Whether you’re an agency-side consultant or an in-house executive, you’ll most likely need to implement a digital strategy from scratch more than once during your career. This could be due to a new client, a change in business direction, or a new job with a clean slate.
Experienced marketers will have their tried-and-tested methods for kicking off a campaign, but complacency can be dangerous in such a fast-paced industry. I’ve only been in this game for about five years, but I’ve picked up some useful titbits along the way.
Hopefully the following six ideas can help you create a great digital strategy:
1. Do your research
The importance of research cannot be overstated. Campaigns will never be perfect from the get-go, but research helps you start on the best possible footing. Firstly, establish business goals and target audiences, then figure out where they’re spending their time and what they’re talking about.
Consider your audience’s concerns, problems, hopes, and dreams. For B2B, we usually want to make the lives of other professionals easier. How can your product or service make people better at their jobs? Also research community blogs and magazines, identify influencers and writers, and work out how to leverage their audience.
Tips:
Use tools like Followerwonk, BuzzSumo, or Klout for insightful information about your target audience, based on their social media habits. Consider your research in every aspect of your strategy and refer to it regularly during your marketing activities.
2. Create a budget
Social platforms are choking the organic reach of business pages, and there is more content than ever to compete with as new and existing enterprises embrace digital. As a result, promotion and advertising budget has become essential. Boosting your written and visual content with budget not only helps improve your reach, but enhances your ability to target the right audience. Investment doesn’t need to be huge – a small amount will make a difference.
Tips:
Create a monthly budget sheet to record all expenditure. Excel or Google Spreadsheets are fine, and more flashy tools are available. Add relevant data such as CPC and reach, but also some qualitative insights and actionable notes. Before new campaigns, review successes and failures from the previous weeks and ensure you apply learnings. Don’t be scared to shift budget balances between different platforms if one is better suited to your market.
3. Set timelines
A digital strategy is a colossal thing, especially when put into the context of a wider business or product strategy. It’s a whole lot more manageable to chop it into chunks, and see your tasks as small parts of a big puzzle. The puzzle will never be complete. Chill, accept it! Instead, it’ll change shape and perpetually morph into something more challenging and more rewarding.
I like to break my campaigns down quarterly, and weekly. Each week has a list of essential tasks, leaving space for ad-hoc. This was particularly important during agency life, and was a perfect way to stay on top of projects and report progress to clients.
Tips:
Keep quarterly KPIs in mind, and set objectives for every week to keep on track. If your KPI is to reduce website bounce rate to 45 per cent, set weekly objectives that will help you eventually reach that goal. You’ll need to tie this into a close monitoring of Analytics, and work on things like conversion rate optimization (CRO) and user journey – which incorporates design and copy skills, as well as patience.
4. Source specialists
Most of us can scribble the odd paragraph and spin the odd yarn. Marketers come from many different backgrounds, academic and otherwise. However, to write great content is a massive time investment. For those in strategy-driven roles, it’s important to enlist the help of a dedicated writer to help you do this.
Furthermore, visual media is absolutely key to the modern B2B marketing campaign. Photography, graphic design, and video are becoming the bread and butter for B2B and B2C, and there are many highly-skilled people to take your content to the next level. This allows you to oversee the strategy, and not get caught up in a churn that saps your energy and inevitably reduces the quality of your output.
Tips:
Find brilliant freelancers on website like Upwork, Elance, and PeoplePerHour. Reach out on Twitter – the fact that people stick their neck out to publicly recommend others means you’re likely to get quality. That said, be diligent. Google sections of your writer’s content to detect plagiarism, and maintain a zero-tolerance approach if found out. There are good and bad eggs.
5. Build a spine
Prepare an automated spine of content and social that requires minimal time investment, mapping out an editorial calendar and commissioning the content well in advance. This allows you to release your creative side, and keeps you agile during the week. With this freedom, you can do the cool stuff – interview colleagues, create podcasts, shoot videos, run competitions, and more. As for social, schedule standard posts in two-weekly cycles, and dip in daily to add timely engagement-focused updates, retweet, and discuss.
Tips:
Scheduling tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck offer free plans, and most competent CMS platforms will enable you to schedule articles. It’s important to remember that whilst this is a content is designed to bubble away under the surface, it should still be of the highest quality.
6. Set your measurements
Remembering a school ski trip in my teenage years, our teacher told us: “If you’re not falling over, you’re not learning.” Trial and error is inevitable, so don’t expect everything to work. Allow time in your strategy for regular review of progress and make tweaks along the way. Agile is the key word here, yet again. A cumbersome approach won’t get you very far and refusal to accept a learning curve will only serve to waste time and money.
Tips:
Set clear measurable objectives at the start of your campaign, and keep them in line with overall business goals. Don’t wait until the end of the quarter to have a conversation about targets if you’re falling short. Be honest with yourself and your team. If something isn’t working, either adapt methods or alter the objectives to be more realistic.
