Getting Started with Digital Strategy
Omnichannel marketing requires that multiple marketing channels are working together to create and deliver an amazing, seamless user experience. Delivering the same customer experiences across all marketing channels whether traditional and/or digital without boundaries including .com, social, mobile, email, events and sales reps.
To put together a successful omnichannel marketing campaign, you need to understand the difference between goals, strategies and tactics.
Goal – An observable and measurable end result. Strategy – Your overarching vision or plan to achieving your goal. Tactic – One or more methods for implementing your strategy.
With any new initiative, you need to start with strategy and goal setting. Start by establishing a specific set of objectives like increasing sales by a certain amount or establishing greater brand awareness. Once you've established your goals, you can start strategizing and testing different tactics to achieve your goals.
Your strategy describes how you intend to reach your goal. It should be broad enough that it does not prescribe specific marketing tactics, but be specific enough that it describes who you are targeting to reach your goal and how you will target them.
When you start creating a digital marketing strategy, you’ll want to consider how each of your digital channels can work together toward your goal. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase traffic to your website, you might consider just a few of the ways that different digital marketing tactics can increase visitors to your website.
Understanding how digital marketing works goes beyond just getting to know each digital marketing tactic on its own. These digital marketing tactics can work together to support your overall campaign goals.
Defining Your Target Audience
After you establish goals and strategies, the next step is to understand your audience and build profiles of those customers. Most companies develop personas based on demographics and behavior, along with an understanding of a customer’s motivations and challenges.
The more you humanize customers, the more relevant your marketing efforts will be. You may even need to develop multiple buyer personas, such as chief technology officer, system engineer or network architect.
Next, you’ll want to start developing segments of your customer base that take into account behavioral data and scoring. You can define certain behaviors like their last website visit, attendance at your event or asset download. This precision tracking drives higher engagement, conversions, customer satisfaction, retention metrics, and revenue.
Background - company, job responsibilities, likes and dislikes about job, team structure
Goals - business challenges, pain points and how your products can help
Source of information - preferred channels for consuming content (i.e. podcasts, specific websites)
Preferred content topic - topics of interest
Marketing message - messaging that speaks directly to this persona
Objections - anticipated objections during the sales process
Specific product interest - interest in a particular solution or product
Role in purchase process - influence in the decision-making process
Quotes - actual quotes to bring your persona to life
Digital touch points are steadily increasing as customers have a variety of ways to engage with a brand. Paid, Earned and Owned media mix is a balancing act that when combined allows us to intercept, engage and convert in an efficient and effective way.
It's important to ensure that your traditional content is aligning with your digital content in terms of messaging. The approach to content strategy operates on the belief that buyers are loyal to businesses that deliver consistent, relevant, and interesting information. When your content is making customers smarter instead of merely pitching products, users will be more likely to engage and stay loyal to your business.
To maximize the value of your team and effectively create the content you need, use the 4 Rs of content marketing:
Reorganize re-purpose sections of the same piece to create smaller breakout pieces
Retire - remove content that is no longer relevant, is under-performing or was created for a past event
Rewrite - extend your existing investments by using content that you already have
Redesign- create different versions to appeal to certain personas
Free marketing content in Marketing Velocity Central: View and download a wide range of content including messaging guides, videos, third party white papers, infographics, call scripts, copy blocks, case studies and social media posts that you can customize and use in your marketing campaigns. Explore Marketing Velocity Central!