Five Digital Strategy Tips
Online digital marketing is relatively new to the marketing world, and with everything new, it can be overwhelming for people who are new to the industry, or when you’re trying to explain what your job is to your parents. While we can help you explain what digital marketing is, we can’t make your parents understand it.
We’d like to take you on a digital strategy journey. If you’re trying to formulate a digital strategy for your business, brand or your clients, we’ve put together a list of five important tips that will help you create your digital marketing strategy. These tips are designed as a core checklist to get through the bulk of your strategy!
- What’s the problem?
Strategy is about problem-solving and finding solutions to drive business objectives. When developing your business’s digital marketing strategy, you’ve got to get down to understanding what problems the business is facing, even if it means finding problems the client never knew existed. Defining the problem is likely to be more important than the definition of your solution — so take some time trying to understand the entirety of the business.
You need to know the brand, it’s challenges, the audience and the context in which you can add value.
2. Read the room
Your strategy’s success relies entirely on reaching the right audience. This means understanding the data, interrogating your data and giving it meaning — therefore gaining insight. The difference between data and insights is that insights are the reasoning behind the statistics. For example, more flat whites/lattes are sold in Italy before lunch and more espressos/black coffees are sold after lunch. We can deduce the insight from the coffee sales data. This tells us that traditionally speaking, milk should only be consumed in the morning.
Gaining a deeper perception of your audience is crucial in understanding how they make decisions. By getting to know your audience, you’re facilitating a conversation between your business and your audience, creating the potential for meaningful relationships.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel
More often than not, the solution isn’t as complicated as you think it is. It’s easy to get carried away by big ideas and brand altering strategies but sometimes that’s not the brief. In most cases, all it takes is a structured and pragmatic approach to tick off business objectives.
The best way to make sure your strategy will work is by learning from past strategies, the successes and failures. Look back on the strategies you’ve already done and implement your learnings — this is crucial for growth as a strategist. Be careful not to copy/paste a single strategy, but rather implement best practice and optimise on the existing benchmark.
We’re not here to tell you that you can’t ignite your creative flame, you’ll always have that opportunity because every story needs creative thinking…
4. Tell a story
Storytelling is ancient and has played a massive role in human development. The human race has been surrounded by storytelling for centuries — from cavemen gossiping around a fire, to our favourite bedtime stories and our eventual eulogies. We see stories everywhere. Stories use the power of emotion to drive us to engage and connect. How? Well, when we engage emotionally, we’re connecting with one another and creating meaningful connections along the way.
In this industry, storytelling is a brand’s method of sharing a message to connect with their audience on a personal level, giving your brand first consideration in their purchasing decision. If you want to make sure your brand is sending the right message, give people a story that shares similar values and grabs them emotionally — whether heartfelt or humorous.
A quick tip: when trying to grab a buck from your consumer, try making them feel something before pushing a product in front of them. This puts your brand first in their eyes because you’re connecting with them emotionally.
5. Adapt, or dive.
Digital media allows you the opportunity to adapt your campaign because you have live and in-depth analysis. This allows for us to learn on the move and be on hand to optimise the performance of a strategy constantly. It’s crucial that you continue to analyse the performance of your campaign to see what’s working, what isn’t and why. For instance, during Covid19, as an alcohol brand, you might need to shift the objective from sales to awareness and engagement, which means altering your strategy.
Working in the digital industry is always about adapting, not because it’s easier compared to above the line, but because behaviours on social media are constantly fluctuating which means that the timing or delivery of your campaign can be potentially off.
With most things in life, you won’t get it straight away and you’ll make mistakes. It’s important to remember these mistakes and use them to strengthen your next strategy. We hope that these five strategy tips will help you create and navigate your strategy for digital, so use them as core practice with every strategy that comes your way and you’ll find success!
For more info about digital marketing check out our blog or contact us.
