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How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

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Colin MacDougal

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Creating a buzz on this ultra crowded web of people, information, and brands is a challenging task. Only by forming a smart strategy and then executing it do marketers succeed.

Know Your Customers

The very first step that marketers have to focus on is consumer research before they can board the brand wagon. It is mandatory that sufficient research be conducted before even the tiniest effort of brand promotion because according to Sun Tzu, ‘Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ And strategies can be developed only by someone informed. Demographic and psychographic details are used to develop a customer profile.

Create a Brand

Using information from the customer analysis, focus on the creation of the three following things:

  • Brand Essence – What is the one clear, crisp idea that the brand is about? The people behind Coke have worked to promote is as a brand that represents happiness, Lux is all about star appeal, while BIC characterizes disposability. Remember, a brand’s essence is the one thing about it that can never be change.
  • Brand Values – What values that surround the brand? In addition to being a symbol of happiness, Coke also symbolizes celebration, sharing, love, friendship, familial values, etc.
  • Brand Persona – If brand essence and brand values were personified, they would create brand persona.

Customer Internet Availability

Once the branding cycle is complete, probe into the web browsing behavior of the target market. The timing, the frequency, the websites/social media they use most to interact with others, the things they like to share, the things they enjoy but do not choose to share with others, the average amount of time spent on one sitting at a social networking site, etc.

Keep an Eye on the Competition

Along with details of web browsing behavior of the target market, knowledge about what the competition is doing on the Internet is also crucial. Find out what the industry’s leaders are doing and which and how new entrants in the market have been able to attract significant audiences at different social networking sites and other online mediums.

Select Mediums

Keep in mind the selection of online media the target market uses and the different platforms used by the competition. There are two main strategies that marketers can go for – offensive or defensive. Campaigns with larger resources can afford to adopt an offensive strategy and establish their presence on online platforms that are already dominated by competitors. On the other hand, marketers may also adopt a defensive strategy by attacking the competition where it is not looking. In other words, it can establish its presence on mediums that the target market frequently uses but which haven’t been used by competitors yet.

Some of the most frequently used mediums and tactics for online marketing campaigns include application development, meta engines, online stores, PR engines, blogs, feed services such as RSS, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, social media and affiliate marketing.

Analyze Results

Having conducted the research, created a strategy, and then applied it, the last yet perhaps the most important step of the entire process is to analyze the results. Thanks to tools such as Google Analytics, the results of an online marketing campaign can be determined. The findings can be used to improve future efforts to promote a brand online.

Author’s Bio:
Colin MacDougal works with www.HostPapa.com company serving over 100,000 customers around the world. Since launching in 2006, HostPapa has offered reliable, budget-friendly, easy-to-use web solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. You can find HostPapa at http://www.facebook.com/hostpapa

How to Bring a 2nd Generation of Evangelists into Building a Brand Values Baseline

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Arthur Lugovoy on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Build a Brand Values Baseline — PART 2

One Ripple on a Bungee Cord

Master teachers and trainers will tell you that the most lasting understanding is that which builds on what we know and takes form from our experience of what we are learning. The most powerful method for moving a person, a team, or a group of volunteers to share the vision and values of a project or a brand in a deep thoughtful and feeling way is to let them follow the path to their learning as much as possible.

Anyone who’s sat watching someone who moves a mouse around a keyboard showing us how to use a web tool knows that method is not nearly as effective as when someone hands us the mouse and asks us to do the same motions to see the results.

If we want our new volunteer, new employee, new team or group to take on, understand and internalize the values that ARE our brands letting them own their own learning is by far the best way to go.

Two weeks ago, we collected the values words behind the higher purpose that brings our teams to the quest — what we’re building together that we can’t build alone. We talked about the idea of sending them them off with a challenge to condense that list of words into 5 words that might stand up and stand alone as a foundation for what we do. I offered some about the huge list of value words.

How might we take this list back to entire company to distill it down to no more than five words — a values baseline — that describes the values that drive what we do?

Last week, we talked about how to find the leaders in the pack of people around us.

Send out the first generation of evangelists to interact with stakeholder leaders. But make sure that the message you send doesn’t get smaller and smaller — like a ripple in the water. Instead imagine that the first ripple — the core team of 8-12 people — are attached to the quest a fine thin bungee cord. Have them go out, learn and come back again.

How to Bring a Second Generation of Evangelists into Building a Brand Values Baseline

The goal or objective of sharing at this moment is to invite and include the people who help our business thrive at the earliest point in the process.

  • Work with the core group to help them identify leaders who want to build something that they can’t build alone.
  • Determine a strategy of selecting 2-4 per core team member that will move outward from the core group to include core people in adjacent groups with similar needs. For example, marketing might reach to sales, pr, communications.
  • Invite those individuals to listen into a report of what the core group has been doing and ask their help in reviewing the core values baseline words when the team has reached 5 or fewer. (keep this informal and conversational.)

