A digital strategy is a project to promote a brand on the Internet. With its help, companies attract customers, sell more and earn more. A marketer can develop the strategy for a casino Roulette, online flower store, or a banking app: he prescribes step by step what and how to make advertising work.
Goals of Digital Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is a roadmap: it helps to use the tools so that the budget and efforts are not wasted. Goals can be different, such as:
- Introduce the audience to a new product or brand.
- Create a need for the product.
- Increase the reach of subscribers.
- Increase the number of hits.
- Optimize the budget.
But the ultimate goal is to increase profits.
Technologies of Digital Strategy
Branding
Branding works on recognition of the company. The purpose is to be remembered and stand out among competitors. Different kinds of advertising are used to achieve it:
- Targeted – it is adjusted in social networks on a particular audience, for example by age, interests, location.
- Contextual – the principle is the same as that of targeting, but not in social networks, but in search engines.
- Native – useful content, such as a blog with tips and tricks that unobtrusively mention the product.
Another method is SMM. For example, the company produces original clothing for young people. The brand gives style tips on Instagram and other social networks, and tells how to combine things. For photos it chooses its own models of clothes – shows that it follows trends. The audience watches useful content and as a result, a stylish image is associated with the company’s products.
PR
PR helps build brand reputation, convincing the audience that the offer is valuable to the consumer and the company itself is valuable to society. The goal isn’t to induce purchase, but to increase trust.
The methods are SMM, blogs, and special projects. For example, the same clothing brand accepts old clothes and sends them for recycling. So he shows that he cares about ecology. It helps to create an image of a company that cares, to attract customers with the same position.
Performance
A direction in marketing to achieve financial performance. The purpose is to increase sales and reduce the cost of promotion. The performance marketer deeply analyzes the effectiveness of advertising: knows how to work with the product funnel, promotion channels. Compares data and makes decisions.
For example, a clothing brand uses different promotion tools. To optimize the budget, the marketer connects the end-to-end analytics system and monitors the company’s referrals and sales. He discovers that there are more leads from search engines than from social networks. The budget is reallocated to spend more on profitable sites.
CRM Tools
CRM is a system that includes task schedulers, analytics tools, customer bases, and mailing platforms.
The goal is to automate routine, to improve service quality. With CRM, the platform collects all appeals and orders and systematizes them.
For example, a marketer of a clothing brand sends out mailings to customers and in messengers. Using data from CRM analyzes the audience and divides them into categories. New clients are sent a promo code for the next purchase, regular – a selection of shares. For those who haven’t been in touch for a long time, they write about a new collection.
How to Develop and Implement a Digital Strategy
Set a Goal
Decide what is more important for your company now: to strengthen reputation, find effective advertising channels or attract new clients.
Use SMART technology to formulate a goal. The goal according to it should be:
- Specific. It’s easy to present. What do you want to achieve, change, improve?
- Measurable. Exact numbers of new customers, conversions, or amount of profit. What results will show that you achieved what you planned?
- Achievable. Focus on the current market and company situation. Is it realistic to reach the goal, what could get in the way?
- Relevant. The goal coincides with the general strategy of the company, helping to improve the brand performance. Why do we need this particular result?
- Time-bound. There is a clear deadline, not “as soon as possible.” When do you need to achieve the result?
An example of such a SMART goal: increase the number of new customers by 30% by the end of this year.
Analyze Your Competitors
Select your main competitors and compare them to your company. Find out how they work with their target audience, what techniques and channels they use.
There are special services for analyzing the audience and competitors’ traffic sources:
- SimilarWeb. Surveys any site that is visited at least 5,000 times per month. Shows the total number of visitors, average time to view the site, depth of views, bounce rate.
- Woorank. Analyzes the technical parameters of the competitor’s site. Shows metadata, page content, and traffic sources.
Identify the advantages and disadvantages of competitors, try to adopt good practices.
Study the Audience
It’s usually heterogeneous – segment it by criteria:
- Age, gender, marital status.
- Place of residence.
- Profession.
- Interests and hobbies.
- Behavior – the way they search for information, shop, choose goods.
This way you avoid generalizations and choose the right offers for the audience.
For example, among the audience of the clothing store are predominantly girls under 25 years old. Clothing should emphasize their individuality, but at the same time be inexpensive. Customers prefer to order models online with home delivery. With this knowledge, it’s easier to come up with offers: for example, develop a delivery service, think of promotions.
Choose Communication Tools and Channels
Find out where customers get information about the brand, which influences their decision to buy the product. To do this, use end-to-end analytics services. They analyze customer flow from different advertising sources and provide statistics for each channel.
Create a Customer Journey Map
This is a visualization of the customer’s interaction with the brand. The stages the consumer goes through before making a purchase.
Add to the map the customer’s motives and expectations at each stage, channels of communication with the company. This will help find the barriers in the customer’s path and eliminate them. Possible barriers include technical errors, inconvenient navigation on the site, lack of product information. In these cases, they strengthen technical support, change the design and structure, and fill the site with information.
For example, the client finds a suitable model at the online clothing store, but sees unfamiliar designations of the size range. Most likely, he won’t compare different size grids, and goes to another store. To eliminate this barrier, the site introduces a table of size matching or indicates to each model a more familiar designation.
Make a Semantic Core
If there is a blog or website among the channels, highlight the keywords that will bring the user to the web resource – this will structure the site and attract more customers.
Plan the Steps
Determine what needs to be done as part of the strategy. For example:
- Develop promotions for subscribers.
- Think through a content plan.
- Talk about the channel in the company’s social networks and on the website.
- Publish posts and respond to comments.
- Analyze metrics.
For each step, set a deadline to keep track of whether everything is going according to plan.
