Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
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Before launching any digital marketing strategy, you need to understand the key components for success. To understand how the pieces of a digital marketing strategy fit together, the components are organized into a framework called the Five Cs. They are (1) company strategy; (2) customer experience; (3); content creation (4), channel promotions, and (5) check-back analysis.

digital marketing strategy ©Shutterstock/Michail Petrov
Developing your digital marketing strategy.

Working with the Five Cs framework helps you cover all the bases as you create your digital marketing strategy and implement your plan.

Digital marketing strategy component #1: Company strategy

The first C is company strategy. To create a digital marketing strategy, you need to begin by looking at your company’s business goals. The question to ask yourself and your team is, “What do we want the company to achieve and how do we make it happen?”

You should direct your attention to your goals and business case for undertaking this effort. To that end, consider the following topics:

  • Create a digital marketing strategy. Several components go into a successful marketing strategy.
  • Get your customers’ attention. Marketers are fiercely competing for your customers’ attention.
  • Understand your business model and your brand. Learn about a variety of business models and how to determine what “job” your product does.
  • Decide which marketing campaign to create. After you understand your goals, you can choose the right marketing digital marketing campaign.
  • Develop the strongest offers. You look at how to turn leads into customers by crafting winning offers.

Digital marketing strategy component #2: The customer experience

The second of the Five Cs is customer experience. You need to learn what your prospects will think, feel, and do when interacting with your brand as part of your digital marketing strategy. The question for your marketing team to ask is, “Who are our prospects and how will we serve them as customers?”

You must define your audience and analyze the customer experience. You do this with the following:

  • Collect and analyze customer data. Before you define your audience, you need to evaluate the kind of data you will use.
  • Create personas. You define the characteristics of your perfect audience by investigating several different types of information.
  • Develop the buyer journey. You want to understand the journey your prospect takes from being interested in your product to sold on it.
  • Assist with sales enablement. Your sales team is facing an empowered customer. Your content can assist in making the job easier and more powerful. You can also determine where your company falls on the content maturity scale.

Digital marketing strategy component #3: Content creation

The third C you should address when developing your digital marketing strategy is content creation. You need to focus on creating quality content (based on your story) that you know your customers want and need. The question to ask is, “How will we create quality content, who will do it, and what will that content be?”

You need to develop a strategy for content, define your messaging, and establish your systems and governance rules.

  • Create a content strategy. You should have both a content plan and a content marketing strategy.
  • Develop content types. You want to ensure that you take full advantage of all the types of content available to you, including long- and short-form original content, curated content, and visual content.
  • Know what your customers want. You learn how marketing funnels help you reach your entire audience.
  • Write and storytell. You have a story to tell that will connect with your audience. How do you incorporate it into your content?
  • Create processes and systems. You know that without a documented workflow and procedures, your content marketing efforts fail.
  • Target content for each audience. Your company needs to build a resource library that customers can access without contacting you.

Digital marketing strategy component #4: Channel promotions

The fourth C in the digital marketing strategic approach is channel promotion. To have your content make the greatest impact, you want to decide where and by whom your content will be distributed. The question to ask is, “How will our prospects and customers find our content so that they can choose us?”

You want to make your content easy to find and share. You need to know how to promote your content so that prospects can find it.

  • Use paid, earned, shared, and owned media for maximum reach. Making the most of all types of media is the only way to ensure that your brand voice will be heard.
  • Use search marketing. Although search marketing is constantly changing, you can’t ignore its value.
  • Create sharable content. Sharing is key to any content plan. You should embrace shareability as a strategy and borrow from journalism’s five Ws and one H (who, what, why, where, when, how) as applied to sharing.
  • Add an email marketing campaign. Everyone loves and hates email. But email marketing is still a very important tactic to use to reach customers.

Digital marketing strategy component #5: Check-back analysis

The fifth C is check-back analysis. The focus here is on the metrics you choose to determine successes or failure of your digital marketing strategy. The question to ask is, “Have we met our goals?”

You want to reevaluate your plans and make revisions as necessary:

  • Reassess your business model and brand value. You know that it’s important to frequently assess how things are working.
  • Reexamine your content marketing strategy. Obviously, a determination of how well your content marketing strategy is working is essential.
  • Measure success. If you’re tracking key accounts you need to reassess your goals for each one.
  • Track metrics. It’s helpful to gauge potential new opportunities as you track your metrics.
  • Optimize campaigns for return on investment (ROI). Using split testing and analyzing the speed of your pages is key to optimizing your campaigns.
If you do the hard work required to create and implement your plans, you can expect to be on the road to content marketing success.

When creating your digital marketing strategy, knowing what other companies with high growth do is helpful. According to a study done by Accenture called “CMOs: Time for digital transformation or risk being left on the sidelines” a large percentage of high-growth companies:

  • Use data and analytics to improve the impact of their marketing (86 percent)
  • Know that digital channels are of strategic importance (84 percent)
  • Make sure that customers get a similar experience across all channels (80 percent)
Addressing these components will set you on the path to digital marketing success.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Stephanie Diamond founded Digital Media Works, Inc., an online marketing company. She has more than 20 years of experience building profits for both small businesses and multibillion-dollar corporations in over 75 different industries.

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