As the new stakeholder leaders are invited to be part of the review process give them room to ask questions and offer to participate. Let them know you’re preparing a formal method to move the process out to a second generation. Meanwhile ask them to …

  • be an active part of what the group doing
  • be the eyes on the outside of the conversation checking that we’re not missing or skipping important ideas
  • offer insights, questions, mutations, and new visions,
  • add energy and experience missing from the group.

How do we do that?
To build trust and a solid brand values baseline, strategy needs to underpin how this goes. Each core team of champions and heroes from the first meeting needs to champion a group or team that will become their shareholders network — the second-generation ripple. Inside that second ripple, the core team can identify 4-8 people that seem most interested and qualified to enlist in participating in ‘building something we can’t build alone.” The core teams can hold 1-2 small meetings of 3-4 people and place the task of distilling the words down to a short together with them.

In two to four weeks, the core teams can meet again with a single short list and a depth of comments from the individuals with whom they’ve met and discussed the values underpinning the brand values baseline.

When the core teams meet together, the discussion then revolves around how to serve the thoughtful, heartfelt needs of the higher cause of both the first and second generation as we clarify and condense the values baseline to fewer than 5 words.

Can you name the values that drive your business? Are you sure that everyone who helps your business thrive would agree on those five words

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

What Three Values Drive Your Brand?

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

10-Point Plan — The Brand Values Baseline Defined

Three Reasons Get Us to the Task at Hand

Now the core team returns to discuss the feedback from the stakeholder leaders who’ve helped them identify the brand values baseline. Review the words each group has returned with and talk through the meaning until the group can roll up the short list to three words that stand for the foundational core values that drive the business. Try one from the head, one from the heart, and one from the long-term vision or meaning.

An example might be these three that drive SOBCon:

Delivering brilliance: We believe in intelligent, elegant connected ideas that raise us up to higher thinking.

Trusting fearlessness: We believe in authentic trust in ourselves and others that has no room for fear as it stand with our intelligent ideas.

Deep Strategic Vision: Our quest and our purpose is to move ourselves, our businesses, and those around us forward with leadership born of strategy and deep meaningful purpose.

Or brilliance, trust, vision. Those three words wrap up the sentences and make the an easy reference for every decision that drives our business. Other people on the core team can choose their synonyms and as long as they mean the same thing, we can trust in the variations and the mutations that will grow from them.

We have our values aligned.

What three values drive your business?

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Create a Powerful Core Community by Building a Brand Values Baseline – PART 1

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(Updated in 2020)

10-Point Plan: Build a Brand Values Baseline PART 1

A Decision Model for All

Any time we interact, we have a chance to build and strengthen relationships. When we strengthen relationships with the people who love what we do, we strengthen our business. When we know the values on which those relationships stand, we can identify, attract, and connect with more people like them.

That’s the thinking behind building a brand values baseline.

Whether you’re a corporation or a solopreneur, you can start a power core community by finding 6 to 10 people who support and love what you do and bring them into this exercise.

  • Choose a location that is good for thinking and honors the participants. Think of the place you might take your most valued client or customer group to talk strategy and future relationships.
  • Invite 2 – 8 heroes — people you’ve identified as social stars, training stars, influence stars — to a meeting. The wider diversity of their skills, levels and backgrounds, the richer the experience will be. Also invite a trusted non-participant to record notes.
  • Explain that the room is designated a free conversation zone — that you’ve asked them to join you in a conversation because of their leadership skills and the respect they show for the people who work for the business. Let them know you’re counting learning from them so that the company might grow.
  • Without much talk or fanfare, ask them to reflect on the highest reason they might believe in the work your business does. Allow them time — as long as 10 minutes — to gather their thoughts as individuals. Encourage them to write words and phrases, draw images, or make a mind map of what comes
  • Allow each individual to share his or her thoughts with the group. As they speak, write notes for reference and track words that express values on a flip chart.
  • When the entire group has spoken, review what you heard and confirm that you’ve heard correctly what was said. Add your own thoughts. List your own values words to the flip chart.

Review the list of words, noting the similarities between them and poses these questions.

  • How might we take this list back to entire company to distill it down to no more than five words — a values baseline — that describes the values that drive what we do?
  • Should we distill down now and get their approval?
  • What process might we use to include everyone in this quest?
  • Who does everyone include?
  • How long will that take? What should each of us bring back to this meeting, if reaching a true values baseline is our goal?

As your heroes and champions get more interested in the values that underpin your business, so will the people who look up to them. A single meeting with the heroes and champions who love what you do can bring out the best in your company in less time than a whole team from a huge consulting firm.

Live your values and you’ll attract the people to your brand who value what you do.

How will you / did you find your brand values baseline?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss