From a business prospective, the world that we live in is fast moving, hard hitting, and unforgiving. By using digital strategies to solve your businesses adversities in an analytical and productive way it is possible to achieve great success. This digital strategy 101 crash course will introduce and teach you to address and solve problems by creating and executing your own digital strategy.

Digital strategy can be defined in many different ways depending on industries, we’ll define it as the process by which a problem is identified, analyzed, simplified, and solved by using digital solutions. A digital strategy performs most successfully when approached with a analytical mindset.

How will a digital marketing strategy help my company?

Digital marketing strategies create a structured plan to intertwine sales, awareness, brand image, user engagement, and company growth in a way that can be measured with key performance indicators. It is also good practice to break your KPI’s into three objectives:

Quantity, Quality, and Overall Worth

• Quantity reflects how many overall people you want to reach, total audience effected from you. Some KPI’s to look for would be how many mentions of your brand, how many total views, or how much traffic driven.
• Quality reflects on how many solid leads from the total quantity will be acquired. KPI’s to watch would be overall conversions, how many strangers became users, or how many people made it all the way to your shopping cart.
• Overall worth should be looked in the long term and not short. Worth is how successful your strategies were versus cost of acquisition. Performance indicators would be number of repeat customers or or active users on your platform.

Being able to recognize that end goals and strategies need to be broken down into smaller strategies and goals is key. Realizing that different digital channels require different approaches will also save a lot of head aches. Ask yourself what is the goal for each channel whether it be online advertising (paid ads, social media followings, SEO), TV advertising, or print marketing. Often times integrating different channels to work together work better than alone, putting a print ad in a newspaper which includes a discount for online orders through your website should generate a larger user base than not putting the ad in the newspaper, the only question being is it worth it.

Managing what channels to focus on is very important, trying to incorporate too many channels could prove as too costly and time draining. Ask yourself questions like should I focus more on SEO vs SEM, should I invest more money into CPC vs CPM, and will my social media account segment the correct user base. Unless you have a very specific targeted persona then finding the most worthwhile or efficient digital channels will come from trial and error. Being on every single social media outlet may not be worthwhile for your strategy if content and user base do not correlate.

Understanding marketing funnels will be important for you during your planning. Marketing funnels, sometimes called customer funnels or conversion funnels, have been around for over 100 years and are a great way to begin your digital marketing strategy because it outlines your buyers journey throughout their entire experience with you. Funnels are broken down into stages:

Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, and Retention

• The awareness stage focuses on bringing to light a problem that people have and making as many people as possible recognize the problem. Creating solutions to peoples problems is a waste of time if people do not realize that they even have a problem to begin with.
• The consideration stage concentrates on the period after the customer realizes they have a problem and they are now beginning to understand that they need the product being sold.
• The desire stage occurs when the customer starts doing their research on different brands and variations of the product or solution being sold.
• The action stage is the step at which the customer finally makes the purchase.
• Retention stage is all about quality of product sold and customer service. If the customer had a good experience with your brand then they are not likely to jump ship to your competitors.