Digital Strategy Session at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce

There's no question that, in the contemporary landscape, a huge part of your marketing strategy is digital. Customers and companies alike are generally online-- and you wish to have the ability to reach them and observe their behavior where they invest the most time.

However when you're growing an organisation, it seems like this ever-evolving landscape can rapidly end up being overwhelming. There's already enough to do-- how are you also expected to produce, fine-tune, and keep a nimble digital marketing strategy?

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

We've assembled a list of seven digital marketing methods that online marketers can adapt to help their groups and companies grow, along with a refresher course on the meaning of digital strategy and marketing projects.

Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that assist you achieve your company goals through carefully chosen online marketing channels. These channels consist of paid, earned, and owned media, and can all support a typical project around a specific line of work.

The term "strategy" may seem intimidating, however constructing a reliable digital strategy doesn't require to be challenging.

In simple terms, a strategy is just a strategy to accomplish a desired goal, or numerous goals. For instance, your overarching goal might be to create 25% more leads through your website this year than you drove in 2015.

Depending upon the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might include multiple digital methods-- each with various goals-- and a great deal of moving parts. But coming back to this basic method of considering strategy can help you stay focused on conference those objectives.

What is a digital channel strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan encompassing a series of channels to increase sales, awareness, growth and engagement for a product, service or brand. ... Cross-channel techniques, where channels integrate for much better results (e.g. aligning link building and web material with SEO).

Regardless of our simplification of the term "strategy," there's no doubt it can be tough to get going actually building one. Let's see what a digital marketing project appears like, and then, we'll delve into those 7 foundation to assist you produce a reliable digital marketing strategy to set up your business for online success.

It's simple to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns, but here's how to distinguish the two.

As we have actually currently laid out, your digital strategy is the series of actions you require to assist you accomplish your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing projects are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that relocation you toward meeting that goal.

For example, you may choose to run a project sharing a few of your best-performing gated material on Twitter, to produce more leads through that channel. That campaign belongs to your strategy to create more leads.

Here a couple of other popular examples of digital marketing campaigns and the techniques they use.

GoPro
Delta Airlines
Geico
Wayfair
Mastercard
ETF Securities
Red Bull

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

GoPro is popular for its unbelievable point-of-view design action video, 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 loyal users.

By occupying its YouTube channel with user-made video content, GoPro has encouraged an entire fanbase of outdoorspeople to take incredible footage of their experiences and post it online-- frequently with credit back to GoPro. This continuous digital marketing campaign has actually championed using video to get the word out about the GoPro product line-- and a great deal of the content is produced by the consumers themselves.

Have a look at the video listed below, which GoPro republished, awarding the video's original shooter with being one of the 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, but don't ignore the stories they can tell on social media (focus on "stories").

Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social networks, specifically on its Twitter handle. The brand uses this account to engage potential passengers in a range of ways that are both prompt and mentally stimulating. Last month, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company began sharing individual stories from Delta workers straight through the company's Twitter feed

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

All you require to hear is the word "Geico" to bear in mind you can conserve 15% or more on your automobile insurance coverage. But even a business with such a remarkable tagline can run the risk of annoying its buyers if its marketing campaign is too longwinded.

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

Preroll advertisements are a form of paid content on YouTube where you pay YouTube to roll 15- to 20-second ads ahead of videos that have the same audience as the marketer. While some business 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 top place. In this way, its YouTube preroll commercials are really entertaining.

4. Wayfair
Digital strategy: Owned media, Instagram tags

Wayfair, a furnishings and decoration merchant, has a truly innovative Instagram strategy. Let's simply state its photos aren't simply photos.

Instagram gives business an opportunity to show their followers a more intimate side of the brand name, raising the curtain on the business to display the staff members and occasions that make the company what it is. For Wayfair, however, Instagram isn't simply a culture play-- it's a purchase page.

Using Instagram's product tags, Wayfair has actually taken a few of its most beautiful house interior shots on Instagram, and tagged them with product and price labels. It's a digital marketing campaign that reveals people exactly just how much each product in the photo costs, helping Wayfair generate buyers right from its Instagram account.

5. Mastercard
Digital strategy: Owned media, Travel blog

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

Priceless Cities, Mastercard's travel blog, provides readers a travel resource to support the credit cards that help spend for these readers' locations. It's a respectable idea, as it enables the business to much better align itself not just with the things its clients purchase, but with the places its customers go.

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

ETF Securities is a little, asset management service based in Australia accommodating wealth managers and investors in Europe. Since the service they provide is so intricate, the business discovered where its clients hung out the most-- LinkedIn-- and sponsored paid content on this platform that drives more interest in investments and assists consumers make smarter financial decisions.

