Step 1: Develop a Digital Strategy

50% of you are doing digital marketing but amazingly, don’t have a strategy or plan.
A digital strategy will help you define:

1.1 Your opportunities in the E-Marketplace
1.2 Your Segmentation and Targeting
1.3 Your Online Value Proposition
1.4 Your online goals
1.5 Your online audience personas
1.6 The best touchpoint to drive leads and sales

Start with a separate document to make the case and get buy-in and then aim to integrate it into your marketing strategy.

Step 2: Create Your Digital Roadmap

You’re directionless if you don’t have a long-term roadmap, we recommend using a range of plans and checklists that suit your business.

To manage digital effectively, a cascading hierarchy of plans works best including:

2.1 Long-term vision and roadmap for strategic initiatives
2.2 An annual plan for marketing integration digital marketing
2.3 Campaign and quarterly 90 day plans
2.4 Editorial and content calendars
2.5 Weekly and daily operational plan and to-do lists

Step 3: Laser Focus on the Core Inbound Channels

The key channels that drive the bulk of visits and sales are fixed, but they have evolved, so apply the latest best practices, particularly for mobile platforms.

Focus on these core Paid, Owned and Earned media channels to gain better visibility than your competitors:

3.1 Search Engine Optimisation fuelled by Content Marketing
3.2 Google Adwords
3.3 Social media marketing linking to influencer outreach
3.4 Email marketing for prospects and customers
3.5 Display advertising using remarketing

Step 4: Bring Your Core Competences In-House

The details matter to getting results in digital, that’s the insights on your audience and optimising creative for relevance and engagement.

Although many do resources these core activities in-house, our research showed that hybrid or agency-based approach makes sense for some businesses too, so it’s about selecting the right resources for each activity. We recommend digital marketers retain ownership or collaborate closely with agencies on:

• Customer insight: Behaviour, characteristics and needs
• Strategy: Reviewing content investments are aligned with business goals
• Analysis and Optimisation: Analytics, testing and post-campaign reviews

Step 5: Invest in Planning, Evaluation and Optimisation

Make time for these activities to grow your digital marketing contribution.

We asked marketers whether they thought more time spent managing digital marketing would lead to better results. Their response was that they believed their companies should be investing more time.

5.1 Planning. Post-campaign reviews are important too
5.2 Evaluation and Optimisation. Reviewing insights and tests to increase ROI
5.3 Integration. More on this in Step 6
5.4 Outreach. Often the forgotten part of Content Marketing and SEO

Step 6: Integrate Your Marketing Activities

Integration of different digital channels is one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing today.

Our survey results show that many aren’t happy with the lack of integration, with silos killing integration, particularly in larger organisations, so consider these integration techniques.

6.1 Develop a shared multichannel view of customer insight based on persona
6.2 Campaign plans consider all channels from the outset
6.3 Paid, owned and earned media investment in balanced
6.4 Reducing the number of specialist agencies to a full service agency
6.5 Touchpoint attribution is used in analytics to credit the right media investment

Step 7: Optimise Your Marketing Activities

Join the leaders who have embraced optimisation and run structured tests and trials.

These are techniques leaders use:

7.1 AB and Multivariate testing fro web and mobile experience
7.2 A structured plan of hypotheses to test for different touch points
7.3 Test of ad creative
7.4 Optimisation of Ad networks and remarkerting techniques
7.5 Testing of offer and proposition as part of Growth Hacking

 

Download the full Managing Digital Marketing Report here