Digital Marketing Strategy

Broadly, a marketing strategy aims to secure a competitive advantage by defining a pathway towards best meeting the needs and expectations of a specific audience. Typically a good digital marketing strategy will identify goals, determine how to achieve them and lay out a plan towards success. The best marketing strategies enable project stakeholders and marketers to collectively understand the current state of the project, the position it holds within a given arena or marketplace, the desired rate of growth and how to both achieve and measure the growth along the way.
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Marketing is such a fundamental element in the success of most projects that it needs to be taken as seriously as any other part – this makes planning marketing absolutely vital. Successful marketing is about more than simply communicating the value of a product or project to the wider world and so any plan for marketing activity needs to be both thorough and considerate of a broad range of topics - including economic factors, business challenges, world trends and general market activity. In this sense, a marketing strategy is part research, part analysis, part communication, part decision making and part marketing theory.

In general, a marketing strategy will answer the following questions (among many others):
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What are the project’s objectives and goals?
Who are the customers or end users of the project?
How can the customers/users becomes aware of the project?
How can the customers/users be inspired to become an advocate for the project?
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Understanding how to inspire your end users to voluntarily promote your project themselves is key in lowering overall marketing costs and increasing the benefit of marketing efforts long term.

A digital marketing strategy specifically focuses on the activities that will be carried out using digital technologies that typically include websites, mobile apps, multimedia content, email marketing and additional processes designed to increase awareness and usage of available digital assets (including Search Engine Optimisation, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Social Media Management and Paid Online Advertising). Each project will requires a different mix of marketing elements according to the specific details that are unique to it, so there is no ‘one size fits all’ digital marketing strategy.

A complete strategy will include research and analysis of relevant markets, competitors in those markets, the competitor's own strategies and the available options that can be used to achieve the stated goals within the given project scope. The complexity of the devised strategy will vary depending on the project’s needs, the sophistication of the team and/or audience and also the available budget. Overall, the aim is usually to maximise the return on the investment (ROI) that is made into the project, typically by increasing the amount of direct revenue generated by the project or achieving other valuable goals that lead to greater income.
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It is essential to be able to measure the financial benefits generated by marketing activity in relation to the financial costs involved in order to ensure that budgets are not being wasted and opportunities for growth are exploited to their full potential. All projects, whether their intentions are commercial or otherwise, need to balance their resources against their activities in ways that ensure they are sustainable and able to continually thrive. Doing this requires a willingness to carefully plan and think through as much as possible in advance of making important decisions.

While it is true that we need to ‘spend money to make money’, we also need to spend money wisely to make money!

There is no single or standard approach to defining marketing strategies, however, there are commonly relied upon techniques and methods of analysis that can greatly help the process of reaching optimal results. Some methods are highly technical, requiring mathematical analysis of large data sets, while others are far more simplistic – yet all can be useful when used appropriately. For example, at the overview level, a simple SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) can be highly informative and can serve as an anchor for further lines of enquiry and goal setting. Meanwhile, other far more specialised processes can be used to understand more subtle details relating to economic factors and growth potentials within markets (The page on Marketing Strategy on Wikipedia is a good starting point for more information on commonly used market and business analysis techniques).

A long list of possible tactics also exists for marketing activities that can be included into an overall strategy. These range from traditional approaches such as telemarketing and direct mail marketing, through to more modern examples such as email marketing and social media marketing. Each technique will also come with a variety of further ‘growth hacks’ that can be used to boost their overall success. Sustainable growth in the modern world means being open to trying a broad range of options and remaining receptive to new information – opening space for a type of agility that prevents stagnation and gives the best chance of reliably reaching goals.

We are more than just a content marketing agency or an seo agency - we address all the key aspects that go into an effective online marketing strategy. We rely on a combination of either face to face or online (voice) interviews that include probing questions to get to the core of what our client really needs. We aim to identify and agree goals early on so that we can precisely target our efforts towards producing a solid strategy in a short space of time. We then perform our own research and use whatever data our client has provided us from their own records (such as sales performance data, website traffic tracking data and other market information) to sketch an overview of the most effective approach to using digital marketing techniques to reach the agreed upon goals.
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Examples of objectives/goals might be:

Our investigation will include a review of the project and brand’s attributes and positioning, plus the specifics of it’s ‘value proposition’. We will define clearly what makes the project stand out and what we are to be specifically selling, which may or may not be a product (it could be something less tangible, yet equally desirable).
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We will make recommendations for marketing actions to be undertaken and where relevant we will specify the metrics that will be used to measure their success too. In some cases we may recommend an extensive SEO campaign, coupled with social media campaigns (using platforms such as Linked In, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and appropriate eCommerce marketing options. In some cases we may need to produce specific deliverables such as a new website or complete a thorough rebranding process to fundamentally shift perception of the project in beneficial ways. The specific details of any strategy will always be dependent on the needs and goals of each unique case.
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We then present our recommendations to our client and discuss them in detail. If needed we will prepare a final strategy document for stakeholders to reference throughout the planned marketing process.