Digital Marketing Strategy Guide
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The document provides a guide to developing a successful digital marketing strategy. It outlines 5 key stages: 1) Research the battlefield by understanding your target audience and competitors, 2) Set goals by defining objectives and key performance indicators, 3) Plan the attack by differentiating your brand and deciding how to communicate to customers, 4) Gather your weapons by integrating your brand across marketing channels and platforms, 5) Review gains and losses by analyzing performance against objectives. The guide stresses the importance of an adaptive digital strategy to stay ahead in a shifting landscape.
Digital Marketing Strategy Guide
- 2. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Overview A digital marketing strategy is the content plan that ensures any digital marketing efforts are tailored to your target audience, in order to maximise return on investment. Your audience may be arriving at your website or online content via a desktop, a tablet or as is increasingly common, from a mobile device. To be fully accessible, you should consider optimising your content across multiple platforms. 700,000Apps have been developed for iphone and android (AllThingsD) @36% Of marketing emails were opened on a mobile last year (2012)(Knotice) If you want to succeed in the digital space, it is vital you focus on what you want to communicate, who you want to communicate it to and how you’re going to communicate it. Our digital marketing strategy guide is your one-stop-shop for understanding digital engagement and helping you to define a successful digital strategy for your company. 1in5 minutes spent online is attributable to social media sites (Comscore)
- 3. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Our ‘Digital Marketing Strategy Guide’ will take you through what we see as the key 5 stages of preparation for your successful digital strategy. The digital landscape is forever shifting. Don’t stand still as you may just get left behind. 1//ResearchtheBattlefield 2//Setthegoal 3//Plantheattack 4//Gatheryourweapons 5//Reviewgainsandlosses
- 4. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Research the battlefield No amount of research is too much research. To successfully recognise and understand your target audience, you must get to know them inside out, finding out how, when, why and what material they are accessing online. Join blogs and forums where your target audience hang out and observe the demographic (age, gender, social status, income etc). Look at what your competitors are doing, chances are, you’re targeting the same people. Information is power. Know your Enemies Recognising your market competitors will help you: - Differentiate yourself in an increasingly crowded and competitive market - Understand their strengths and more importantly, exploit their weaknesses. //1 Know your Allies For B2B companies, knowing your audience may mean looking at your target company’s business model, financial situation, size, industry etc. For B2C companies, you should look for your target audiences social characteristics, buying tendencies, influences etc.
- 5. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide //1 By defining your target audience demographic (age, gender, social status, income etc.), understanding their buying decisions and the way they access your content, you can tailor your marketing material specifically for them, capitalizing on being able to personalise your content. This helps define your brand and differentiate yourselves from the competition. Get up-close and personal £50k+Influencedby Fashionblogs5and under usestabletand mobiletoaccess content
- 6. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide The digital landscape is forever shifting and if you stand still, you may just get left behind. Understand where you are excelling in the digital marketing landscape, where you can do better and how you can adapt for the future. Be proactive, active and reactive in your approach. By understanding these three points, you can set informed goals for your company to achieve, improving your marketing attempts in the long term: Understand the battlefield //1 If you know where you’re excelling in digital marketing, don’t rest on your laurels, do it better. If you don’t someone else will. (PROACTIVE) If you know where you need to improve in your digital strategy, focus on this and excel. (ACTIVE) Be adaptable and look out for the latest trends. Being first to market doesn’t always guarantee success, but you must know when it’s right for you and don’t get left behind. (REACTIVE)
- 7. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide specific measurable attainable relevant timely You can’t measure success unless you’ve set specific targets and objectives. (Smart Insights) It’s not good enough to say “we want to increase social engagement”. By what channel? By what quantity? Over what time frame? All of your goals must be attainable and realistic. Consider whether an objective is too ambitious and if it needs breaking down into more manageable goals. Everything you do should be relevant to your customer behaviour. Decide, do you want to: Maintain your current customers? Increase the amount your current customers purchase from you? Or, gain new customers? Set the objectives: //2
- 8. 5000+ CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide //2 Set the objectives: Good quality market research is essential to help you define your areas of improvement and set business objectives. Structuring your areas of improvement to attain business objectives is where Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) make their first appearance; these are the factors that are measurable. For example, if you’re looking to increase engagement, KPI’s might include: Number of bookmarks % of time spent on site Number of Facebook comments Twitter retweets Number of email subscriptions The list goes on.
