Digital Strategy Session at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce

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

However when you're growing an organisation, it looks like this ever-evolving landscape can quickly become frustrating. There's already enough to do-- how are you also supposed to develop, tweak, and keep an agile 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 techniques that marketers can adapt to help their teams and companies grow, in addition to a refresher course on the significance of digital strategy and marketing projects.

Your digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that assist you accomplish your company goals through thoroughly picked online marketing channels. These channels include paid, made, and owned media, and can all support a common campaign around a specific line of business.

The term "strategy" may appear challenging, but building an efficient digital strategy goal doesn't need to be hard.

In basic terms, a strategy is simply a strategy to attain a desired goal, or several goals. For example, your overarching goal might be to generate 25% more leads via your site this year than you drove last year.

Depending upon the scale of your service, your digital marketing strategy may involve multiple digital techniques-- each with different goals-- and a great deal of moving parts. But coming back to this easy method of considering strategy can assist you remain concentrated on conference those objectives.

What is a digital channel strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a strategy encompassing a variety of channels to increase sales, awareness, development and engagement for a product, service or brand name. ... Cross-channel strategies, where channels incorporate for much better outcomes (e.g. lining up link structure and web material with SEO).

In spite of our simplification of the term "strategy," there's no doubt it can be tough to get started really constructing one. Let's see what a digital marketing campaign looks like, and after that, we'll delve into those 7 building blocks to assist you create an efficient digital marketing strategy to set up your company for online success.

It's simple to puzzle your digital strategy with your digital marketing projects, however here's how to identify the two.

As we have actually currently detailed, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to assist you attain your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the foundation or actions within your strategy that relocation you toward meeting that goal.

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

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

GoPro
Delta Airlines
Geico
Wayfair
Mastercard
ETF Securities
Red Bull

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

GoPro is popular for its incredible point-of-view design action footage, all drawn from the business's classic fisheye lens. What you might 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 encouraged an entire fanbase of outdoorspeople to take remarkable video footage of their adventures and publish it online-- often with credit back to GoPro. This continuous digital marketing campaign has promoted the use of video to spread the word about the GoPro product line-- and a great deal of the content is developed by the consumers themselves.

Check out the video below, which GoPro republished, awarding the video's original shooter with being among the best videos in its category.

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

You wouldn't consider an airline as a leader in innovative digital marketing, but don't undervalue the stories they can tell on social media (emphasis on "stories").

Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social networks, specifically on its Twitter manage. The brand name uses this account to engage potential travelers in a variety of manner ins which are both timely and mentally stimulating. Last month, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company began sharing personal stories from Delta employees directly through the business's Twitter feed

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

All you need to hear is the word "Geico" to remember you can save 15% or more on your cars and truck insurance. However even a business with such a memorable tagline can run the risk of frustrating its buyers if its marketing project is too longwinded.

That's why Geico released a series of preroll ads on YouTube that confess to the advertisement's brevity in the videos themselves.

Preroll advertisements are a form of paid content on YouTube in which you pay YouTube to roll 15- to 20-second ads ahead of videos that have the very same audience as the advertiser. While some business attempt to squeeze as much messaging as they can into that brief slot, Geico has actually taken the opportunity to tease itself for taking up your time in the first place. In this way, its YouTube preroll commercials are actually amusing.

4. Wayfair
Digital strategy: Owned media, Instagram tags

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

Instagram provides business an opportunity to reveal their fans a more intimate side of the brand name, raising the drape on business to show off the staff members and events that make the company what it is. For Wayfair, however, Instagram isn't just a culture play-- it's a purchase page.

Utilizing Instagram's product tags, Wayfair has taken some of its most beautiful house interior shots on Instagram, and tagged them with item and cost labels. It's a digital marketing campaign that reveals people precisely how much each product in the photo expenses, helping Wayfair create purchasers right from its Instagram account.

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

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

Priceless Cities, Mastercard's travel blog site, offers readers a travel resource to go along with the charge card that assist pay for these readers' locations. It's a pretty good idea, as it permits the company to much better align itself not simply with the important things its consumers buy, but with the places its customers go.

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

ETF Securities is a little, asset management service based in Australia dealing with wealth supervisors and investors in Europe. Since the service they supply is so complicated, the business discovered where its customers hung out the most-- LinkedIn-- and sponsored paid content on this platform that drives more interest in investments and helps clients make smarter monetary decisions.

With this digital project, ETF Securities saw 95% year-over-year growth in its LinkedIn fans.

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

Red Bull has ended up being more popular for its sponsorship of severe sports than the energy beverage it offers. It's a natural fit for the kinds of people the drink interest. But instead of developing digital content on the energy drink market, Red Bull captures its audience with short articles and videos all about the latest happenings in the severe sports neighborhood.

