What Digital Marketing strategy is really about…
Strategy – What is it?
Digital marketing strategy is quite simple. After selecting that strategy, you can select appropriate tactics and therefore create prioritised actions.
Digital Marketing Strategy Definition
Let’s take a step back and look at the word strategy and what it means to you and me.
Strategy stems from what you want, your vision. So, what is your ‘vision’ for your business?
Hold that in your mind.
Strategy is Focus
Strategy is the focus. The strategy condenses your vision, or objectives if you’d rather, into a statement.
Cast aside all of those wonderfully complex marketing terms and models and remember one thing.
Digital Marketing is about making money.
Nothing else matters, everything else including the theory is boring.
Question your Strategy
Is this strategy going to gain my business profit?
Follow up questions to reality check that strategy:
Will it create brand awareness?
Will the strategy gain my business influence in the market?
Does the strategy involve people, does it engage them?
Digital Marketing Strategy Ideas
- ‘…to be the most influential website for X’ in the UK.’
- ‘…build a community of like-minded people who will buy our products or services.’
- ‘…the main information resource for Y in Europe.’
- ‘…making learning an instrument a creative and practical experience.’
- ‘…the most responsive organisation in the area for Z.’
- ‘…to entertain while educating children, 8 – 13.’
Strategy or vision should be a living thing. A strategy will also be aware of the gaps in other businesses attention. What is the gap?
What are Tactics?
Tactics are the details of the strategy you’ve created from your business vision. In digital marketing terms this means usually, not always, the different channels and the different methods to create traffic that buys.
The Tactical Core
Is content.
The tactics, more below, are all going to need entertaining and informative content in many forms. In digital marketing you get to choose and trial lots of different types, video, imagery, words and more like case studies, emotional copy and the like.
Digital Marketing Tactics (Main Channels)
Here’s a selection of tactics. Some will be appropriate for your vision; some will work better than others. Online marketing is about creativity, ideas and testing.
- Content Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Paid Advertising
- Social Media
- Affiliate
- Partnerships
- Influencers
- PR
- Webinars
‘Content is King’
Content is also the Queen, the Jack and the Ace of everything you do, so make it original, make it creative, make it into a Wow!
Spend a lot of effort into finding and creating all your content. Do that as it is what makes you different from the competition. All the other channels are about technique.
SOSTAC Marketing Planning
This is a marketing model to follow as a starting point. It is a way of framing your intent.
- Situation: Where are you now?
- Objectives: What do you want?
- Strategy: As above.
- Tactics: As above.
- Actions: Things to be done to make the above work.
- Control: Budget, people and how you are going to track success.
Digital Marketing Strategy, a Planning Example
We have a client that has been with us since the start of the company. They were selling just one product.
The strategy was to make them the most influential website for that product. We did it.
First by breaking down the product into the different categories of demand and creating content of various types for each category:
- Cooking
- Beauty
- Fitness
- Health
The tactics were very simple:
- Organic Traffic
- Social Influence
- Paid Ads
- Building an email list
- Market Influence
- Content Marketing (involving, video, imagery and stories)
The Result (after two years)
- Visits to website up from around 3,000 per month to a peak of 98,700
- Social following (combined) up from less than 2,000 to 300,000
- Email list of a few hundred to 30,000
What am I not Sharing?
It was a lot of graft creating all that content and involved many talented and hardworking people, plus a fair amount of budget.
The client has pivoted now into a range of other products and is doing very well with their own ecommerce store. We al knew that ‘pivot’ had to happen.
O’ and how we went about finding content that worked and how we tracked all the values, that is the KPI’s and especially what was engaging with visitors and followers.
Digital Marketing Should be Simple
So, this is a simplistic way of looking at digital marketing strategy but simple is best right? You don’t have to dress it up in reams of useless digital paper.
Digital marketing plans have to change in terms of tactics, digital platforms evolve faster than I can drink my coffee, so does the market, so does circumstance.
That means getting the strategy, the focus for your vision absolute. The vision stays the same until the market changes. Then you are in the world of the ‘pivot’ which is taking your vision and repurposing, taking all you have learnt and placing it a
Summation
Strategy. It’s your vision, put into a simple sentence that focuses your tactics.
I hope to have dispelled the utter boredom of marketing for you and if I can do so further contact us, Conversion Detectives for some apt, succinct and realistic strategy, tactics and action planning advice.
About Conversion Detectives
Conversion Detectives is a full service digital marketing agency in Hertfordshire.
We find the best quality traffic for your website and convert more of that traffic into sales or sales leads.
Services
Digital Marketing Strategy | Creative Content Marketing | Email Marketing |
Lead Generation | Content Strategy | Social Media Marketing |
Video Marketing | SEO (Basics) | SEM |
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