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Digital Strategy Session at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce

There's no question that, in the modern landscape, a big part of your marketing strategy is digital. Customers and companies alike are often online-- and you wish to be able to reach them and observe their behavior where they invest the most time.

However when you're growing an organisation, it looks like this ever-evolving landscape can quickly end up being frustrating. There's currently enough to do-- how are you also supposed to develop, fine-tune, and maintain an agile digital marketing strategy?

Download our complete guide to developing a digital marketing strategy that works here.

We have actually assembled a list of seven digital marketing methods that marketers can adjust to assist their groups and businesses grow, along with a crash course on the significance of digital strategy and marketing projects.

Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help you achieve your business goals through carefully chosen internet marketing channels. These channels include paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a typical campaign around a particular line of business.

The term "strategy" might appear challenging, but developing a reliable digital strategy goal does not require to be tough.

In easy terms, a strategy is just a plan of action to attain a preferred goal, or numerous goals. For example, your overarching goal might be to create 25% more leads by means of your site this year than you drove in 2015.

Depending upon the scale of your service, your digital marketing strategy might include several digital strategies-- each with various goals-- and a lot of moving parts. But returning to this basic method of thinking about strategy can help you remain focused on conference those goals.

What is a digital channel strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a strategy incorporating a series of channels to increase sales, awareness, development and engagement for an item, service or brand name. ... Cross-channel methods, where channels incorporate for much better results (e.g. aligning link building and web content with SEO).

Regardless of our simplification of the term "strategy," there's no doubt it can be hard to begin really building one. Let's see what a digital marketing project looks like, and then, we'll delve into those seven building blocks to help you create a reliable digital marketing strategy to set up your business for online success.

It's easy to puzzle your digital strategy with your digital marketing projects, but here's how to differentiate the two.

As we have actually already described, your digital strategy is the series of actions you require to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing projects are the foundation or actions within your strategy that relocation you toward meeting that goal.

For example, you might decide to run a project sharing a few of your best-performing gated material on Twitter, to generate more leads through that channel. That project becomes part of your strategy to create more leads.

Here a couple of other well-known examples of digital marketing campaigns and the strategies they utilize.

GoPro
Delta Airlines
Geico
Wayfair
Mastercard
ETF Securities
Red Bull

1. GoPro
Digital strategy: Earned media, user-made video

GoPro is famous for its extraordinary point-of-view design action video footage, all taken from the company's classic fisheye lens. What you may not know is that so much of the video material you see on its YouTube channel wasn't made by GoPro, but rather by its most devoted users.

By populating its YouTube channel with user-made video material, GoPro has actually motivated a whole fanbase of outdoorspeople to take fantastic footage of their adventures and publish it online-- often with credit back to GoPro. This ongoing digital marketing project has actually championed making use of video to get the word out about the GoPro line of product-- and a great deal of the material is created by the clients themselves.

Check out the video below, which GoPro republished, awarding the video's initial shooter with being one of the very best videos in its category.

2. Delta Air lines
Digital strategy: Owned media, Twitter stories

You would not think about an airline as a leader in innovative digital marketing, however don't ignore the stories they can tell on social networks (focus on "stories").

Delta Air Lines is a respected user of social networks, particularly on its Twitter deal with. The brand uses this account to engage possible travelers in a range of ways that are both timely and emotionally promoting. Last month, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company started sharing personal stories from Delta staff members directly through the company's Twitter feed

3. Geico
Digital strategy: Paid media, YouTube Preroll advertisements

All you need to hear is the word "Geico" to keep in mind you can conserve 15% or more on your car insurance. But even a company with such an unforgettable tagline can risk frustrating its purchasers if its marketing campaign is too longwinded.

That's why Geico introduced a series of preroll advertisements on YouTube that admit to the advertisement's brevity in the videos themselves.

Preroll ads are a kind of paid material on YouTube in which you pay YouTube to roll 15- to 20-second advertisements ahead of videos that have the exact same audience as the marketer. While some companies try to squeeze as much messaging as they can into that brief slot, Geico has actually seized the day to make fun of itself for taking up your time in the first place. In this way, its YouTube preroll commercials are really amusing.

4. Wayfair
Digital strategy: Owned media, Instagram tags

Wayfair, a furniture and decor merchant, has a truly innovative Instagram strategy. Let's just state its photos aren't simply pictures.

