Setting your Digital Media Strategy: What do you want?

It’s on your to-do list.

✅Set your digital strategy.

Sounds simple, right?

But often entrepreneurs and business owners feel overwhelmed and a bit lost about where to start.

Strategy, in spite of being a favoured word tossed around among executives, really just means thinking about why you’re doing something before you do it.

It’s really that simple.

But often we forget to think about the strategy behind that Facebook ad campaign or product landing page because we’re focused on hitting our numbers or meeting a revenue target.

It’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to feel rushed.

But setting your digital marketing strategy is as simple as deciding what you want to do, how you’re going to do it, what you expect to happen, and when and how you’re going to measure your success.

It’s about heading in the right direction. Because at the end of the day, you mainly want to attract and delight your customers.

The first question you need to ask yourself: Why are you deploying this digital tactic (facebook ad or SEM)? What do you want the result to be? 

Here are a few objectives or end results that may be fueling your strategy:

• Brand Awareness:Do you want more people to know about your brand, your product or service?
• Acquisition or lead generation rates: Do you want to reach more people who’ve never bought from you before and bring them into your buyer’s journey?
• Growing your existing customer base (increase the customer value): Do you want to retain your customers and have them purchase from you more frequently?

Based on your end results (and main objective) you need to start to shape you out your overall strategy.

Here are the 3 steps to take to build your digital strategy today:

1. Set a SMART goal. 

Set a specific goal – and a metric – to help you get to that end result.Goals and objectives are crucial to helping guide you where you’re going.

Goals are like a lighthouse. It’s guiding you to your final destination and where you want to be.

Goals need to follow the SMART principle. And in case you need a refresher, that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely. We’re going back to the basics but it’s so important. Here is what your goals might look like for your digital strategy:

• X number of leads from your downloaded ebook in 30 days
• % follower growth on Facebook within 3-weeks

Really understanding the goal you’re trying to hit is the first step to reaching it. Create an example and make it come to life.

2. Know your audience. 

Get to know your audience! This doesn’t mean understanding some key characteristics or traits. I want you to go deeper than demographics. This means truly understanding them.

If you don’t know your audience well, you won’t be able to deliver a message that’s relevant enough to cut through the noise.

You can go about understanding your customers in a number of ways and you don’t need a big budget or fancy agency to do it.

First, think about who your customers are and group them into 3 or 4 buckets. Take each of those buckets and create a character for them. Add in a number of different details; such as, bio, age, goals at work, how you can help them reach those goals, challenges, how you can help them overcome their challenges, their objections, etc. You see the pattern here.

If you haven’t done this and you’re looking for an excellent template, Hubspot has a great outline and exercise for you to do. Once you know your audience well. The rest gets a whole lot easier.

3. Audit your Brand 

This step doesn’t always seem obvious. And no, I’m not talking about asking people if they like the colours you selected. I want you to audit what people say about your brand when you’re not in the room.

This is linked back to your brand image.

How does the public at large perceive your brand? Is it positive? Is your message consistent? 

What you find out might shock you. Or it might validate some of your original hunches.

When you do a brand audit (or send out a brand survey), you may want to start by analyzing the following five factors (as mentioned by ATTENTION USA):

1. Presence – Measure the brand’s social footprint
2. Influence – Branded message adoption
3. Perception – Emotional reaction to the brand
4. Virality – What comes when people are organically in conversation
5. Resonance – reaction to the overall conversation about the brand

Remember: Be OPEN.

This is where you’re going to walk away with the biggest takeaways. Which will also help your customers.

Bonus #4: Evaluate and alter 

Now it’s time for the loop. This is where you take all that information, and you put measurements in place to ensure that you’re going to meet those goals.

In order to be successful, you must continually evaluate and alter your digital strategy.

Yes. This is a must.

I find that a lot of start-up companies feel that they don’t have the time. Or they are on to the new product launch or the acquisition of 100 new leads. But slow down just a little. As marketers, it’s important that we measure everything.

Think about tools that you can deploy that will help you monitor your success (like Sprout) and ensure you have your Analytics set-up properly.

What will be your ultimate measures? Figure out your performance standards – conversion rates? Followers? Leads? 

These days, quantifying and qualifying the value of your digital strategy is important to better communicate with your boss or the CEO the value you’re producing day in and out.

You delivery results and your hard work should be recognized.