Introduction:
In previous article we get an overview on digital marketing with different characteristics, the origin of Digital Marketing and how its differ from Traditional Marketing. Here, we will see how to plan digital marketing, what are the skills requires for it and what the career is.
Digital Marketing Plan:
PLANNING IS IMPORTANT FOR ANY START...
The plan must outline the objectives, the target audience profile, the content strategy, the channel strategy, the budget and methods of measurement.
Objectives
The starting point is to identify the objectives of digital marketing. This can be split into Branding and Performance objectives. Both goals can coexist. Some campaigns and activities may have the objective of increasing brand awareness and brand recall, whereas others may have the objective of increasing sales or leads or conversions. It is advisable to identify the metrics for measurement of performance alongside objective setting. If the goal is branding, then the metric would be recall. This could be carried out by hiring a market research agency, which may do an online or offline research for top-of-the-mind recall, attitude and brand associations. If the objective is to measure performance, then measurement can be done using metrics such as CTR, leads, conversions and cost per acquisition.
Buyer Personas
The next step is to identify buyer personas. This should be based on an analysis of past data and profile of your best customers and not based on hunch or assumptions. The more scientific it is, the more accurate it will be. Another important aspect is that you should develop multiple personas and not one. Rarely customers would be so homogenous that they can be categorized for one persona. The information that you need about your best customers can be categorized into three areas:
Who:
you should identify the age, gender, location, job title, responsibility, education of your customer and make a pen profile.
What
You must consider the goals of your customers and their pain points that they want to be resolved. What are their areas of interest, what are their passion points, what media do they consume, what are their media touch points?
Why
Ultimately you must ask if they will buy your product, your unique selling proposition, your elevator pitch and how compelling it is to convince the customers to buy. To fill your buyer personas, you can obtain information from the social media profiles of your customers. You can also get useful information from audience reports in Google Analytics, a system that explains the geographic, demographic, device data of your audience. If you place Website Demographic Tags from LinkedIn on your website, you will get detailed information about demographics such as job title, function, seniority and function of your website visitors.
Content
You must prepare a content strategy by analysing what worked in the past and what didn't. You must analyse the performance of each of the content types such as video, image, infographics, e-books, webinars, games, how to, trends and create more of the variety that performed better.
Channel
As a part of the channel strategy, how much would you invest in creating paid, owned, earned content in owned, will you have website or a microsite? Which social media pages or handles will you have and how will you prioritize? For earned media, will you participate in blogs or forum or question-answer sites? What is your content strategy for getting engagement? Will you use contests, promotions, controversy or emotional appeal? For paid media, which platforms will you run campaigns on? Will you run campaigns on search engines or banner ads on websites, or on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin?
Timelines
You must prepare a month-wise calendar to document which activities are for which month. You must further break down content strategy, channel strategy, target audience week-wise so that there is a starting point to refer to.
Budget
How much budget will you allocate to digital marketing? It depends upon what percentage of the marketing objectives will be met through digital. It also depends upon the industry and the role of marketing communications in marketing mix and the role of digital in marketing communications mix. For certain industries such as e-commerce, financial services, automobile and education, digital is very important and hence a higher percentage may be allocated to digital. How much budget will you allocate for paid campaigns across different media!
Hence how much budget will you allocate as media cost? How much budget will you assign for content creation?
How much budget will you allot for technology development cost such as developing a website or a game!
Measurement
The measurement metrics (As above Image) will be dependent upon the objective. If the objective is branding then measurement will involve recall, attitude and association studies. You may wish to hire a market research agency to do it either online or offline. If the campaign objective is performance, then measurement is through CTR, leads and conversions.
Skillsets Of Digital Marketing:
Think
Digital marketing requires people who can think and conceptualize. They should be able to look at metrics and analyse the performance and optimize. They should have analytical skills and should be able to run campaigns on search, display and social media. They should be able to do A/B testing to know what works and what does not and optimize. They should be able to identify some strategic goals of digital marketing such as testing some product concepts or doing market research for consumer trends.
Feel
This is one of the most important skills in digital marketing. It is the ability to empathize with your customers by stepping into their shoes and understanding their pain points. This skill will enable the digital marketer to identify the content strategy that will resonate with their target audiences. Members of the team possessing these skills will be actively involved in creating content strategy for websites, blogs, forums and social media. They should analyse the sentiments using listening tools so that they know the pulse of the market, the brand associations and the consumer engagement.
Act
Digital marketing requires a lot of execution. You need people who can understand the brand concept and the content strategy and create creative images and videos. These people should be graphic designers or be from institutes of design and know software for editing photos and videos. They should not only know how to use tools and software but should also be artistic and creative. They should also understand brand values and should be able to create images and videos that are aligned with the brand values.
Where You Can Work as a Digital Marketer?
The world is witnessing digitalization at a very fast pace. The organizations involved in digital marketing can be divided into three broad types: companies or brands (clients), agencies and vendors.
The clients are the companies that look to increase their sales and profits through digital marketing. They can be B2B or B2C and may sell products or services.
Agencies (and consultancies) work for clients to assist them with their business goals. In digital marketing, they're often called 'specialists'. The companies hire agencies to perform certain tasks, such as SEO, running paid online ad campaigns or managing their social media presence. Engaging an agency is a very common practice as the business goals are hard to achieve without specialist knowledge and execution of strategy.
Finally, the vendors are the marketing suppliers that help the clients and agencies to execute their digital strategies. Within the vendor space, there are a wide variety of roles, from providing user base for direct sales and marketing, to technical support or creative marketing.
Summary:
All the basics of digital marketing and why it is required for other technology and software is discussed in brief. It is very vast topic to cover up in depth. Next we will see, how it's works with different social media platforms and what are the different algorithms to run your business profiles.
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