Considering employing a digital marketing agency, or possibly want to make yourself aware of what is involved? Based on experience gained since the mid 1990’s, this series will shed some light to aid your decision (be it outsource vs. in-house, remain with your current supplier, or highlight considerations as to why you may want to move, review potential agencies, how to measure, and how to decide).
Welcome to Part 4 in this series – Digital Marketing Strategy.
Picking up from part 3 and all other articles related to this series that you can access on our blog, we continue with the drill down picking up with a more detailed look at a digital strategy as part of enabling successful, measurable and sustainable digital marketing.
So what should an online marketing strategy encompass?
At a high level it should incorporate
- Leveraging audit outcomes
- Translating the business strategy and vision into an enabling marketing strategy
So drilling down:
Leveraging Audit Outcomes
Taking into account the outcomes from the digital audit in each of the component areas
- Email Marketing
- The prevalence and role of email within your industry both from a marketing as well as a functional perspective
- How it is leveraged to help move parties through the sales cycle / funnel
- Social Media
- The prevalence and role of social media within your industry both from a marketing as well as a servicing perspective
- The preferred social media platforms
- This doesn’t mean automatically discounting less popular social media channels, but it is reviewing the platforms in context
- Identifying the opportunity gaps both in what your organization is doing as well as what and where competitors are doing
- Understanding the potential of both organic and paid social media initiatives
- Website
- The prevalence and role of websites within your industry both from a marketing as well as a servicing perspective
- Understanding the nature and intent of how users engage with your website
- Realizing the form and functionality of your website to meet the users’ requirements as well as help fulfil your intent for the website
- Identifying quick wins
- Looking into areas of development
- Understanding the potential of both organic and paid web marketing initiatives
- Marketing Overall
- This spans traditional and digital marketing
- The intent is to understand the perspective on, and orientation towards, marketing at large within your organization
- Understanding your business from a marketing perspective, and in turn understanding marketing from your business’ perspective
- As necessary, leveraging established marketing tools such as SWOT analysis and the like (not the ambit of this article, but worthy of articles of its own)
Translating the business strategy and vision into an enabling marketing strategy
At a high level, the Digital Strategy is broken down as follows:
- Target market
- This informs the defined audience for your digital marketing strategy
- Three tiers of target market
- Primary target market
- Source of the majority of revenue generation (in terms of quantum of ROI as well as turnover)
- Select people/organizations that are typically part of your secondary target market, but these are identified as lower-hanging fruit that can also be a part of this target market if quick win conversions possible (low and quick effort for medium levels of ROI and turn-over)
- The main focus of marketing related activities
- Secondary target market
- This component is split into two main groups
- Organizations that are a source of a significant enough amount of revenue generation (in terms of ROI as well as turnover) to justify attention and pursuit, however, not at the same level financially nor amount of activity as the primary target audience
- Influencers organizations of primary target and secondary target markets, even though they themselves may/will not be direct customers themselves they have a direct vested interest in the primary and/or secondary target organizations
- This component is split into two main groups
- Tertiary target market
- Derived target audience (no current formal vested interest) that will gain value from clients utilizing your offering
- Primary target market
- Within each target market to target and speak to the relevant Persona in order to realize sales and non-sales value.
- Personas are fictional profiles that represent groups of similar people in a target audience.
- They can help you figure out how to reach people on a more personal level, while delivering the right messages, offers, and products at the right time.
- Pain Points
- What clients and potential clients have identified as their biggest challenge that is relevant to providers of your services and/or products
- Identify Problems & Ideal Outcomes
- From the pain points, what problem(s) are we going to solve for them
- See The Demand
- Products/services that people/organizations desperately need and will pay money for (from within your offering stable)
- Email Marketing
- To be leveraged as a means to reach the already “opted-in” target market, be they past, current or potential customers, as well as external influencers
- Works in collaboration with the website and social media to reach those that may, or may not, be frequenting social and/or web directly on a consistent basis, and also provides a good reference point and cross-marketing means irrespective of online user behaviour.
