Introduction to Digital Marketing Strategy.

This Video was created for our YouTube Channel, can be found here, please see below the transcription of video if you don’t feel like watching the video. 

Introduction:

Before we can define what, digital marketing strategy is, we should first define what business strategy is.

Strategy is a term that gets brought up in planning meetings all the time but what is strategy?

It can be defined as “What steps does our company need to take to succeed in our current market”.

“In one sentence, sum up what you and your business will be trying to achieve over the next few years and how will you do this”. It is essential to think about both long-term objectives for your strategy. Thinking too short-term can cause your business to stagnate and you may miss out on implementing long-term growth strategies that will pay off over several years of work. Be prepared to suffer the short-term to pay off in the long term.

Strategy can be thought of as the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term. It achieves an advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a changing environment and fulfils stakeholder expectations.

The strategic planning process consists of identifying where an organisation is, deciding where it should be positioned in the marketplace to maximise its chances of progressing its mission and creating strategies and tactics to achieve that position.

But why is defining a clear business strategy important for marketing?

Builds awareness for your products/services and drives sales or whatever your main business goal is.

Promote products and services to the target audience.

Make sure products reflect core business messages.

Make sure products reflect core business messages.

Linked to overall company strategy.

Looks to the future.

Having an effective strategy can help companies plan their marketing activities for the future and even incorporate important elements such as technology.

Marketing should reflect core messages, reflect mission statements, and provide a means of using resources effectively.

What is involved in strategy?

The purpose of creating a business strategy is to gain a competitive advantage for your organisation.

Setting a clear and achievable direction for your organisation.

You need to focus on the long-term, not the immediate day-to-day issues.

Strategy can determine your company’s values, structure, and culture.

Allows you to flesh out ideas in more detail.

Gives clear messaging from the top of the organisation to employees.

How do I come up with a marketing strategy?

Mission Statement – What is the purpose of the business/products/services? This should be a one sentence mission statement. Nike have the mission “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” It is clear and concise painting a picture of what nike wants to be perceived. As you can see they don’t mention their products even though they are a product company.

Objectives – How are you going to do this?

Create multiple SMART Objectives –

What are SMART Objectives.

SMART Stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Based.

You should make all your digital marketing strategy objectives SMART.

Specific – Put as much detail as you can into your objective. Instead of saying we want to increase sales, say we want to increase sales of x product to 150 units a month by Q4 2023.

Measurable – Building off this example, you get measurable, saying you choosing something like sales of a specific product means from now to Q4 you can see if sales have increased.

Attainable – This can be quite difficult. You have to make sure your objectives are big enough to strive for but not too big that you can’t reach them. Pick objectives that you know you can achieve but will be hard work.

Relevant – Create objectives that are related to your business, industry and to marketing if marketing strategy is your goal. The sales example is great as sales and marketing go hand in hand. A bad example would have an objective about implementing a new IT system in your business. This is important for the business but marketing will have no input so not relevant to your strategy.

Time-Based – This is quite simple, add timeframes to your objectives. We want to increase total social media followers by 12,000 in 12 months. That allows you to break the objective down into smaller pieces, in this example, you would need 1,000 followers each month. If after 3 months you only have 1,500 followers instead of 3,000 you know something is not working in your marketing and gives you enough time to make adjustments to increase your followers.

SMART objectives should be monitored throughout the time frame agreed upon.

These objectives are not a create once and forget about, they should be reviewed regularly and if necessary, amended to reflect changes within your company.

Vision Statement – What do you want to become? The vision statement is the desired long-term goal of an organisation. To use Nike again, their vision statement is “to do everything possible to expand human potential.” When deciding on your company’s vision statement, try to think of an ideal world where you want your organisation to be or doing in 5 years’ time.

That was the introduction to creating Digital Marketing Strategy, marketing strategy is relatively simple exercise (it might not be easy but it is deceptively simple) every business should undertake to gain a much better understanding of their business and be able to effectively communicate that to internal and external stakeholders.