What about the online communications that I already have?

If you already have e-marketing or e-communications, this is a good time to check what they’re up to and if they are any good.

·        How do you create awareness of your online stuff, offline? What hard-copy marketing do you have and how does it direct people to your website or online presence? Do you have other websites pointing to your website? A way to measure success of this awareness is to check and see how many unique visitors you have.

·        Have a good look at how your audience interacts with your website and social media. Do they leave comments, likes or share your content? A way to measure the success of interactions is to take a look at your bounce rate (a high bounce rate can indicate that people are fleeing your website and haven’t found what they’re looking for); pages per visit (this is a bit ambiguous, as visiting one page could mean the visitor has found exactly what they’re looking for, or it could meant that it’s confusing or not what they are looking for, and they’ve clicked off quickly).

·        How do you assess whether your website or online presence is a success? Do you have any ‘goals’ (donate button, contact us form etc). Do you have any analytics set up to see if these ‘success goals’ are actually successful? Did you visitors donate or fill in that form?

·        How do you try and get your visitors to come back again and again? Does it work? Are your readers happy, or are their comments negative?

·        If you’re feeling brave, you can do a full content audit. This is a big topic and will be covered in another blog post.

5.      What should my objectives be?

Once you’ve found out what your overall business objectives are, you can think of ways that digital marketing can help solve these problems. Consider what your situation analysis and SWOT analysis came up with and put them all in one big cauldron. Your objectives should maximise your strengths and opportunities and minimise your weaknesses and threats. You can find loads on the internet about creating SMART objectives, but basically the SMARTer the objectives, the less vague and meaningless they are (and probably more likely to get done):

·        Specific

·        Measurable

·        Actionable

·        Relevant

·        Timely

6.      How do we get there? Strategy to achieve the objectives

Consider who your target audience is – can you break this audience into smaller groups? Think about how you can target each of these groups – does this require a different strategy for each group?

Things to think about:

·        What are you offering?

·        What is your target audience/audiences?

·        Which parts of the e-communications mix can you use?

e-Communications mix:

Ø  Search engine marketing (SEO, paid search, PPC, inclusion feeds)

Ø  Online PR (Publisher outreach, media alerting, brand protection – reactive and proactive PR)

Ø  Online partnerships (Affiliate marketing, sponsorship, co-branding, link building)

Ø  Display advertising (banner and skyscraper adverts)

Ø  Offline communications (Advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, PR, sponsorship, direct mail, exhibitions, merchandising, packaging, word-of-mouth)

Ø  Email marketing (rented lists, created in-house lists)

Ø  Social media marketing (Audience participation, managing presence, viral campaigns, customer feedback, adverts and content on social media)

Ø  Landing page personalisation

Ø  Rich media – video & audio

Ø  Blogs

Which of these social media options would work for your strategy?

·        Social networks

·        Social publishing (news)

·        Social commenting in blogs

·        Social niche communities

·        Social customer service

·        Social knowledge (Wikipedia)

·        Social bookmarking

·        Social streaming (photos, videos, podcasts)

·        Social search

·        Social commerce

7.      What is the tone of your message?

The tone of your message will be the starting point for your content strategy. Decide which is the most appropriate for your overall target audience:

·        Informational

·        Emotional

·        Branded

·        User-generated

8.      How exactly do we get there? Tactics

This is where you think about the specific details of your chosen e-communication channels.

Consider the following:

·        (Product) Can value be added via digital channels? Either by offering product digitally or through content?

·        (Place) Can you use e-commerce to sell the product? Do you need to add function to your website?

·        (Price) Could you reduce the online price, or advertise free offers?

·        (Promotion) Marketing communications – how online and offline tools complement each other to promote your product.

9.      Who does what and when? Actions

Based on your strategy and details in the tactics – in the ‘action’ section, decide on who does what and when. If you are doing everything, all of the time, you probably can skip this section…

10.  How do we monitor performance? 

This is a big area, and covered in another blog post, but suffice to say you can apply some web analytics (such as Google Analytics) to measure the success of your website and social media.  

Here are some things to think about:                                                              

·        Reach – Unique visitors, audience share, revenue of goal per visit

·        Interaction – Bounce rate, pages per visit, product page conversion

·        Conversion – Conversion rate, sales, revenue

·        Engage – Fan engagement, repeat sales