Components of Digital Marketing Strategy

Have you ever asked yourself these questions?

1. What do you mean by digital marketing strategy? 
2. How can we put it into different components?

Whenever you are dealing with various things in life those things are multi dimentional. You have multiple things in place like you might have to think about budget, target group, how people buy, what type of and how much digital assets are required, etc. So keeping all these dimensions into different parts what will be the output?The output of any digital marketing strategy taken will be a two dimensional thing. You have to put everything of your plan into an excel sheet.

The very first thing you should do is to ask the following questions to your client in somewhat similar order:-

1. What are the business goals - (4 wheels, challenges, SWOT, etc.)
2. What is the role of the marketing team in the company?
3. What are your offerings (product, compare, pricing, SWOT, etc.)
4. What are the objectives from the marketing team? List down everything giving weightages
5. Now take the top objectives (80% of it), put numbers SMART Goals) to it, what you want achieve. Keep it as a draft)
6. Now do the analysis-
• Customer Understanding as much possible
• Customer Journey and Buying Cycle
• Customer Segments - Pain points and Gain points
• Competitors offerings - what are they doing, check their website, ads, pricing, current custom survey results
• How they buy - based on research, brand, impulsive, marketplace
• role of digital in buying - Influence, Convenience, Comparison
• Competitors (traffic analysis) - How are they getting the traffic, channel wise competitor analysis
• Your own business digital analysis - What is the expected CPA, CPLs etc.
• Digital Marketing (Search, Profile, Contextual, Marketplace) - How big is it, what we can achieve
• B2C, B2B (big buyers), Resellers, Influencers, Internal Customers

Explanations in details:-

4 Wheels of a business - 

• Financial Stakeholders: Financial stakeholders invest money in the company and wants return from the company. 
• Customers: The customers actually wants return or value addition in return of the value they pay the money to the company. 
• Human Resources: The human resources do the activities based on which the customers get the value addition. 
• Society: Everything you are doing has to be within the society limit in terms of compliance, so that the society approves you as a business and based on that you can actually run your business. 

Challenges a Business Face - Never assume, ask the client

Example: In England there are a lot of old age homes. their real challenge is to get staffs to work with rather than customers.

So at the beginning of the strategy making part one should understand the goals, objectives and the challenges faced by the business.

Reference book: Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play