Digital strategy is the how of using digital media (website, social media, email marketing, etc.) to reach your target audience. This can feel overwhelming -- where do you start? But it is essential. Digital media do not just "do their thing.”
When Peak Enterprises develops or helps develop a digital strategy, the following process is generally followed. You can use this process yourself, or contact Peak Enterprises about coaching you through it. Keep in mind that your ability to complete these steps will require having done some market research and analysis. While this can be done through this process, it is very helpful to have current market and sales data, target customer profile(s), price planning information, etc. handy if you already have it.
Step 1: Define What You're Selling
Whether a product, service, or personal brand, it is important to have absolute clarity as to what it is you are trying to sell. This will inform virtually every subsequent determination.
Step 2: Define Your Objective and Measure
A marketing campaign needs to have a clear objective. It might be to introduce a new product, reach a new demographic, or something else. But whatever it is, this needs to be clear. Your objective might be stated as, "To add [demographic] to our customer base." After determining your objective, you need to determine how you will measure progress. Numerical measures are usually best but not essential -- as long as there is no subjectivity or ambiguity about progress and completion.
Step 3: Identify Your Target Customer
At this point, identify every characteristic of the people you want to reach that may distinguish them from other people who you are not concerned about reaching. This will become your target customer profile. You may have more than one profile, but keep in mind that each additional profile complicates your marketing strategy and if you try to reach populations that have mutually exclusive characteristics (such as product features that can't be integrated) with the same strategy you may lose some or all of them. Your customer profile(s) will heavily inform nuances of your digital strategy -- from where you advertise online to the design of your content and the keywords and hashtags that you use.
Step 4: Identify Your Competitors and Alternatives
Identify the specific entities that are or will be competing for the same target customers. Then identify the industries/sectors and specific entities that are or will be offering something fundamentally different than what you are selling but that would meet the same customer need -- i.e., an alternative. If you've done a “5-Forces Analysis," you will want to refer to it to answer these questions.
Step 5: Clarify Your Difference
List in clear terms what characteristics of your product/service and you/your entity makes buying from you preferable to buying from a competitor or alternative. (For Peak Enterprises, two of our fundamental distinctions are our integration of business strategy and digital marketing services, and our openness to working with small businesses on viable budgets.) If you haven't done a SWOT (not SWAT) Analysis, now would be the time to do it. These characteristics are some of the most important things you will want to draw attention to through your digital strategy.
Step 6: Determine Your Sales Channels
Taking into account all of the information you've laid out in the previous five steps -- and particularly your target customer profile -- determine the best sales channels to use to reach your target customer. While your digital strategy will focus specifically on digital sales channels (as the term implies), it is essential that you determine both digital and non-digital channels at this point. Otherwise you may improperly allocate resources or end up with conflicting messaging.
Step 7: Plan Your Marketing Activities
Now it is time to actually plan your digital marketing activities. This is not elaborated on here because either you know enough about digital marketing to do this, or you're probably better off contacting Peak Enterprises or another digital marketing strategy firm. At the same time, you can "give it a try" even if you're not sure you can do it (but don't lose sight of time constraints and that you may have to "wait in line" for professional help).
Step 8: Reality Check
In some ways this might be the most important step. It is possible to develop a 200-page strategic business plan covering every conceivable nuance of what you want to do and yet miss that actually achieving your strategic objectives is either not possible or won't happen by implementing the 200-page plan you've put together. At this point it is important to take a step back and ask a relatively simple yet potentially very hard question: Is it realistic 1) for me to do what I am proposing and 2) that doing so will achieve what I want it to?
Whatever your answer to this, you then need to ask: Why is this? What makes me confident of this assessment? If my assessment, after all this work, is that it isn't realistic, what did I miss in the planning process that I now see? If your answer is "yes, it's realistic" than the "why" serves as a secondary check against false optimism. If your answer is "no, it's not realistic," the "why" is a check against false pessimism and potentially a way to identify solutions.
Conclusion
If after reading this and checking out the linked resources you feel confident doing this yourself, go for it! If you feel overwhelmed but motivated, now might be the perfect time to contact us. If you're thinking something like, "This is crazy! How did I get myself into this?" now might be a good time to take a deep breath, remind yourself which way is up, and then contact us.
