Six Steps to a Clever Digital Strategy
You have a business strategy, a marketing strategy and now you need a digital strategy too? Great…. something else to add your to your never-ending list, and another document to add to the growing pile in your office.
Unlike your other strategies, your Digital Strategy should be detailed, right down to daily and weekly tasks to keep you or your marketing resources on track. So if you struggle with knowing how to achieve the goals in your other strategies, you will definitely find a Digital Strategy helpful for your business.
A digital strategy is simply a plan of the actions you need to take to achieve your goals using online marketing
Sounds incredibly simple right? But pulling together a strategy can be challenging when you don’t know, what you don’t know. So what do you need to know to write your strategy?
1. You need to know who you are marketing to
Creating a buyer persona, or a detailed description of your ideal client/customers is a good start. You should ideally be able to describe the age, location and income bracket of your target market but also:
What problems are they trying to solve?
What are they trying to achieve?
And what are they interested in outside of what you offer
2. Articulate your goal
Your strategy needs to clearly state a goal that is linked to the KPI/s of your business. If your business goal is to grow revenue, then your digital strategy goal may be to grow leads by a specific number or percentage via your website.
3. Know the lay of the (digital) land
Know your assets - social media profiles, websites, blog content & imagery
Know your key referral websites or collaboration partners: Articles, features, posts on other websites, referral websites
Know what you’re spending on paid digital advertising: Google Advertising, Facebook Advertising - anything you spend money on
And work out the gaps
A Digital Strategy must include how your current online real estate can be used to meet your business goals, what real estate is missing, and what isn’t really working for your business
4. Planning your content: what content do you already have?
Content is so important because it simultaneously defines your brand (through topics, products, and posts), helps people understand what makes you different from your competitors AND it is what allows people to find your brand online via search engines - creating leads and customers.
But what content do you currently have to work with?
Everything on your website
Ebooks
Social media posts
Infographics
Video
Anything you have scribbled to yourself at 4am in note form on your phone or good old fashioned diary can be re-purposed into digital content
Content is the core of your Digital Strategy: you must know exactly what you are going to do to create new content or leverage existing content
Once you have your content assets all laid out you need to determine which content has worked or will work by testing it. Identify content that aligns with your business goals like driving leads or increasing purchases. If you have value-add resources like an e-book or infographic on your website (that people provide their email in exchange to download) then that would be an example of content to re-use AND content to develop more of during the year.
Next, focus on the gaps:
Is there a business goal that is not serviced by your current content?
Are you missing a review or the answer to a frequently asked question about your business or industry?
5. Assess your Digital Advertising channels
It is pay to play out there and you need to evaluate how you are going to spend your digital advertising dollars. If you’re running Google Advertising campaigns and can’t figure out what your ROI is… perhaps it’s time to pause those campaigns and see what else could work for your business. At the very least you need to be able to clearly document how much you have spent on any paid channel in the last 12 months (or YTD) and have some kind of conversion reporting in place.
6. Creating your Digital Strategy document
If you have followed through on the above you should now have:
Buyer personas
Marketing goal/s
A list of your current assets (website, social media accounts etc)
A list of your content
What is missing
What has performed best
A list of your key referral websites/partners
A list of your paid digital advertising and spend
Bonus: Example list of actions for six months
Pull all of your observations together and create a list of monthly actions - it does not have to be complicated! Making sure your website is set up to collect leads before pushing post on any content!
Creating a Digital Strategy is unique to each business but all it needs to do is map the actions you need to deliver to achieve your business goals over a 12 month period
January
Plan 12 blog topics for the year and where they’ll be shared
Ensure lead forms, conversion code and funnel are set up or scheduled for each and website bits are under control
February
Launch eBook by end of month
Facebook advertising campaign to promote
Publish blog
March
Publish an article on a key referral/partner website
Share to LinkedIn and Facebook with call to action
Publish blog
April
Create followup offer for ebook downloaders
Create an email campaign to nurture ebook downloaders
Publish blog
May
Review strategy goals and progress to date
Publish blog
June
Re-share Q1s blog posts to social media
Re-share ebook to social media
Publish blog
