What is Digital Strategy?
It is the organized series of actions that are going to help you achieve your goals using online marketing.
Now for us to get the best out of this session, we will be more practical and interactive in our approach.
So it’s not about long grammatical definitions and all, it is about result and what works.
Let me quickly ask, who has ever experienced a problem like running an online campaign and you weren’t satisfied with the outcome. Almost all of us have, at some point. So, the whole aim is to show you how to configure a back end for your campaign.
To get you to be more intentional.
So you decided to use Facebook, Why?
You decided to post by 9pm, but Why?
You decided to bid 5$ per click, ok but why?
Let’s ride
Who’s with me?
To make it more organized in approach, so that concepts and terms won’t be flying up and down. We will do this in 6 modules which will serve as our compass and guide.
1. Market Insights
2. Consumer Insights
3. Situation Analysis
4. Tactics
5. Tools
6. Analytics
Module 1
Market Insights
This gives you insights to understand what market behaviour is like. At times, we want to confuse Market and Consumer.
The Market is the game.
The Consumer is the player.
Here you have the patterns and dominant factors of your target market.
So you have to understand the rules of the game first before anything.
Now what market insight affords you is to know who is dominant in a market and what they are doing right via digital strategy.
Some tools that can used here to get such insights include:
Google Trends
Similar Web
Module 2
Consumer Insights
Here we will look at the 3-point triangular consumer rule.
Why, How and What.
Let’s break it down.
Here you want to know how your audience/ consumer behaves and uses digital media.
When you understand this, you will know just how to communicate to your consumer.
The three questions you have to answer is:
Why are they using digital media?
What kinds of digital media are they using?
How do they like being spoken to?
Why helps you to know the very first reason that bought them online, is it shopping, video search, web search, etc
What helps you know what platform they favour over the others. Is it more of Facebook or LinkedIn.
How helps you know the tone or format, is it through photo, video, text or audio.
I am sure most of us, favour or prefer one Social platform to another.
So in summary, your Audience/Consumer Insight helps you answer the Why, What and How.
You can use Google Consumer Barometer tool for this.
Module 3
Situation Analysis
Here you combine data from Market Insight and Consumer Insight.
Then relative to yourself you start arriving at some propositions and postulations like:
1. How do i measure up?
2. What are my abilities
3. What are my digital activities.
What this means this is
1. Having known through market analysis who dominates the market and what they are doing right digitally. You try to rate yourself. How can i now match up and beat them.
2. What are some things they are neglecting or not doing well digitally. You leverage on that weak spot and make yours better.
3.What are my unique digital activities that are doing well and how do i boost them.
Module 4
Tactics
Here you want to execute your strategy, having known your digital strengths and weakness. You plan your new strategy and execute using these frameworks.
1. RACE ( Reach, Act, Convert and Retain) framework.
2. ACR (Act, Convert and Retain) framework.
3. STDC (See, Think, Do and Care) framework. By Google.
The RACE framework is used for long term digital strategies like a duration of 3- months and above.
Here you have time on your side.
You want your audience to Reach your audience first through awareness. Let them know.
Then Engage them using chats/social posts.
Before asking them to do something.
Thereby Converting them.
When they’ve done so, you then retain them through Email marketing by sending them newsletters.
Act , Convert and Retain is just like RACE but used instead for shorter campaigns.
STDC is for delicate audience like women. It was developed by Google. It is more emotionally engaging in execution.
In STDC, you employ a lot of colours and visuals, if possible ask them to use product for a period of time before buying.
Module 5
Tools
Some tools to use include:
1. Search Advertising
2 Social Media Advertising
3. Email Marketing
4. Display Advertising
5. Mobile Marketing
1. You use Search advertising to reach people when they are more likely to search for a product. So when they do, your product pops up as result.
2. Social Media Advertising is used when you want create a buzz of your product before selling.
3. Email marketing is used to keep in touch with already existing customers
4. Display advertising is used when your product is visual oriented. So they can see it.
5. Mobile marketing is used when the large amount of your audience are more active on their mobile gadgets.
Module 6
Analytics
Here you want to measure and optimize your strategy through your campaign that is already running and share frequent real-time reports with your client as often as they request for it.
This is because, whatever you don’t inspect, you can’t expect.
You make use of:
1. Google Analytics tools for Search advertising
2. Mobile Analytics for Mobile advertising.
3. Google display planner for display advertising.
4. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Analytics for Social Media Advertising.
5. ESP for reporting Email marketing.
KSS BY : Uche Kene
