Developing a strong social media marketing campaign has become table stakes for most companies. However, the challenge is how is it possible to balance that with other digital marketing priorities. And although it may seem fairly easy to assign a twentysomething in the office to the task, it has become more complicated than sending out pictures of your tellers or a group of employees picking up rubbish by the side of a local highway.
The shifting sands of social media are more complex than they appear. And simply posting across the major platforms – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter – isn’t a strategy. The fact is, the mile wide, inch deep strategy to social media marketing isn’t effective any longer – if it ever was.
What Is Digital Marketing, Really?
Digital marketing has turned into a catch-all term that combines a variety of methods to get your product in front of consumers. These channels include:
- Web,
- Social,
- Email,
- Customer resource management (CRM),
- First party engagement,
- Influencer engagement, as well as
- Paid media.
Deciding where to spend your time – and money – in order to drive awareness about your next offering can be a tricky endeavour, particularly given that each channel requires its own level of expertise and knowledge of industry best practices to maximise your return on investment (ROI).
How To Structure A Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a document which shares the details for all the preparations for your digital marketing campaigns or measures to be taken. It details, among other things:
- Short, medium and long-term business goals.
- The strategies to follow in order to achieve the goals at the digital level.
- The channels to use.
- Action and development plans.
- Investment and budget.
- The timing and roadmap.
. You need your digital marketing strategy to:
- Attract, convince, convert as well as make your customers fall in love with your product or service.
- Plan all the strategies in addition to actions in order to reach your target customer.
- Section off your digital marketing campaigns so that they provide value in every stage.
A useful digital marketing strategy will help you with taking the correct decisions in order to make a company effective online. A strategy process model offers a framework which gives a logical sequence to follow in order to ensure the incorporation of all key activities of strategy development and implementation.
A digital marketing strategy should include a review to check that all of your resources are in place to assist your organisation manage all of the digital touchpoints. A successful digital marketing strategy should be built on reviewing seven core capabilities. These are:
- Strategic approach,
- Performance improvement process,
- Management buy-in,
- Resourcing and structure,
- Data and infrastructure,
- Integrated customer communications, as well as
- Customer experience.
While it may seem attractive to just dive in and start on as many platforms as once, by telling yourself that you’ll work out the details later you’re really just shooting yourself in the foot. Running any type of digital marketing campaign (even just search engine optimisation) without specific objectives in mind isn’t like ambling around in Paris without a GPS—it’s more like getting into a yacht with no map, where you’ll probably get trapped in and floating out at sea. With no digital marketing strategy, you will not going to see results as you don’t have the correct content in place to really get the results.
Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing
Keen to learn more about deploying the correct digital marketing strategy? If you are then our Advanced Digital Marketing Course is for you. For more information, please follow this link.
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