Any entrepreneur with even a cursory understanding of the modern marketing landscape will have already considered the role of online marketing in their overall marketing strategy. Digital marketing isn’t something that is going to be important in the future. It is already critical to generating momentum for a new venture and without a presence online, a new business will most assuredly be left in the dust of its competitors.
You’ll find a veritable treasure trove of content on the web, explaining the intricacies of each and every facet of the internet marketing world, but in this guide, we’re going to focus on what new businesses can do to build resilient foundations upon which a powerful and flexible digital marketing strategy can be built.
Five Fundamentals
There are five foundational steps to follow before you can begin to structure your digital marketing strategy, which should preferably be completed in this order. We’ll list them here and then unpack them in detail below.
1. Competitor Research
This is no time to reinvent the wheel. Study your competitors’ successes and failures and use this to guide your own strategy. Not only will competitor research show you what kinds of content your audience responds to, it also often reveals which platforms work and which digital marketing components should be included in your strategy.
2. Establish a home base
While a website is an essential part of your brand’s digital presence, it is no longer a given that all roads should lead back to your website. Many brands are using a Facebook page as their primary platform, for example. A “home base” is usually where you are trying to drive users, via all the other channels you use. It needs to be meticulously managed, regularly updated and checked daily. It also needs to be stable and established before you start any other activities.
3. Identify core elements
There is a dizzying array of strategies, services, social media and advertising channels available to the digital marketer. It is a mistake, however, to attempt to leverage too many of these in any one campaign. Identify a maximum of four core components and map their roles out in your high-level digital strategy. This will help to avoid spreading your budget and your attention too thinly. Your choices will largely be informed by your competitor research and your budget.
For example: 1. Paid Search > 2. Facebook Marketing > 3. Website > 4. Retargeting
4. Assign Roles and Responsibilities
The execution and management of an effective digital marketing strategy requires a surprisingly high number of work hours, on a daily basis. It is essential that all responsibilities are identified and assigned, so that this doesn’t have to happen when work commences. It is also critical that lines of communication are kept open between team members and that each person understands the “big-picture” strategy and their role within it.
5. Establish a Reporting System
Accurate, detailed reporting is what makes the difference between an effective digital marketing strategy and an expensive, frustrating mistake. It is the only way that you will reliably know how your strategy needs to be adapted and whether or not a channel or strategy is providing ROI. You should question the merits of any channel or strategy whose results cannot be effectively measured and reported on.
Competitor Research
When it comes to laying the foundations of your internet marketing strategy, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more informative and valuable exercise than in-depth competitor research. Not only can competitor research show you which platforms are most effective in reaching your target audience, but how to use them too. This not mentioning the value of also getting to see what has not worked in the past, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Most marketers go as far as identifying the components of their competitors’ digital presence, reading through their social feeds and spotting any campaigns that appear to have been successful. This is only scratching the surface of the treasure trove of information available through competitor research though.
Start by assuming the role of a potential customer and moving through each step of the process, from a simple Google search, through to enquiring or providing payment details. Take special note of which competitors managed to get your attention and why. When you landed on their website, what prompted you to enquire or buy? Remember, any issues or obstacles you encounter are just as valuable to your research, so be sure to note them.
It also pays to take a closer look at content and the way it is distributed. Are your competitors formatting their content in a certain way to appeal to a specific audience that prefers a specific platform? Does long format or short and concise content perform better? Does your audience want to be entertained or informed? You can answer these and so many other questions during your competitor research.
Establish a Home Base
It’s worth pointing out that no digital marketer would advocate not having a website at all. A stable, well-managed website lends a level of legitimacy to your digital presence which is essential if you are going to earn the trust of users.
That said, your website might not necessarily be the centre of your online marketing efforts. With the meteoric rise of third-party sales platforms like Etsy, many SME’s have little more than a single branded page as a website, choosing instead to focus on building a loyal core audience on a platform such as an Etsy store, or a Facebook page.
