Running a
digital marketing
strategy

In the Digital Strategy fundamentals section, we learnt understanding customer needs, aspirations, emotions, desires etc had the greatest impact on whether or not a strategy will be successful. The more a business understands their customers, the more tailored messaging can be to position the business/brand as the solution to the customers problems or needs.

In the Planning a Digital Strategy section, we learnt traditional advertising is no longer effective at reaching consumers online. Content marketing is now the best vehicle for delivering the messaging (and resulting value) mentioned above.

Digital channels are now used as the medium for creating and amplifying content to reach customers online.

Avoiding common mistakes when using digital channels: 

Many digital strategies fail as businesses do not use helpful content marketing (which provides value) to reach consumers. Instead, they use digital channels as an extension of traditional advertising and simply try to push products to as many people as possible, despite many demonstrating no interest in the products of the business.

Businesses also fall short when understanding how to correctly use each digital channel. Some common mistakes when trying to use each channel:

SEO: a business may try content marketing via writing a blog however the content is thin (low word count), fluffy and provides no real value to users (i.e. doesn’t solve a problem or improve their knowledge/situation). The website is slow, has many broken links and is not endorsed by other websites (i.e. few backlinks indicating a level of trust and quality).

Facebook ads: The wrong campaign objective is selected. Accounts are structured incorrectly with ad sets full of too many targeting options. Ads are only in one format (e.g. an image) with budgets sporadically allocated across the account. Campaigns are promoted to cold audiences only with no retargeting or consideration of the customer journey.

Google ads: Campaigns are incorrectly set up with many unrelated keywords being attached to single ad groups. Conversion tracking is not set up with clicks to the website as the main success metric. Ad copy is taken straight from the website and is not customer-focused or enticing enough to have Google users click through.

Social Media: A lack of understanding of how the Facebook/Instagram/YouTube etc algorithms work when determining how many users will see a post. This results in posts receiving little reach and engagement. Posts are purely sales-driven.

eDM’s: Subscriber lists are not segmented (so users can receive emails most relevant to them) and unengaged subscribers are not removed resulting in future email performance being dragged down. Some businesses see eDM’s as simply another platform for pushing sales-based messaging rather than communicating value to and helping customers.

Display advertising: the return-on-investment for display advertising (e.g. web banners) is usually very low. This medium is typically reserved for remarketing and showing ads to users who have already visited a site and shown a strong interest in the products/services (e.g. by spending more than five minutes on the site).

Some businesses choose to use display advertising to reach out to a completely cold audience who have demonstrated no interest in the business. Promoting content/product value can also be very difficult with display ads as you sometimes only have a small single image to communicate your message.

Using each channel to its full potential:

The first step in running a comprehensive digital strategy is to develop a strong understanding of the fundamentals of each digital channel. Not only will this help you avoid the above mistakes, but it will ensure you use each channel to its full potential (e.g. not wasting time writing content nobody is searching for, avoid wasted money on poor performing ads etc)