DIGITAL MARKETING

STRATEGY
Study Notes

SEO (SEARCH ENGINE

OPTIMIZATION)
Study Notes

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Digital Marketing Strategy
LESSON 1: DIGITAL STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS ....................................................................... 7

MARKETING TODAY ............................................................................................................................................ 8

Evolution of companies’ strategic orientations ............................................................................................. 8

Marketing today ............................................................................................................................................ 8

Scope of strategic marketing ......................................................................................................................... 9

STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS ............................................................................................................................... 9

What is a digital marketing strategy? ............................................................................................................ 9

Components of a digital marketing strategy ............................................................................................... 10

The outputs of digital marketing ................................................................................................................. 10

OVERARCHING STRATEGY ................................................................................................................................ 11

The value of an overarching strategy........................................................................................................... 11

Digital marketing vs digital media ................................................................................................................ 11

DIGITAL RESOURCES ......................................................................................................................................... 12

The core elements of a digital marketing strategy ...................................................................................... 12

STRATEGY AND BUDGETING ............................................................................................................................ 12

The elements of budgeting .......................................................................................................................... 12

Budget considerations ................................................................................................................................. 12

The budget plan ........................................................................................................................................... 14

STRATEGY AND ROI .......................................................................................................................................... 14

What is ROI?................................................................................................................................................. 14

Commercial objectives ................................................................................................................................. 15

Measuring success with ROI ........................................................................................................................ 15

Measuring success on non-conversion channels ......................................................................................... 16

LESSON 2: DIGITAL STRATEGY RESEARCH ................................................................................ 18

STRATEGY AND RESEARCH ACTIVITIES ............................................................................................................. 19

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 Key research activities ................................................................................................................................. 19

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT RESEARCH ........................................................................................................ 19

What is strong research? ............................................................................................................................. 19

Critical thinking ............................................................................................................................................ 20

Research best practices ............................................................................................................................... 20

OWNED AND DESK RESEARCH ......................................................................................................................... 20

Owned research ........................................................................................................................................... 20

Desk research ............................................................................................................................................... 21

DIGITAL AUDIT .................................................................................................................................................. 21

What is a digital audit? ................................................................................................................................ 21

What a digital audit examines ..................................................................................................................... 22

Elements of a digital audit ........................................................................................................................... 22

AUDIENCE RESEARCH ....................................................................................................................................... 24

Audience data variables ............................................................................................................................... 24

Using audience data variables ..................................................................................................................... 24

Developing audience insights ...................................................................................................................... 25

Creating audience personas ......................................................................................................................... 25

Audience persona insights ........................................................................................................................... 26

Finding audience data .................................................................................................................................. 27

What audiences should you target? ............................................................................................................ 27

SOCIAL LISTENING (VIDEO) .............................................................................................................................. 27

What is social listening? ............................................................................................................................... 27

How to conduct social listening ................................................................................................................... 28

Types of social listening ............................................................................................................................... 28

Developing insights from social listening ..................................................................................................... 29

WEBSITE RESEARCH ......................................................................................................................................... 29

The role of the website in a digital marketing strategy ............................................................................... 29

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 The changing face of search engine optimization (SEO) .............................................................................. 30

Audience behavior tools .............................................................................................................................. 31

COMPETITOR RESEARCH .................................................................................................................................. 31

What is competitor research? ..................................................................................................................... 31

Perceptual maps .......................................................................................................................................... 32

LESSON 3: SETTING STRATEGY OBJECTIVES AND KPIS ............................................................ 34

SETTING OBJECTIVES FOR A STRATEGY ............................................................................................................ 35

Why should you set objectives? .................................................................................................................. 35

Measuring success ....................................................................................................................................... 36

STRATEGY KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS) ......................................................................................... 37

The role of KPIs in digital marketing ............................................................................................................ 37

Reporting vs measurement .......................................................................................................................... 37

Assigning responsibilities ............................................................................................................................. 37

STRATEGY AND FORECASTING ......................................................................................................................... 37

Looking to the past ...................................................................................................................................... 38

Looking to the future ................................................................................................................................... 38

How to reach your goals .............................................................................................................................. 39

Setting KPIs from your forecast ................................................................................................................... 40

STRATEGY AND PERFORMANCE REVIEWS ....................................................................................................... 40

The importance of reviews .......................................................................................................................... 40

LESSON 4: DEVELOPING MARKETING BRIEFS AND CREATIVE STRATEGIES ............................. 42

DEVELOPING A MARKETING BRIEF ................................................................................................................... 43

Creating marketing briefs ............................................................................................................................ 43

CREATIVE STRATEGY......................................................................................................................................... 44