Focussing on driving traffic towards your own website has its own obvious benefits, but using a third party platform as your base comes with its own perks. If you use a well-established platform, your content or store will be hosted on a highly stable, fast and resilient server and users will access it through a familiar interface. When marketed properly, you also stand the chance of capturing the attention of “passing traffic”; users already on the platform. This not to mention the highly sophisticated and detailed reporting and integrated advertising budgeting functions that many third-party platforms now offer.
Identify Core Elements
Digital is, without doubt, the fastest evolving marketing platform in existence. From one year to the next, best practices can be completely revised and what was the absolute must-use platform can become irrelevant and a waste of time to work on.
1. Social
For the would-be digital marketer, a common knee-jerk reaction to this dynamism is to set out to establish a brand’s presence on as many popular platforms as possible. This is a mistake, with often far-reaching consequences.
As a rule, you should plan to have a presence on only those platforms which you can realistically manage on a daily basis, and which will bring real value to your digital presence. It is never a good idea to have a profile on a social network that you don’t have time to manage properly, just for the sake of having an active account.
Why? The most important reason is that being present on platforms that cannot be managed astutely will make it more difficult for you to establish a consistent brand identity online. Your aim should be to present your brand in the same way, regardless of the platform that a customer chooses to use to engage with it. To this end, elements like copy tone, physical branding – including logos and colours – and the way you interact with customers should remain consistent across any and all platforms.
The journey from your social media or third-party platform to your website and vice versa should feel seamless and the only way to effectively achieve this is to ensure that branding and presence is consistent across all these platforms. So be sure to conduct thorough research before choosing social media platforms, and only create accounts on those that could serve a specific purpose in your digital marketing plan. Then, assign responsibilities and resources to ensure that every platform you use is monitored daily, effectively managed and flawlessly branded.
2. Paid Search
For a brand that is new to digital marketing, the benefits of using paid advertising options are obvious. To be discovered organically by searchers on any platform, you’ll need a legacy of good content, solid SEO and hopefully a collection of dedicated and engaged followers. Paid advertising options, both in search engine engines and on social media, are an excellent way to kickstart this process.
The trick to using paid search effectively is to be able to accurately determine the ROI of your campaigns. It’s easy to make mistakes when starting out, particularly when using a system as complex as Google Adwords, but fortunately, the web is replete with highly detailed and informative user guides, how to’s and tutorials.
The better you can familiarise yourself with the way that consumers in your industry search, interact and buy online, the more efficient you will become at using paid search solutions. To this end, creating a detailed, step-by-step sales funnel and customer journey analysis will help you to understand where and how to spend your budget most effectively.
3. Retargeting
Retargeting will often be considered part of your paid search strategy, as by far, the most effective retargeting strategies are those driven by intelligent user activity tracking, by search engines like Google. Retargeting is simply setting up a system whereby relevant ads are shown to users who have indicated their interest in a product or service in the past. For example, if you know a user has checked out your range of puppy beds on your site, but didn’t buy one, your retargeting strategy would aim to offer that user a special offer on puppy beds using a banner ad on another site.
For some digital marketers, retargeting can be an exceptionally cost effective way to reduce CPA, boost sales and improve traffic. Be sure to evaluate its potential in your digital marketing plan when allotting budget for paid solutions.
Assign Responsibilities
This may seem like an obvious point, not worthy of inclusion in a list of fundamentals, but failing to clearly assign responsibilities is one of the most common mistakes that small businesses make. If you are to create a sustainable digital marketing strategy that serves to expand and develop your brand, and not undermine it, it is vital that responsibilities are mapped beforehand, so you can prevent problems, instead of having to fix them.
Assign responsibilities that promote collaboration
It might seem logical to simply assign one person to handle all responsibilities on a given platform. For example, many companies hire a “social media person” to handle all activities on social platforms and a “site manager” to handle everything relating to the website.
Even when working with a small team, it is far more beneficial to create dependencies that purposefully involve people with differing skillsets. Not only will this help the individuals in your team to gain new skills, it will also enrich each project you undertake, while keeping the entire team up to speed with your brand’s overall online marketing strategy.