Instagram gives business a chance to show their followers a more intimate side of the brand, lifting the drape on the business to show off the staff members and events that make the organization what it is. For Wayfair, however, Instagram isn't just a culture play-- it's a purchase page.

Utilizing Instagram's item tags, Wayfair has actually taken some of its most beautiful house interior shots on Instagram, and tagged them with product and rate labels. It's a digital marketing project that reveals people exactly how much each product in the image costs, helping Wayfair create buyers right from its Instagram account.

5. Mastercard
Digital strategy: Owned media, Travel blog site

Mastercard bases its brand name on the stories and experiences that cardholders go on. But what great is a travel-based brand name without a travel-based digital marketing project to choose it?

Valuable Cities, Mastercard's travel blog, offers readers a travel resource to support the credit cards that assist pay for these readers' destinations. It's a pretty good idea, as it permits the business to better align itself not simply with the important things its customers buy, however with the places its customers go.

6. ETF Securities
Digital strategy: Paid media, LinkedIn Sponsored Material

ETF Securities is a small, property management service based in Australia dealing with wealth managers and investors in Europe. Due to the fact that the service they provide is so complicated, the business found where its clients hung out the most-- LinkedIn-- and sponsored paid material on this platform that drives more interest in financial investments and helps customers make smarter monetary choices.

With this digital campaign, ETF Securities saw 95% year-over-year development in its LinkedIn followers.

7. Red Bull
Digital strategy: Owned media, Lifestyle news

Red Bull has ended up being more popular for its sponsorship of extreme sports than the energy beverage it sells. It's a natural suitable for the kinds of people the drink attract. However instead of developing digital material on the energy drink industry, Red Bull captures its audience with posts and videos all about the most recent happenings in the extreme sports neighborhood.

In this digital marketing project, Red Bull teaches us that what you sell isn't always the perfect material strategy. Rather, it's the way of life that your consumers live.

It's important to keep in mind that even if a project runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn't make it a strategy-- it's a technique that sits along with other projects to support a larger marketing strategy. For example, ETF Securities (mentioned above) hosted a project to increase its fans on LinkedIn, using the digital strategy of sponsored content (a kind of paid media). This one tactical project might be one little part of a larger digital marketing strategy that serves to produce more leads for among its items or business lines.

Now that we've gotten to grips with the essentials of digital strategy and digital marketing projects, let's go into how to construct your strategy.

Construct your buyer personas.
Recognize your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.
Evaluate your existing digital channels and possessions.
Audit and plan your owned media projects.
Audit and prepare your earned media campaigns.
Audit and prepare your paid media projects.
Bring everything together.

1. Construct your purchaser personalities.

For any marketing strategy-- offline or online-- you need to understand who you're marketing to. The best digital marketing methods are built on in-depth purchaser personalities, and your primary step is to create them. (Need help? Start here with our totally free purchaser personality kit.).

Buyer personalities represent your perfect consumer( s) and can be developed by looking into, surveying, and interviewing your organisation's target audience. It's important to keep in mind that this info ought to be based upon genuine information any place possible, as making assumptions about your audience can trigger your marketing strategy to take the incorrect instructions.

To get a rounded picture of your personality, your research swimming pool must include a mixture of clients, potential customers, and individuals outside your contacts database who align with your target market.

However what kind of information should you gather for your own purchaser persona( s) to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends upon your services, and is likely to differ depending on whether you're B2B or B2C, or whether your item is high expense or low cost. Here are some beginning points, however you'll wish to tweak them, depending on your specific organisation.

Why is digital strategy crucial?

The Significance Of A Digital Strategy. A digital marketing plan is an essential tool for your organisation. ... Concentrating on a specific audience and identifying that audience's requirements, interests and discomfort points, will help provide a more efficient plan in attaining your marketing goals.

Quantitative (or Demographic) Details.

Location. You can utilize web analytics tools like Google Analytics to quickly identify what location your site traffic is originating from.
Age. Depending on your service, this might or might not matter. It's best to gather this information by determining trends in your existing prospect and customer database.
Earnings. It's finest to gather sensitive info like individual earnings in persona research study interviews, as people might be unwilling to share it via online forms.
Job Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing consumer base, and is most appropriate for B2B business.

Qualitative (or Psychographic) Details.

