digital strategy
10 Pitfalls To Avoid When Creating A Digital Strategy
This is an excerpt from a white paper widely circulated in the US this week. Click here to download the entire article.
There are all sorts of conflicting statistics about the failure rate of online marketing campaigns. The numbers don’t really matter. There are enough highly publicized train wrecks to safely conclude that a good percentage go wrong. The more interesting question is why?
One reason may be the ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet. Facebook today. Pinterest tomorrow. It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to building a high impact web and mobile presence. Here are 10 pitfalls to avoid when designing a digital strategy for your client or brand.
PITFALL #1:
Rolling Out A Strategy Before Conducting An Assessment
If you take only one point away from this paper, please let it be this. Before even thinking about whether your business needs a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a new fangled iPhone app, do a rigorous assessment of your existing online and mobile presence and that of your competitors. Find your audience online and understand how they want to be engaged. Research the online advertising climate and see if any firm, anywhere, is establishing online and mobile marketing best practices. What has worked? What has crashed faster than a Kardashian wedding?
An assessment lays the groundwork for the strategy. You can’t figure out where you want to be until you know where you currently are, online.
Takeaway
- Analyze the company’s website for ease of navigation, broken links, see how it ranks in search results.
- Review your firm’s (or your client’s) social media channels, note the frequency of post, the level of active engagement from your target audience. Apply the same analysis to your competitors.
- Search forums, social media, and blogs to find your target audience. Understand where they are, how they like to engage, and take careful note of key influencers.
PITFALL #2:
Objectives. What Objectives?
Imagine jumping in the car and pressing the gas without knowing your destination. How would you decide which route to take? That’s what it’s like to design a roadmap for a digital strategy that does not have clear objectives. How can you know whether a pay-per-click advertising campaign is better than a frequently updated blog if you don’t know what either tactic is trying to achieve.
Clients often say their online objective is to grow revenue. That’s not sufficiently clear. A more valuable goal would be to increase revenue from online sales by 7% in a specific time period. The more specific the objective(s), the better.
Takeaway
- List your goals for the digital strategy as they apply to your larger business goals. Review and refine until they are crystal clear.
- Select and customize web and mobile tools, design timelines and structure content to meet those objectives.
Download the rest of this white paper here.
Tags: ALERT, digital strategy, pitfalls
The Effects Google+ Could Have On Business
After months of rumours Google jumped into the social network game with a big splash last week, announcing its new social network Google+ as the competition for Facebook. Currently, users are only able to sign up through invites but It’s expected that by the end of July, Google+ will be open to the public, possibly with new Google+ Brand Pages, too.
Yes, Google+ is yet another “sandbox” to play in and learn about but it comes with some big enticements including the prospect of easy integration of services. As we discussed last week, Google+ has many features that compete with several web and mobile apps and it appears that Google+ may be looking at using one of their latest features, Google Hangouts, in their upcoming Google+ Brand Pages. The big advantage that both Facebook and Google have over their competitors is scaleable size. But will an all-in-one solution win out? Too early to call but here are some early indicators.
It seems Google couldn’t be happier with the launch of Google+ and its social sharing button “Google +1.” Stats show that websites are quickly adopting the Google button, and that social sharing continues to grow across the web
With “+1” and Google+, Google has the ability to tie all of its products together to create the ultimate search friendly business platform. From content curation to user reviews, most businesses will be in a position to benefit from Google+ — possibly even more than Facebook. Despite current pervasiveness, it’s even conceivable that Facebook could transition into a MySpace 2.0 evolved social entertainment network with its large audience of gamers, and now rumoured music service. We’re not suggesting a mass exodus but with the prospect of a shift as significant as this one, we are saying that it’s more important than ever to have a meaningful digital strategy.
In June, it was reported that people are spending more time on mobile apps than the web itself. Time spent surfing the Internet shifted to 81 minutes/day on a mobile app compared to 74 minutes/day on the web itself. Was Chris Anderson’s article on “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” an accurate reading of the future? The trends halfway through 2011 would say so – and there’s more to come. Google has already reported that native apps for Google+ are coming soon.
The question is no longer whether a business has an audience on the Internet — only where? Is it on the web, on a mobile app, or both? With an integrated strategy, a brand can better identify its top priorities and its best channels for engagement. Community and context are everything, but if a brand is not active on the same channel as its target audience then despite good intentions, it’s operating in different universe.
Tags: digital strategy, facebook, google plus, mobile apps, web
Social Media Strategy? Spare Me
A friend of mine quietly sent me a slideshare presentation yesterday. It was created by a long established advertising and interactive agency in town. She sent it to me quietly because it was entitled “Why You Don’t Need a Social Media Strategy”. I guess she thought I should know I might soon be out of work, if word of this got around.
