Digital Strategy

Know your current situation

Before you can start thinking about your digital strategy you have to evaluate your existing situation. The first step is to gather customer insights through surveys, stakeholder interviews and available industry statistics. We can also look at your existing website statistics to analyse the demographic of your current customers.

Resources

We will analyse your organisation by creating a special online SWOT, to isolate potential avenues for maximising value online. We will also look at you internal resources - who is responsible for digital? Capabilities? What is the company infrastructure like? An area that is often overlooked until it is too late is supporting the digital campaign. Planning for the success of a digital campaign is an important element of ensuring the success of your digital strategy. If sales increase, is the stock available and will you be able to manage the increase in orders? If online engagement with your customers grows rapidly do you have the staff available to engage and montor areas of engagement? If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, can your website handle large increases in traffic?

Market Analysis

Here we will look at market statistics, focus on actionable needs and trends - what they are and how you can meet them.

Competitor analysis

What are your competitors doing? Benchmarking against competitors will provide valuable insights for your own digital strategy, and is crucial for SEO, social media marketing and other tactics we might develop. We will provide you with a detailed competitor analysis report outlining your competitors digital situation.

Opinion leaders

Where do your customers go to find information? Who are the opinion leaders in your industry? We will review your customers' use of different types of sites which may influence their decisions, such as search engines, news sites, forums, social networks and bloggers. You should build your brand awareness and monitor your brand reputation across these channels.

Know your audience & brand

In this step we will analyse your customers, their characteristics, behaviours, needs and wants. We will work with:

What is the profile of your current customers? Is this segment aligned with your business objectives? What are their behaviours like? Together we will go through analytics gathered on your website to determine the profile of your current audience.

Next we will determine if this segment is the most beneficial segment for you to target online. You should apply your traditional segments, but we will also consider new microtargeting options that are available for you online. We will create a profile for your ideal customers - their demographics, search habits, product selection behaviours and needs.

Digital campaigns that have a message that is not aligned with the audience are weak, of limited value and like incorrect brand messages potentially damaging.

Know your objectives and KPIs

Your Digital objectives should be closely aligned with your overall business objectives. In this step we will identify suitable objectives for your digital strategy, and create measurable KPIs for each. Our objective setting will centralise around 4 areas:

Reaching - building awareness of your business to drive traffic to your online presence, website or social media.

Action - encouraging and facilitating for your customers to take action and interact with your brand on your site or other nominated area. Persuading customers or prospects take the next step when they initially reach your site or social network page.

Converting - getting the customer to form a relationship which will generate commercial value for your business.

Engaging - building brand loyalty and building customer relationships through time.

Know your digital strategy

In this step we will develop a strategy for achieving the objectives and KPIs we identified in the previous step. We will develop an online value proposition to position your online products and services in the customers mind.

We will also work though the marketing P's (Price, Product, Place, People, Partnerships, Promotion, Processes) and modify these for online. Should you have a different pricing strategy for online? Should you modify your product offering for your online store?

We will work on how to integrate your offline and online marketing and how these can leverage off each other, web content strategy and retention strategies.

Know your tactics

Now it is time to tie it all together! Here we will define the specific tactics we will use - for each objective we will create an initiative that will fulfil that objective. Tactics will also be planned to cover each of the Reaching, Action, Converting and Engaging areas as defined previously. As an example, one Converting objective could be to raise the amount of online sales. The tactics to achieve this could be to lower the risk potential customers associate with the purchase by improving product photography, setting up an online system for product returns, overcoming all objectives by answering all potential questions online and offering free shipping.

Execute & measure

It's time to execute! We will put all of the digital tactics together into a recommendations document for you, and we can help you implement these, create a plan and a timeline for implementation. Most importantly, we will decide on the best way to measure the different implementations and campaigns, and set up dashboards for you.

An important note to remember is that digital channels always work best when they're integrated with other channels, so remember that where appropriate, digital should be combined with the traditional offline media and channels. We can help you create print marketing campaigns to integrate with your digital campaigns.