Once you have a clear sense of what the business challenge or objective is, and you have defined how your marketing strategy will work towards fulfilling it, you can start thinking about your digital marketing strategy.
Digital marketing strategy builds on and adapts the principles of traditional marketing, using the opportunities and challenges offered by the digital medium. A digital marketing strategy should be constantly iterating and evolving. Since the Internet allows for near-instantaneous feedback and data gathering, digital marketers should constantly be optimising and improving their online marketing
efforts.
User-centric thinking, which involves placing the user at the core of all decisions, is vital when looking at building a successful digital marketing strategy. The digital marketing strategist of today is offered not only a plethora of new tactical possibilities, but also unprecedented ways of measuring the effectiveness of chosen strategies and tactics. Digital also allows greater opportunities for interaction and consumer engagement than were possible in the past, so it is important to consider the ways in which the brand can create interactive experiences for consumers, not just broadcast messages.
The fact that digital marketing is highly empirical is one of its key strengths. Almost everything can be measured: from behaviours, to actions and action paths, to results. This means that the digital marketing strategist should start thinking with return on investment (ROI) in mind. Built into any strategy should be a testing framework and the ability to remain flexible and dynamic in a medium that shifts and changes as user behaviours do.
If we defined strategy as ‘a plan of action designed to achieve a particular outcome’, the desired outcome of a digital marketing strategy would be aligned with your organisation’s overall business and brand-building objectives or challenges. For example, if one of the overall objectives were acquisition of new clients, a possible digital marketing objective might be building brand awareness online.
Consider that in the early days of TV, when the new medium was not as yet entirely understood, there were separate ‘TV planners’ who created a ‘TV strategy’ for the brand. Over time, this was incorporated into the overall marketing strategy (as it should be).
The same is going to happen with digital. Increasingly, digital thinking is being incorporated into marketing strategy from day one. This section considers digital strategy separately in order to highlight some differences in approach, but this should change in practice over time.