Goals. Depending upon the need your product and services was created to serve, you might currently have a great idea of what goals your personality is wanting to accomplish. However, it's finest to cement your presumptions by talking to customers, as well as internal sales and customer support agents.
Challenges. Again, speak with consumers, sales and customer service agents to get a concept of the typical issues your audience faces.
Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and individuals who line up with your target market. If you're a fashion brand, for example, it's handy to understand if large segments of your audience are likewise interested in fitness and wellness, as that can assist inform your future material development and collaborations.
Priorities. Talk to consumers and individuals who line up with your target audience to learn what's crucial to them in relation to your business. For example, if you're a B2B software application business, knowing that your audience worths client support over a competitive rate point is extremely important information.

Take this details and create one or more rounded personalities, like Marketing Molly below, and guarantee they're at the core of your digital marketing strategy.

2. Determine your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll require.

Your marketing goals need to always be connected back to the fundamental goals of business. For example, if your company's goal is to increase online profits by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads through the site than you did in 2015 to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you need to know how to determine it, and more important, really have the ability to measure it (e.g., have the ideal digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you measure the effectiveness of your digital transformation strategy will be various for each business and dependent on your goal( s), but it's essential to guarantee you're able to do so, as it's these metrics which will assist you change your strategy in the future.

If you're a HubSpot consumer, the Reporting add-on in your HubSpot software brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can rapidly determine what works and what does not.

3. Assess your existing digital channels and properties.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or assets to include into your strategy, it's helpful to very first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. The owned, made, and paid media structure assists to classify the digital 'lorries', properties, or channels that you're already using.
Owned Media.

This refers to the digital possessions that your brand or business owns-- whether that's your site, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the things your service has complete control over. This can include some off-site material that you own, however isn't hosted on your site, like a blog that you release on Medium, for instance.
Earned Media.

Quite merely, earned media describes the exposure you have actually earned through word-of-mouth. Whether that's content you've distributed on other sites (e.g., visitor posts), PR work you have actually been doing, or the client experience you've provided, made media is the recognition you get as a result. You can make media by getting press points out, positive reviews, and by other individuals sharing your content on social media, for instance.
Paid Media.

Paid media is a bit obvious in what its name recommends-- and refers to any lorry or channel that you invest loan on to capture the attention of your buyer personas. This consists of things like Google AdWords, paid social networks posts, native marketing (like sponsored posts on other sites), and any other medium for which you directly pay in exchange for exposure.

Gather what you have, and classify each automobile or property in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear image of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy may integrate elements of all three channels, all collaborating to assist you reach your goal. For instance, you might have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that's been developed to assist you create leads. To magnify the variety of leads that material creates, you might have made a genuine effort to make it shareable, indicating others are dispersing it through their individual social networks profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. That's the earned media part. To support the material's success, you might have posted about the material to your Facebook page and have actually paid to have it seen by more individuals in your target market.

That's precisely how the three can work together to assist you satisfy your goal. Naturally, it's elective to utilize all three. If your owned and earned media are both effective, you might not require to buy paid. It's all about assessing the best solution to fulfill your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you understand what's already being used, you can start to think of what to keep and what to cut.
4. Audit and prepare your owned media campaigns.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which practically constantly takes the type of content. Every message your brand broadcasts can normally be classified as content, whether it's your 'About Us' page, your product descriptions, article, ebooks, infographics, or social media posts.

Content helps convert your site visitors into leads and consumers, and helps to raise your brand's profile online-- and when it's optimized, it can likewise improve any efforts you have around search/organic traffic. Whatever your goal, you're going to require to utilize owned material to form your digital marketing strategy.

To construct your digital marketing strategy, you need to decide what material is going to help you reach your goals. If your goal is to produce 50% more leads via the site than you did in 2015, it's not likely that your 'About Us' page is going to be included in your strategy-- unless that page has in some way been a list building machine in the past.

It might more likely that an ebook gated by a form on your website drives even more leads, and as a result, that might be something you wish to do more of. Here's a short procedure to follow to work out what owned material you need to satisfy your digital marketing goals:
Audit your existing material.

Make a list of your existing owned material, and rank each product according to what has previously carried out finest in relation to your current goals. If your goal is list building, for instance, rank them according to which produced the most leads in the last year. That might be a particular article, an ebook, or even a particular page on your site that's converting well.