I enjoyed going through the slideshow.. and I didn’t entirely disagree with its point. However, there is an “it all comes down to semantics” argument to be made against it. Let me explain.
The presentation stated you don’t need a social media strategy. Instead, you need an engagement strategy, or an influence strategy. My take on the presentation was that it was capitalizing on the nausea widely experienced when hearing the ubiquitous phrase “social media strategy”. Fair enough. However, in our shop, engagement and influence are key parts of every strategy. Doesn’t that go without saying? Perhaps what the slideshow was trying to get at is the fact that it is vitally important to venture deeper than social media when designing an online plan. Mobile, website content, optimization, online advertising are all important, sometimes more important than social media depending on the business objectives for the strategy.
There is no question “social media” is getting way too much airtime. But for people new to the concept of having an integrated online strategy, this term can really help get them in the right line of thinking, despite its shortcomings.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?
Tags: digital strategy, engagement, influence, Social Media, strategy
Social + Search = Marketing (Part 2)
This is part 2 of the Marketing basics series. After discussing the 4 P’s of Marketing in part 1, I thought it would be useful to talk about brand positioning. In particular, the basic T-C-B model is a good, simple framework to organize your thought process and approach when creating social media and search engine marketing strategies.
Brand positioning is an enormous topic in itself. Traditionally, companies tried to create a brand image for their companies through broadcasting marketing messages to their audiences through advertisements on TV, radio, print, etc. With the advent of social media, online marketing and engagement focused communications, it is suicide to sound like a traditional broadcast ad when engaging with your audience.
Traditional messaging approaches and the notion that you can define your brand for your audience do not carry over to online marketing. So it is important to understand your company’s brand positioning.
Even though you can’t tell your audience how to perceive your brand, your communications and actions do influence how they perceive it. What you say and what you do must be consistent with your desired brand image.
What is the T-C-B model?
I was first exposed to the T-C-B model while reading a Marketing book by Rossiter and Bellman. T stands for Target, C stands for Category and B stands for Benefit.
Target
It is important to understand who is your target audience. With social media, your target audience may be just one person or a small, special interest group you engage with. Whichever the case, you need to understand them on a deeper, more personal level than traditional marketing.
Category
It is also important to understand what category need your audience will get from your product, service or interaction with you. By category, I mean the type of product. For example, the iPhone’s category is a mobile phone. The iPod’s category is a MP3 player. The iPad’s category is…I’m still trying to figure out that one… If you cannot quickly communicate to your audience what your product does, why they need it or why they should care about your company, they will not pay attention.
Benefit
As touched upon in part 1 of this series, the benefit of a product to its consumers is the value your audience will receive from your product. If you understand who your audience is and what category need they desire, then the key benefit is the “thing” that will satisfy that need.
Try considering T-C-B before sending that next tweet. Who are you engaging with? What is it you’re talking about? What value will your followers get?
Victor Chan
eMarketing Strategist
Tags: benefit, brand, brand positioning, category need, digital strategy, engagement, internet marketing, marketing basics, online marketing, target audience
Future Digital Media Ninja at a Vancouver Internet Marketing Agency
The most interesting part of being an intern at Magnify so far has been participating in the process of ALERT (Assess, Locate, Engage, Respond and Track) for clients. Participating and contributing to the strategy from start to finish in all of its stages has been definitely a first for me. In my past experiences my tasks and responsibilities have been pretty much focused on one specific thing. It is very rewarding and refreshing to have a strategy, where one had a meaningful role in crafting and executing from start to finish, giving positive results for a client.
The most fun part of ALERT was participating in the team brainstorming sessions. It’s a great opportunity to get your ideas out there, as well as be exposed to new ones. Even when the ideas might not fit that specific client, they can be fine tuned and used for another project or client. The open nature of the discussions made it easy to engage other teammates and pick their brains on creative ways to use social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
The less entertaining part of the process, but probably the most necessary would definitely be tracking. The procedural nature of tracking results and stats on a daily basis can get a little bit monotonous. However, one quickly learns that it is not any less important. Monitoring the performance of the implemented strategies will allow you to react and make the necessary changes to ensure that we meet client needs and project goals.
As an amateur web developer I have been able to observe firsthand the necessity of taking social media into consideration when developing a website. In order to be able to boost quality traffic and create online buzz, the site needs to have the ability to share content. The other interesting aspect is that the content needs to tap into online culture and add value to online conversations and interactions that occur on the different social media platforms.
It’s been an awesome learning experience working at Magnify for the past few months, and I can’t wait to learn some more in my quest to become a digital media ninja.
Tags: digital media, digital strategy, internet marketing, online marketing agency, Vancouver