In this digital marketing campaign, Red Bull teaches us that what you offer isn't always the perfect content strategy. Rather, it's the way of life that your customers live.

It's important to keep in mind that even if a project runs over the course of a number 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 instance, ETF Securities (pointed out above) hosted a campaign to increase its fans on LinkedIn, utilizing the digital strategy of sponsored material (a form of paid media). This one tactical project might be one little part of a bigger digital marketing strategy that serves to produce more leads for one of its products or business lines.

Now that we've gotten to grips with the fundamentals of digital strategy example and digital marketing campaigns, let's dig into how to build your strategy.

Develop your purchaser personas.
Determine your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll require.
Assess your existing digital channels and properties.
Audit and plan your owned media projects.
Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.
Audit and prepare your paid media projects.
Bring it all together.

1. Develop your purchaser personalities.

For any marketing strategy-- offline or online-- you require to know who you're marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed purchaser personas, and your first step is to produce them. (Need help? Start here with our free buyer personality set.).

Buyer personas represent your perfect customer( s) and can be developed by investigating, surveying, and interviewing your service's target audience. It is very important to keep in mind that this info needs to be based upon real data wherever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to take the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool ought to consist of a mixture of customers, potential customers, and individuals outside your contacts database who line up with your target audience.

However what type of information should you collect for your own purchaser personality( s) to inform your digital marketing strategy? That depends on your businesses, and is likely to differ depending upon whether you're B2B or B2C, or whether your product is high expense or low cost. Here are some beginning points, but you'll wish to tweak them, depending upon your particular organisation.

Why is digital strategy essential?

The Importance Of A Digital Strategy. A digital marketing plan is a vital tool for your service. ... Focusing on a particular audience and recognizing that audience's requirements, interests and pain points, will assist deliver a more effective plan in accomplishing your marketing objectives.

Quantitative (or Demographic) Information.

Place. You can utilize web analytics tools like Google Analytics to easily identify what place your site traffic is originating from.
Age. Depending on your company, this might or may not be relevant. It's best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and customer database.
Earnings. It's finest to gather delicate details like individual earnings in personality research interviews, as individuals might be reluctant to share it by means of online forms.
Task Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base, and is most relevant for B2B business.

Qualitative (or Psychographic) Details.

Goals. Depending on the need your services or product was produced to serve, you may currently have an excellent idea of what goals your persona is seeking to attain. Nevertheless, it's finest to seal your presumptions by talking to customers, in addition to internal sales and client service representatives.
Difficulties. Again, speak with clients, sales and customer service representatives to get an idea of the common issues your audience faces.
Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and people who line up with your target audience. If you're a fashion brand name, for instance, it's helpful to know if large segments of your audience are likewise thinking about physical fitness and wellness, as that can help inform your future material production and collaborations.
Top priorities. Talk to customers and individuals who line up with your target market to find out what's crucial to them in relation to your service. For instance, if you're a B2B software application company, knowing that your audience worths consumer assistance over a competitive rate point is really important details.

Take this information and create several 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 constantly be tied back to the basic goals of the business. For instance, if your company's goal is to increase online profits by 20%, your goal as an online marketer might be to create 50% more leads via the website 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 important, actually have the ability to measure it (e.g., have the ideal digital marketing tools in place to do so). How you determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy will be various for each organisation and dependent on your goal( s), however it's important to guarantee you're able to do so, as it's these metrics which will help you change your strategy in the future.

If you're a HubSpot client, the Reporting add-on in your HubSpot software application brings all of your marketing and sales information into one location, so you can quickly determine what works and what does not.

3. Assess your existing digital channels and possessions.

When considering your available digital marketing channels or properties to integrate into your strategy, it's helpful to first consider the bigger photo to prevent getting overloaded. The owned, made, and paid media structure assists to classify the digital 'cars', possessions, or channels that you're already using.
Owned Media.

This refers to the digital assets that your brand name or company owns-- whether that's your site, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned channels are the important things your service has complete control over. This can consist of some off-site material that you own, but isn't hosted on your site, like a blog site that you publish on Medium, for instance.
Made Media.

Rather just, earned media describes the direct exposure you have actually made through word-of-mouth. Whether that's content you have actually distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you have actually been doing, or the customer experience you've provided, made media is the acknowledgment you receive as a result. You can make media by getting press mentions, favorable reviews, and by other individuals sharing your content on social media, for example.
Paid Media.

Paid media is a bit obvious in what its name recommends-- and refers to any car or channel that you spend loan on to catch the attention of your buyer personalities. This consists of things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other medium for which you directly pay in exchange for presence.