For example, a person who is responsible for your AdWords campaigns should at least oversee any paid activities on social. The person in charge of SEO should, wherever possible, be included in your content marketing strategy and vice versa. Great digital marketing teams are invariably those who allow both technical and creative team members to contribute to finding innovative solutions to what is an ever evolving challenge.
Collaborate on content
We touched on it above, but if content is central to your digital marketing strategy (as it should be) every facet of your online marketing efforts need to be plugged in to its creation and distribution. You could consider your content the product that every other platform and initiative needs to sell.
Once you have started juggling the many balls required to keep your online marketing campaigns running, it is remarkably easy to allow your content to become isolated from the other activities. Often pressure to meet deadlines and reach a point where content output is consistent ends up forcing you to exclude valuable input from SEO and social, or to miss out on opportunities for sharing.
To prevent this situation, set processes in place that force both content concepts and the end products to be reviewed by the various team members. If you’re doing all these jobs yourself, make a habit of reviewing your content and your content strategy from an SEO and social focussed perspective.
Establish a Reporting System
The accuracy and detail of your reporting is, without question, the single biggest determining factor of your ability to adapt and refine your online marketing activities, to ensure that you are making progress and saying the right things, to the right audience, in the right way. Your reporting system will determine where and how any paid search budgets should be spent, the topics that your content should cover, where it is distributed and even the architecture of your website.
The good news is, there is now a huge range of reporting tools which make accurate, detailed reporting simple for even the most inexperienced of digital marketers. In addition to Google’s own comprehensive range of analytics tools, which come with excellent tutorial content to help you learn how to use them, there are countless third party applications which boast additional functionality, or offer unique functions that may suit your specific needs.
Get everyone in on the action
Don’t leave analytics to a single person in your team. Everyone involved should be able to track the performance of their own work and monitor successes and failures. Not only with this help to promote a sense of accountability among your team, it will also allow each team member to work actively to improve their work based on real data and not speculation.
Tips from the Experts
We spoke to two professionals for whom the creation and auditing of agile yet solid digital marketing plans is part of daily life. These are their top tips.
First up is content marketing and social media specialist Becca Johns, @enthusiastcomms
1. Ensure you are clear on how your digital strategy fits into your wider marketing strategy. Don’t treat digital as a completely separate thing, a customer’s experience with your brand online should match their offline experience
2. Define your objectives clearly before anyone goes anywhere near a browser. Know what you want to achieve and who you want to reach.
3. Don’t spread yourself too thin – you don’t need to be everywhere, especially when it comes to social media. Pick the social platforms where your audience are and that you can resource, and focus on doing them well, rather than trying to cover all of them
4. Allocate budget for social advertising – it’s getting harder to get free organic reach on social media, but you don’t have to spend much to get some good results.
5. Be selective about what you choose to measure – there is A LOT of data available for measuring any digital activity and it’s easy to get bogged down in analysis. Once you’ve defined your objectives, you can identify which data are important to review regularly and which can be left on the platform for the occasional glance!
We also spoke to Sam Quinn, online marketing manager at Appleyard London.
His top tips are as follows.
1. There is a book called Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive customer growth. This book is a must for any digital marketer. It gives the right methodology to test new channels.
2. Think about less crowed spaces and tactics. Almost everybody is doing SEO or PPC these days. Nothing bad with doing these, in fact they should be in your strategy, but what about thinking outside of the box? For example, what about using emails from customers that have not opened your emails recently on Facebook and give them a special offer?
3. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes as much as you can. Selling online is in any case not about the quality of a product but about human feelings and needs. The more you understand them, the better.
4. Forget about ‘spray and pray’ communications. No one likes to be treated as a number. The more you customize and tailor your message, the better it will work. With Facebook or custom groups on emails, you can really segment audiences and get personal.
5. There is no such thing as an expert that knows everything in every sense of online marketing. Hence, read as many industry articles and watch as many webinars as you can. You will find really interesting insights there.
By prioritising these fundamentals early on in your digital marketing plan, you will create a solid foundation upon which to create a unique online marketing presence. Remember, your digital marketing plan will need to be highly flexible, requiring regular reviews and adjustments. This is the only way it will remain relevant in a space where the rules change as fast as the platforms.