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

7. Red Bull
Digital strategy: Owned media, Way of life news

Red Bull has become more well known for its sponsorship of extreme sports than the energy drink it sells. It's a natural fit for the kinds of individuals the beverage appeals to. However instead of producing 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 campaign, Red Bull teaches us that what you sell isn't constantly the perfect content strategy. Rather, it's the way of life that your clients live.

It is essential to keep in mind that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it does not make it a strategy-- it's a strategy that sits alongside other campaigns to support a larger marketing strategy. For example, ETF Securities (mentioned above) hosted a campaign to increase its fans on LinkedIn, utilizing the digital strategy of sponsored material (a kind of paid media). This one strategic project might be one little part of a bigger digital marketing strategy that serves to create more leads for one of its products or business lines.

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

Construct your purchaser personas.
Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.
Examine your existing digital channels and properties.
Audit and prepare your owned media projects.
Audit and plan your made media campaigns.
Audit and prepare your paid media projects.
Bring everything together.

1. Build your purchaser personalities.

For any marketing strategy-- offline or online-- you require to know who you're marketing to. The very best digital marketing strategies are built on detailed buyer personas, and your initial step is to develop them. (Need assistance? Start here with our totally free purchaser persona package.).

Purchaser personalities represent your perfect consumer( s) and can be created by looking into, surveying, and interviewing your company's target audience. It's important to note that this details should be based upon real data any place possible, as making presumptions about your audience can trigger your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

To get a rounded image of your personality, your research pool must include a mix of consumers, potential customers, and people outside your contacts database who line up with your target audience.

But what type of information should you gather for your own purchaser persona( s) to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is likely to vary depending on whether you're B2B or B2C, or whether your product is high cost or low cost. Here are some beginning points, however you'll want to fine-tune them, depending upon your particular service.

Why is digital strategy important?

The Value Of A Digital Strategy. A digital marketing plan is an important tool for your service. ... Concentrating on a specific audience and determining that audience's requirements, interests and discomfort points, will help provide a more efficient plan in accomplishing your marketing objectives.

Quantitative (or Market) Information.

Location. You can utilize web analytics tools like Google Analytics to quickly identify what area your website traffic is originating from.
Age. Depending upon your business, this may or might not matter. It's best to gather this information by recognizing patterns in your existing prospect and consumer database.
Earnings. It's best to gather delicate information like individual income in personality research interviews, as individuals might be reluctant to share it via online kinds.
Task Title. This is something you can get an approximation of from your existing customer base, and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative (or Psychographic) Info.

Goals. Depending on the need your product or service was created to serve, you might currently have a good idea of what goals your persona is wanting to achieve. Nevertheless, it's finest to cement your presumptions by speaking to customers, in addition to internal sales and customer service representatives.
Challenges. Again, speak with consumers, sales and client service representatives to get a concept of the typical issues your audience deals with.
Hobbies and interests. Speak with customers and people who line up with your target audience. If you're a fashion brand, for example, it's helpful to know if big sections of your audience are also thinking about physical fitness and well-being, as that can assist inform your future content creation and collaborations.
Priorities. Talk to clients and individuals who line up with your target market to find out what's most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you're a B2B software application business, understanding that your audience values client assistance over a competitive rate point is very important info.

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

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

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the business. For instance, if your service's goal is to increase online profits by 20%, your goal as a marketer might be to produce 50% more leads through the site than you did last year to contribute towards that success.

Whatever your overarching goal is, you require to understand how to measure it, and more vital, in fact be able to measure it (e.g., have the ideal digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you determine the efficiency of your digital strategy will be different for each business and based on your goal( s), but it's important to guarantee you have the ability to do so, as it's these metrics which will assist you adjust your strategy in the future.

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

3. Assess your existing digital channels and properties.

When considering your offered digital marketing channels or assets to integrate into your strategy, it's valuable to first consider the larger image to avoid getting overwhelmed. The owned, made, and paid media framework helps to classify the digital 'vehicles', possessions, or channels that you're already utilizing.
Owned Media.

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

Rather just, earned media refers to the exposure you've made through word-of-mouth. Whether that's content you've distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you've been doing, or the client experience you've provided, earned media is the recognition you get as a result. You can make media by getting press mentions, favorable evaluations, and by other people sharing your content on social media, for instance.
Paid Media.

Paid media is a bit self-explanatory in what its name suggests-- and describes any car or channel that you spend money 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 straight pay in exchange for presence.

Gather what you have, and classify each vehicle or possession in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear photo of your existing owned, made, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy may incorporate elements of all 3 channels, all working together to assist you reach your goal. For example, you may have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your site that's been created to assist you create leads. To magnify the variety of leads that material generates, you may have made a genuine effort to make it shareable, suggesting others are dispersing it via their individual social networks profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. That's the made media component. To support the material's success, you may have published about the material to your Facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more individuals in your target market.

