20 Aug HOW TO BUILD AN EFFECTIVE DIGITAL STRATEGY (IN 10 STEPS)
If you want to have a productive digital presence for your brand, you need to have a well-thought and effective digital strategy. As the beloved French author and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Deciding what’s the best strategy for your brand/company can be challenging when you jump at it. You need to proceed step by step by thinking your brand’s story and setting attainable and realistic goals to be achieved.
Here are 10 steps to consider when building an effective digital strategy:
1. What is your Business Story?
You need to create a business story, which will help you to be more relatable. At the end of the day, it’s the human connection that matters. Digital world is very crowded and various, and a business story is what you need to stand out.
People want to connect and relate to your brand and what you are offering. You can create a relatable and effective brand story with the following steps, which will also ultimately help you build your strategy.
2. Start with your “Why?”
According to Simon Sinek, who describes himself as an ‘unshakable optimist’, people don’t buy what you’re offering, they buy WHY you’re offering. In his TED Talk, he explains the Golden Circle and why you should adopt this methodology in detail. You need to tell people WHY you’re doing what you’re doing first, not the opposite way.
3. How will you help your buyer persona/target audience?
When you’re telling your brand story, you need to showcase how your brand will help the buyer persona/target audience in a clear way. The audience should understand how you will find solutions to their problems or provide a product/service according to their needs.
4. What do you offer different than others?
Your brand story should include what you’re offering as a brand at the final step. You should present your products/services in a way to affect your audience’s journey. You need to adjust your solutions according to the different journeys and phases as each buyer persona has a unique situation.
5. Set SMART goals
You need to have SMART goals to achieve, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. If you have any hope to achieve your goals, you should first take a look at them.
To give an example, ‘Gaining 1,500 more followers on Instagram by the end of this year to reach more audience’ is a SMART goal. Having an unrealistic and hard to achieve goal will cause you and your team to lose motivation and cause a waste of your resources.
6. Have a platform-specific tone for each social platform
Don’t copy-paste a caption on each social media platform for the same post. Every social media platform has its own character, culture or jargon if you will. You can have a unique or specific tone as a brand but these platforms have their own expectation (in terms of audience).
Most influential brands/companies don’t ever share the same content on each social media platform. To illustrate, interactive contents such as videos are more consumed on Instagram, while contents such as reports and statistics are more fit on Twitter.
7. Be up-to-date
Digital world and especially social media platforms love hot topics. You need to know what’s going on, what’s new, what are the predictions for near future. It’s all about being up to date, which will also help you adopt and update your brand when/if necessary. This will also contribute to you being a trendsetter within your industry!
8. Be consistent and authentic
Being up to date and following trends, doesn’t necessarily mean applying all of them. You need to be authentic and consistent as a brand. Don’t adopt or apply anything just because it’s trendy or viral.
You have a unique voice, don’t hesitate to share it. Your authenticity and reliability are the things that will attract the target audience to your brand.
9. Build a content strategy
Content creation forms a great deal of digital marketing. Nowadays, it’s considered impossible to grow digitally without content marketing. If you think your brand/company is not suitable for blog posts, you need to make a deeper research.
Various companies from various industries such as home security, software, dental hygiene, cosmetics and etc. are publishing content on their websites. It’s a great way of attracting the buyer persona.
10. Analyse your data
Digital marketing is all about data. You need proper data measurement, analysis and reporting tools and systems to see where your brand is and how you want to move forward. This will also help you set achievable goals for your brand and the areas you need to improve.
Without a clear and realistic digital strategy, you’ll likely waste your resources and time. We understand that it can be tough to start on right away, but keep in mind every great journey starts with one step! It’s all about finding correct connections, resources and information.
If you think you need a unique digital strategy that is crafted based on your brand’s needs, problems and goals, feel free to contact IDA Media!
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