Importance of Strategy in Digital Marketing
- Debopriya Bagchi
- May 6, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: May 26, 2020
What is Strategy?
A Strategy is a high-level plan to meet up certain goal or Business Objectives. It involves strategic planning, logical thinking and data analysis. For example, Client Level Strategy is designed to improve overall client satisfaction.
What are the different types of Strategy?
Corporate Strategies or Grand Strategies: There can be four types of strategies a corporate management pay pursue: Growth, Stability, Retrenchment, and Combination.
Business Level Strategies: Business-level strategies are fundamentally concerned with the competition.
Functional Strategies: These strategies may be Operations Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Finance Strategy, and Human Resource Strategy.
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected online marketing channels such as paid, earned, and owned media. Basically, when our plan of action are only limited to online channels it becomes Digital Strategy.
What are the basic questions you should ask to your customers before making any strategy?
The 1st step of strategy is asking questions to your client. As a Digital Marketer before even understanding how to make a strategy for your client, 1st you need to understand your client. Without knowing what is your client’s expectation and what is that product or service they want to promote you cannot be good strategist.
1) The 1st question should be what is that product/service you want to promote and take every details of that product/service?
2) The 2nd question should be the brand message they want to give to their customers or try to understand their Brand Positioning?
3) The 3rd question should be what problems they are facing for which they have come here?
4) The 4th question should be definitely what are their expectation from you?
5) After that you should ask them what are their Business objectives and Budget for this particular promotion, they want to run with your help. (Remember, if they don’t have any clue about this after understanding their Brand you have to suggest them.)
6) After this entire conversation you will ask about the deadline and will start working on your strategy.
(After studying about your Client’s Brand their can be 1000 questions can come to your mind. Please ask your client as many times as possible, because if you do not have a clear vision about your client’s brand you will not be able to portray the Brand Voice of your client’s organization.)
Importance of Strategy in Digital Marketing
You will get a clear plan:
Napoleon Hill has told that “Plan your work, work you plan”. That means if you do not plan what you are going to do you will never be able to achieve your goal. After understanding your goal/objective you definitely should think,
Ø The Channel Mix, the channels where you are going to promote.
Ø The Media Plan, how much budget you are going to spent on each channel and how long you are going to run ad there.
Ø The Content Calendar, through which you will chalk out what are the content you are going to post in which channel. In this calendar some of the core elements are like the type of content for example, blog, video, slideshow etc., the date and time when you are going to post and most importantly what are the ad copy you are going to use. It is recommended to make a 3 months content calendar before start off with your strategic plan.
Ø Lastly the most important thing is Revenue or ROI Model. This is the part which client eagerly wait to see when you show them your strategy. This is where success of Digital Marketing lies because you have some metric in your hand through which you can tell your what are the estimated return they are going to get after this investment. In Traditional marketing you are not able to give your client this exact metric.
So, if you make a proper strategy your work will get a proper direction, you will never be diverted and also it will be very easy to reach your goal.
You will understand your Target Group better:
Have you ever listened to this term Buyer Persona?
Buyer Persona means a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Now, why is it important to know your Audience/Target Group/Buyer Persona?
If as a Digital Marketer you want to help your client you definitely should know what his TG (Target Group) excepting from his Brand. Otherwise it is next to impossible to give him more Business.
Here strategy play a big role. When you are creating a Strategy, you have to maintain 80:20 rule. 80% time on research and planning and 20% time on execution. As you are a Digital Marketer you have chunks of Data.
You can go for a Consumer survey with some set of Questionnaire to understand who is your TG and their need and pain points. Also try to map what are the services your client’s brand giving to their TG and what their TG are actually expecting.
Also monitor your client’s Digital assets like website, app, social media handles, CRM software, rating and reviews to have a clear idea what your TG thinks about the Brand/Brand Image and then check whether the Brand Positioning and Brand Image are matching with each other. Also analyze their previous campaign to check where they have gone wrong to meet up the customers expectation. (This is not applicable for New Brands)
Now it is not enough to know what is the expectation of your TG in a Buyer Persona. You also have to research their Demographics (Age, Gender etc.), Locations, online behavior. If you don’t know in which channel your TG is available your channel mix, content calendar everything is useless.( If it is a new brand 1st you have to understand who are the potential customers can be interested in this Brand, after that you will work on the Buyer Persona.
You will understand your competitor better:
What is Competitive Analysis?
A competitive analysis is a strategy where you identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can create solid business strategies that improve upon your competitor's. A competitive analysis helps you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works.
Whenever you are planning something to launch in the market you definitely have to an eye on your competitors. First research what are the similar Brands present on the market and what is the sweet-spot for you i.e. what is that service which your client’s competitors are not giving but your client is giving. Promote that service as many ways as possible. Also, if your client is not giving that service, suggest them to start that. To learn this you definitely have to go for a Market research/survey.
Not only in terms of service you definitely how your competitors are promoting their brand, which channels they are using, what type of message they are giving to their customers, are their customers happy with their service or not. That means not only your client’s Digital assets, you have to assess their competitor’s assets also which in short, we can say Social listening and Monitoring.
Here are some of the Social Listening and Monitoring Tools:
1) HubSpot
2) Hootsuite
3) SimilarWeb
4) TweetReach
5) BuzzSumo
6) Mention
This data is very much important to make a promotional strategy and the best part this from their only you will get new ideas to promote your client’s brand.
You can suggest Brand Objective/Persona/Budget to your client:
This is specially happened when you have to work for a new Brand. In this case maximum time they have no clue how to position their Brand in market and for this promotion how much money they have to invest. So, it can often happen that they will ask you suggest.
For that a strong market research, consumer research and competitive analysis will be required. You have to understand what are the market charges, which are the channels is required to reach their TG and you have to get a fair idea how much money needs to be invested in each platform to get the best result as per your client’s need. After that you will add your own service charge and will present the Budget in front of your client.
What is Brand Persona?
A brand persona is a collection of personality traits, attitudes and values that your brand showcases on a regular basis to help connect with a certain audience segment. A brand persona can be a person, character, mascot or idea.
“The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and web analytics," according to usability.gov.
According to Jennifer Aaker Model your Brand can have 5 types of personality,
Sincerity (down to earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful)
Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date)
Competence (reliable, intelligent, successful)
Sophistication (upper class, charming)
Ruggedness (outdoorsy, tough)
Now for any new brand you have study their Brand Anatomy i.e. according to their service, their Brand purpose, promise and positioning you have to suggest them their perfect Brand Persona. In any case for any old brand if they have already a Brand Persona in their mind and after market research you find that this persona is not correct for them you can definitely suggest them to change it. Most important when the Brand Persona will be on place you can start working on the campaign or communication part. Every creative you will make or every ad you will run for your client should reflect your Brand Persona. Even the color, the design and the tone of the copy all are the parts of Brand Persona.
Brand’s Objective:
Every Brand should go through a Sales Funnel,
Awareness-Engagement-Conversion
Now for any new Brand Awareness is the 1st step and one thing we should remember that for each the strategy changes. Here one problem arises that a new Brand may want conversion or sales in the 1st step. In that case you have to make them aware about the sales funnel and also the necessary steps.
Even for the old brand you have to suggest what should be their position in the funnel after analysing their Brand. Even if a Brand thinks now People know about them very well so they should move towards Engagement stage, you have to check whether the right TG know about them or not. If that is not happened properly you definitely have to start from the Awareness stage and you have to prepare the strategy accordingly.
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