The concept here is to determine what's currently working, and what's not, so that you can set yourself up for success when preparing future material.
Determine spaces in your existing material.

Based on your purchaser personas, determine any spaces in the material you have. If you're a mathematics tutoring company and have actually found in your audience research that a person of your persona's biggest challenges is finding intriguing ways to study, but you don't have any content that talks to that issue, then you may aim to develop some.

By taking a look at your material audit, you might find that ebooks hosted on a particular type of landing page convert actually well for you (far better than webinars, for instance). When it comes to this mathematics tutoring company, you might make the decision to include an ebook about 'how to make studying more interesting' to your material production plans.
Produce a material production strategy.

Based on your findings and the gaps you have actually determined, make a material creation plan outlining the content that's necessary to help you hit your goals. This should include:


Title
Format
Goal
Advertising channels
Why you're creating it (e.g., "Marketing Molly has a hard time to find time to prepare her blog material, so we're creating a template editorial calendar").
Top priority level (to help you decide what's going to give you the most "value").

This can be a basic spreadsheet, and must also include budget information if you're planning to outsource the content development, or a time estimate if you're producing it yourself.
5. Audit and plan your made media projects.

Examining your previous earned media against your current goals can assist you get an idea of where to focus your time. Take a look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from the majority of reliable to least reliable.

How do I create a digital strategy for my company?

Define Your Goals. Prior to you get going with any plans, first specify your goals.
Know Your Key Channels.
Establish a Content Strategy.
Develop a Calendar.
Put Whatever in Motion.
Display and Measure.

You can get this details from tools like Google Analytics, or the Sources Reports in your HubSpot software.

You may discover that a specific post you added to the market press drove a lot of qualified traffic to your site, which in turn transformed truly well. Or, you may discover that LinkedIn is where you see many people sharing your content, which in turn drives a great deal of traffic.

The concept here is to build up an image of what made media will help you reach your goals, and what will not, based on historical data. Nevertheless, if there's something brand-new you want to attempt, do not rule that out even if it's not yet tried and tested.
6. Audit and prepare your paid media projects.

This procedure involves much of the exact same procedure: You require to assess your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, and so on) to find out what's most likely to assist you meet your existing goals.

If you have actually been spending a great deal of cash on AdWords and haven't seen the results you 'd hoped for, maybe it's time to improve your approach, or scrap it entirely and concentrate on another platform that appears to be yielding much better outcomes. (Take a look at this complimentary AdWords guide for more on how to take advantage of it for service.).

By the end of the procedure, you should have a clear concept of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you 'd like to remove from your strategy.
7. Bring everything together.

You have actually done the preparation and the research, and you now have a strong vision of the aspects that are going to comprise your digital marketing strategy. Here's what you should have up until now:.

Clear profile( s) of your purchaser persona( s).
One or more marketing-specific goals.
An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.
An audit of your existing owned, made, and paid media.
An owned content development plan or wish list.

Now, it's time to bring all of it together to form a cohesive strategy document. Let's review what digital strategy implies: the series of actions that are going to assist you attain your goal( s) utilizing internet marketing.

By that meaning, your strategy file need to draw up the series of actions you're going to require to attain your goals, based upon your research study to this point. A spreadsheet is an efficient format-- and for the sake of consistency, you might discover it simplest to map out according to the owned, earned, and paid media structure we have actually utilized up until now.

You'll also need to prepare your strategy for a longer-term duration-- generally, something like 12 months is a great starting point, depending on how your service is set up. That way, you can overlay when you'll be performing each action. For example:.

In January, you may begin a blog site which will be continuously upgraded as soon as a week, for the whole year.
In March, you may introduce a brand-new ebook, accompanied by paid promo.
In July, you might be preparing for your greatest business month-- what do you wish to have observed at this moment that will affect the content you produce to support it?
In September, you may prepare to concentrate on made media in the form of PR to drive extra traffic throughout the run-up.

By taking this technique, you're likewise developing a structured timeline for your activity, which will assist communicate your plans to your colleagues-- not to mention, maybe even help keep you sane.
Your Path to Digital Marketing Strategy Success.

Your strategy file will be very private to your company, which is why it's practically impossible for us to develop a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Keep in mind, the purpose of your strategy document is to draw up the actions you're going to take to accomplish your goal over an amount of time-- as long as it communicates that, then you've nailed the fundamentals of creating a digital strategy.