That's exactly how the 3 can collaborate to help you meet your goal. Of course, it's not compulsory to utilize all three. If your owned and earned media are both successful, you might not require to invest in paid. It's all about assessing the very best solution to satisfy your goal, and after that integrating the channels that work best for your company into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what's already being used, you can start to think about 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 basically constantly takes the kind of material. Every message your brand broadcasts can usually be classified as content, whether it's your 'About United States' page, your item descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, or social networks posts.

Material assists convert your website visitors into leads and clients, and assists to raise your brand's profile online-- and when it's enhanced, it can likewise improve any efforts you have around search/organic traffic. Whatever your goal, you're going to need to utilize owned material to form your digital marketing strategy.

To construct your digital marketing strategy, you need to choose what material is going to assist you reach your goals. If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the site than you did last year, it's not likely that your 'About Us' page is going to be included in your strategy-- unless that page has actually in some way been a lead generation machine in the past.

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

Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has formerly performed finest in relation to your existing goals. If your goal is list building, for instance, rank them according to which generated the most leads in the in 2015. That might be a particular article, an ebook, and even a specific page on your website that's transforming well.

The idea here is to determine what's presently working, and what's not, so that you can set yourself up for success when planning future material.
Recognize gaps in your existing content.

Based upon your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the material you have. If you're a math tutoring business and have actually discovered in your audience research study that one of your personality's most significant obstacles is finding fascinating ways to study, but you do not have any material that speaks with that concern, then you might look to create some.

By taking a look at your material audit, you might find that ebooks hosted on a certain type of landing page transform actually well for you (much better than webinars, for example). In the case of this math tutoring company, you may decide to include an ebook about 'how to make studying more fascinating' to your material development strategies.
Develop a material development plan.

Based upon your findings and the gaps you've recognized, make a content creation plan laying out the material that's essential to help you hit your goals. This should consist of:


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

This can be an easy spreadsheet, and should also consist of budget plan info if you're preparing to contract out the material creation, or a time estimate if you're producing it yourself.
5. Audit and prepare your made media projects.

Evaluating your previous made media versus your existing goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from many reliable to least effective.

How do I create a digital strategy for my company?

Specify Your Goals. Prior to you start with any strategies, first define your goals.
Know Your Secret Channels.
Establish a Material Strategy.
Produce a Calendar.
Put Whatever in Motion.
Display and Procedure.

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

You may find that a specific article you contributed to the industry press drove a lot of certified traffic to your website, which in turn converted actually well. Or, you may find that LinkedIn is where you see the majority of people sharing your content, which in turn drives a great deal of traffic.

The concept here is to develop a picture of what made media will assist you reach your goals, and what won't, based upon historic information. Nevertheless, if there's something brand-new you want to attempt, don't rule that out just because it's not yet attempted and checked.
6. Audit and prepare your paid media campaigns.

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

If you have actually been investing a great deal of cash on AdWords and haven't seen the outcomes you 'd hoped for, possibly it's time to fine-tune your method, or ditch it completely and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. (Check out this complimentary AdWords guide for more on how to take advantage of it for business.).

By the end of the process, you must have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you wish to continue utilizing, and which (if any) you 'd like to remove from your strategy.
7. Bring all of it together.

You have actually done the planning and the research study, and you now have a solid vision of the components that are going to make up your digital marketing strategy. Here's what you ought to have so far:.

Clear profile( s) of your buyer personality( s).
One or more marketing-specific goals.
An inventory of your existing owned, made, and paid media.
An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.
An owned material creation strategy or wish list.

Now, it's time to bring all of it together to form a cohesive strategy file. Let's revisit what digital strategy example indicates: the series of actions that are going to help you achieve your goal( s) using online marketing.

By that meaning, your strategy file need to draw up the series of actions you're going to take to achieve your goals, based upon your research study to this point. A spreadsheet is an effective format-- and for the sake of consistency, you may find it simplest to map out according to the owned, earned, and paid media structure we have actually utilized so far.

You'll also require to prepare your strategy for a longer-term duration-- typically, something like 12 months is an excellent starting point, depending on how your service is set up. That way, you can overlay when you'll be carrying out each action. For instance:.

In January, you might start a blog site which will be continuously updated as soon as a week, for the entire year.
In March, you may introduce a new ebook, accompanied by paid promotion.
In July, you might be getting ready for your greatest service month-- what do you wish to have observed at this point that will influence the material you produce to support it?
In September, you may prepare to concentrate on earned media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic throughout the run-up.

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

Your strategy file will be very specific to your service, which is why it's nearly impossible for us to produce a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy design template. Remember, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you're going to require to attain your goal over a period of time-- as long as it interacts that, then you've nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.