- 9. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Plan the attack By this point you should already be equipt with a strong knowledge of : Where you are performing well in digital marketing and where you’re not. Who your target audience is Who your industry competitors are What others are doing and how they are doing it Now it’s time to plan what you’re going to do... As mentioned earlier, if you know who your competitors are, you’ll have some idea of how to differentiate yourself. Remember, your brand identity goes a long way beyond just your logo and website design. You must consider: How your brand makes your customers feel Brand tone of voice Company/brand personality Your services, products, prices, customer service policy etc. Brand values & philosophy //3
- 10. As mentioned earlier, if you know who your competitors are, you have some idea of how to differentiate yourself in the crowded marketplace for your industry. However, it is your target customers that should be the strongest influencing factor on your brand, because: It is your target customers that your company needs to engage to drive sales It is your target customers’ demographics and buying habits that will determine who you are, and therefore what your brand is Your brand then affects how you communicate/sell to these target customers successfully CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide //3 Wait... Why do your customers choose your company above others?(if the answer doesn’t come easily, then you should reconsider your digital brand identity.)
- 11. COMPETITORS SOCIAL MEDIA CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Gather your weapons You've done your research. You know who you are and what you do as a company. Now you have to spread the word to your target audience. This means integrating your digital brand across ALL marketing channels, social media outlets and platforms appropriate and available to you - i.e. consider optimising your site for mobile/tablet to reach more consumers. The final piece of your digital marketing strategy jigsaw is to decide which analytic services you are going to use in order to monitor your performance and KPI’s (Econsultancy). //4 700,000Apps have been developed for iphone and android (AllThingsD) @36% Of marketing emails were opened on a mobile last year (2012)(Knotice) 43% of marketers are tipping mobile optimisation as pivotal in digital marketing for 2013 (Econsultancy)
- 12. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide The infinite galaxy of social media can be a scary one. With such an abundance of social channels available worldwide, you need to select carefully the most appropriate ones for your company. No one-size-fits-all, so don’t try and take on more than you can manage by creating social profiles that aren’t relevant to your own target audience. (i.e. If your target market is 13 year old boys interested in action figures, you’re probably not going to find them on Linked In!) There’s no One-size-fits-all There are over social media channels worldwide //4
- 13. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide //5 It is important to review your gains and losses regularly to ensure you’re on track to reach your goals. With increasing access now to free services such as Google Analytics, it’s never been so easy to measure your progress online. This can be a time consuming process if done daily so you may wish to out source this part of your Digital Marketing Strategy to a specialist third party, which can often result in more detailed, accurate and frequent measurements. Either way, analytics and KPI recordings out sourced or carried out in-house, you should then apply and review your findings against your original business objectives. Review gains and losses Findings Have I achieved my objective? No Yes Great! Now, how can we do even better going forward? Back to the drawing board! Where did we go wrong? How can we fix it?
- 14. CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide Can’t ‘talk the talk’? Then you’ll have to ‘walk the walk’. Getting your Digital Marketing Strategy right is vital to staying ahead in one very crowded and competitive game. If you’re not responsive to digital trends and easily accessible to your customers, you can guarantee someone else will be there to steal the limelight. Like it or not, digital engagement is the way forward and many household names have struggled to adapt to this new way of thinking. With each leading brand falling from the high street, there’s an online alternative ready to take it’s place and wipe the tears of it’s newly inherited customer base. Jessops Continued to struggle with competition from online rivals and the prevalence of smart phones now equipt with camera technology. (The Independant) Comet Didn’t move with the times. It was caught out by lower priced online rivals and didn’t have the pulling power in-store to lure customers. (Channel Register)
- 15. Blockbuster Initially came unstuck due to Netfilx - postal and online DVD rentals - eating into it’s customer base (Business Week). The online rental market is becoming increasingly crowded with rival services and the popularity of streaming films over the internet is booming. (BBC) HMV “Could have been successful enough to have taken on Amazon, had it gone online 10 to 15 years ago” (Design Week). However, you cannot bypass the fact that “no bricks-and-mortar record store group has successfully resisted the onslaught of digital music downloads” (Robert Plummer, BBC) CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide In the case of these last two retailers, Econsultancy sums it up by noting that the companies and those in charge of them, failed to recognise and act on the increasing importance of online and how that would affect their business. In truth, this statement probably applies to all other struggling retailers as well. Turning a blind eye
- 16. Have you got a digital marketing strategy in place? CLOUDSPOTTING digital marketing strategy guide @Leedswebagency /cloudspottingagency /cloudspotting www.cloudspotting.co.uk