Collect what you have, and classify each lorry or possession in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Your digital marketing strategy might integrate components of all three channels, all working together to help you reach your goal. For instance, you might have an owned piece of material on a landing page on your website that's been produced to assist you generate leads. To amplify the variety of leads that content generates, you may have made a genuine effort to make it shareable, indicating others are distributing it through their individual social media profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. That's the made media component. To support the material's success, you might have published about the content to your Facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more individuals in your target market.

That's exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Obviously, it's not compulsory to use all 3. If your owned and made media are both successful, you may not require to invest in paid. It's everything about examining the best service to meet your goal, and then integrating the channels that work best for your company into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what's currently being utilized, you can start to think of what to keep and what to cut.
4. Audit and prepare your owned media projects.

At the heart of digital marketing is your owned media, which practically always takes the form of content. Every message your brand broadcasts can usually be categorized as material, whether it's your 'About United States' page, your item descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, or social networks posts.

Material helps convert your website visitors into leads and clients, and assists to raise your brand name's profile online-- and when it's enhanced, it can also increase 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 build 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 last year, it's unlikely that your 'About Us' page is going to be included in your strategy-- unless that page has actually in some way been a list building maker 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 wish to do more of. Here's a brief process to follow to exercise what owned material you require to meet your digital marketing goals:
Audit your existing content.

Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has actually formerly performed best in relation to your present 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 specific post, an ebook, and 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 content.
Determine gaps in your existing content.

Based upon your buyer personas, identify any spaces in the content you have. If you're a math tutoring business and have found in your audience research that a person of your persona's biggest obstacles is finding intriguing ways to study, however you don't have any material that talks to that concern, then you might aim to create some.

By taking a look at your material audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a particular kind of landing page transform actually well for you (far better than webinars, for example). In the case of this mathematics tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an ebook about 'how to make studying more interesting' to your content creation strategies.
Develop a content production plan.

Based upon your findings and the spaces you've recognized, make a content production plan detailing the material that's essential to help you strike your goals. This must consist of:


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

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and must likewise consist of spending plan info if you're preparing to outsource the material creation, or a time price quote if you're producing it yourself.
5. Audit and prepare your made media campaigns.

Examining your previous made media versus your present goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Take a look at where your traffic and leads are originating from (if that's your goal) and rank each made media source from a lot of reliable to least reliable.

How do I produce a digital strategy for my service?

Define Your Goals. Before you get going with any strategies, initially define your goals.
Know Your Key Channels.
Develop a Content Strategy.
Develop a Calendar.
Put Whatever in Motion.
Screen and Step.

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

You may find that a specific short article you contributed to the market press drove a lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn transformed truly well. Or, you might find that LinkedIn is where you see the majority of people sharing your content, which in turn drives a great deal of traffic.

The idea here is to build up a picture of what made media will assist you reach your goals, and what will not, based upon historical information. However, if there's something new you wish to try, do not rule that out even if it's not yet tried and checked.
6. Audit and prepare your paid media campaigns.

This procedure includes much of the same procedure: You need to assess your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to determine what's most likely to assist you meet your existing goals.

If you've been spending a great deal of cash on AdWords and have not seen the results you 'd hoped for, possibly it's time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and concentrate on another platform that appears to be yielding much better results. (Take a look at this free AdWords guide for more on how to leverage it for organisation.).

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

You've done the preparation 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 must have so far:.

Clear profile( s) of your purchaser personality( s).
One or more marketing-specific goals.
An inventory of your existing owned, made, and paid media.
An audit of your existing owned, made, and paid media.
An owned material development plan 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 means: the series of actions that are going to assist you achieve your goal( s) using internet marketing.

By that definition, your strategy file must map out 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 find it simplest to draw up according to the owned, earned, and paid media structure we've utilized so far.

You'll likewise need to prepare your strategy for a longer-term period-- generally, something like 12 months is an excellent beginning point, depending on how your business is set up. That way, you can overlay when you'll be performing each action. For instance:.

In January, you might begin a blog site which will be constantly upgraded as soon as a week, for the entire year.
In March, you might introduce a brand-new ebook, accompanied by paid promo.
In July, you might be preparing for your most significant company month-- what do you hope to have observed at this point that will affect the material you produce to support it?
In September, you may plan to focus on made media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic during the run-up.

By taking this method, you're also developing a structured timeline for your activity, which will help interact your plans to your associates-- not to mention, perhaps even help keep you sane.
Your Path to Digital Marketing Strategy Success.

Your strategy file will be very individual to your business, which is why it's almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Keep in mind, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you're going to require to accomplish your goal over an amount of time-- as long as it interacts that, then you have actually nailed the essentials of creating a digital strategy.