- Social Media
- Social media platforms are excellent channels for the communication, discussion, consumption, understanding and engagement around topics (in varying degrees across these factor from platform to platform, so understanding each platform is imperative to success)
- These are channels where and how problems are recognized and potential solutions sought, identified and peer reviewed
- Identify what roles social media will perform in your digital marketing strategy
- Identify which social media platforms to leverage (if not indefinitely, then at the outset and for the short to medium term)
- Set the activity frequency taking into account scheduled initiatives as well as probable non-scheduled activity
- Determine the interplay (if any) between social media and other marketing channels
- Plan how to leverage the potential of both organic and paid social media initiatives
- Website
- The storage (or referencing) and communication hub of all your business communiqué
- It is a deep and broad channel where, and how, problems are recognized and potential solutions are actively sought, identified, emersed in, short-listed and approached for possible appointment.
- Websites are often used to get “the full story” about an organization/company and solutions offered.
- As such the website is to be utilized to create awareness, enable deep dive in terms of solutions, information as well as position your company as the service provider of choice within your chosen market space.
- Identify what roles your website will perform in your digital marketing strategy
- Set the activity frequency taking into account scheduled initiatives as well as probable non-scheduled activity
- Determine the interplay (if any) between the website and other marketing channels
- Plan how to leverage the potential of both organic and paid web initiatives
Once again, there is quite a bit here, that if done correctly, leverages a lot of defined, intentional, effective, measurable and repeatable / scalable digital marketing success.
In terms of your organizations digital marketing:
- Q&A
- Is the above in place for your business success, as provided for internally and/or via an external supplier?
- If not, what are the risks to your business?
- If so, whether partially or in totality, what opportunities are there to sustain your business? And grow your business ?
- Is the above in place for your business success, as provided for internally and/or via an external supplier?
- Implementation partners are in place, but is there strategic direction?
- If not, how will the component parts collectively pursue and deliver on what is required by your business?
- If so, who owns and who manages the strategy? Where does the understanding sit?
We are honest and transparent as to why we have put out this article. Yes it should be an asset to the industry and customers of our industry, but we also need to do business for many of the same reasons you do. So here is our ask.
Seeking a digital marketing agency, a traditional marketing agency, an integrated agency or a service provider that can co-ordinate multiple suppliers (in-house and/or outsourced)? Why you should consider 3G’s Branding Consulting Digital and Marketing Head Outsource
- All founders have been in marketing, branding, business management and digital online communication since the mid 1990’s
- Principals daily hands-on involvement
- Qualifications include
- BComm. Marketing
- Design Diplomas
- Program in eCommerce
- BTech Multimedia
- IT Specific Project Management (Levels 1 -3)
- Technology Qualifications
- Clients have included amongst others:
- B2B
- B2C
- Multi-Nationals
- JSE listed companies
- Government agencies
- National Lottery South Africa
- Gautrain
- Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMME)
- One-man operations
- Volunteer only operations
We As An Agency
- Are a specialist communication agency offering a complete consulting, design, implementation and management solution
- Have an experienced multi-faceted specialist team
- Leverage our organisational learnings to date
- Have substantial experience collaborating with third party vendors
- Have our proven processes and procedures
- Limit the risk of time, money, and client reputation
- Maximize synergies
- Leverage service and cost efficiencies
- Retain a high level of creativity, professionalism and quality outputs
- Have undertaken standalone projects as well as multifaceted projects that may or may not integrate to third party vendors offerings
- Have aided clients with operational improvements and increased productivity.
- Are grateful to our clients, some of whom are still with as from the very beginning
- Have working relationships with of our clients, within the context of what 3G’s and MHO provides, going back to 2002.
We received the following accolade from yet another satisfied client (extract of LinkedIn post by Normadian reproduced with permission)
My deepest thanks to everyone on the team who has contributed to where we are today. Thank you for all your hard work, dedication and commitment during, what I realise was at times very challenging circumstances. We are deeply grateful and appreciate everything and everyone on the team.
Access further testimonials
Well, that was Part 4. Access the balance of articles in this series as well as other series’ via our blog. You are welcome to access our other posts. Likewise you are welcome to reach out to us should you want to engage directly with us on this.
And…….. Expect more from your communication
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