What is a creative strategy?......................................................................................................................... 44

Establishing a creative strategy ................................................................................................................... 44

Creative strategy vs content strategy .......................................................................................................... 45

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 CONTENT STRATEGY ........................................................................................................................................ 45

What is content strategy? ............................................................................................................................ 45

Content pillars .............................................................................................................................................. 45

The elements of a content strategy ............................................................................................................. 46

The content plan .......................................................................................................................................... 46

The content value matrix ............................................................................................................................. 47

INFLUENCER MARKETING STRATEGY ............................................................................................................... 47

What is influencer marketing? ..................................................................................................................... 47

Influencers in action..................................................................................................................................... 48

Influencer marketing strategy ..................................................................................................................... 50

CHANNEL SPECIFICATION FOR A LAUNCH PLAN .............................................................................................. 51

Creative specifications ................................................................................................................................. 51

WORKING WITH AN AGENCY ........................................................................................................................... 52

Why work with agencies? ............................................................................................................................ 52

Choosing an agency ..................................................................................................................................... 52

Paying an agency.......................................................................................................................................... 52

Best practices for working with an agency .................................................................................................. 52

Red flags when working with an agency ...................................................................................................... 53

Setting expectations with agency ................................................................................................................ 53

LESSON 5: EXECUTING A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY ...................................................... 55

IDENTIFYING CAMPAIGN CHANNELS ............................................................................................................... 56

Choosing your channels ............................................................................................................................... 56

Understanding outbound and inbound digital channels ............................................................................. 56

CHANNELS AND STRATEGY............................................................................................................................... 57

The channels in detail .................................................................................................................................. 57

OFFLINE CHANNELS .......................................................................................................................................... 59

COMMUNICATING A STRATEGY ....................................................................................................................... 60

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 The importance of communicating your strategy ....................................................................................... 60

Communication tools ................................................................................................................................... 60

Structuring your digital marketing strategy document ............................................................................... 61

USING A MEDIA PLAN....................................................................................................................................... 61

What is a media plan?.................................................................................................................................. 61

Implementing the media plan ...................................................................................................................... 62

DEFINING A CAMPAIGN ACTION PLAN............................................................................................................. 62

What is a campaign action plan? ................................................................................................................. 62

DELIVERING A CAMPAIGN ACTION PLAN ......................................................................................................... 64

Automation tools ......................................................................................................................................... 64

Selecting a project management tool .......................................................................................................... 64

Factors to consider ...................................................................................................................................... 64

Strategy risk ................................................................................................................................................. 64

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LESSON 1: DIGITAL STRATEGY
FUNDAMENTALS

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MARKETING TODAY

Evolution of companies’ strategic orientations

During the industrial revolution, companies focused most of their strategies on production. They concentrated
on enhancing production capacity and leveraging economies of scale.

As products became more nuanced, some businesses shifted their attention onto the product itself. Product
development and enhancement became the sole focus of these companies.

As economic models started to flourish, supply and demand were added to the market dynamic, and for a
time, suppliers could effectively control the supply of products to the market. This was epitomized by Henry
Ford’s famous quote about the mass-produced Model-T car: “A customer can have a car painted any color he
wants as long as it’s black.”

The forces of supply and demand eventually led to a balancing of market forces. This in turn led to more
market entrants, which sharpened competition and provided consumers with more power.

At this point, companies began to orient their strategies toward sales and customers. However, in the
beginning, they focused too much on results and on the needs of the end user and didn’t pay enough attention
to other market forces like competition and supply chains.

As time went on, companies started to adopt marketing as a strategic orientation and put marketing at the
core of all their decisions.

Leaders realized that developing and refining products is useful, but they began to ask:

Is there a need for these products and refinements? And, if there is a need, do consumers know
about these products and refinements?
Sales are a good way of increasing revenue, but do our customers return and buy again?
What should a salesperson highlight as the advantage of their product over competitor products, and
how do we make sure that our offering is distinct from competitor offerings?

Marketing today

Marketing evolved to provide the answer to all these questions and carry out the tasks required to implement
the solutions.

Marketing today is influenced by technology and aims to provide a superior experience to customers.
Marketing now happens in real time and is seamlessly integrated across offline and online channels. As
metaverse AI and VR technologies become more mainstream, marketing is likely to drive organizational
developments in these areas.

Roblox example

Roblox is a virtual universe which combines game playing, game creation, social media, and social commerce.
Brands are now using the platform for brand recognition purposes and to boost user engagement. For
example, Vans built a virtual skatepark in Roblox, where users earned points and could swap them for items
such as virtual shoes.

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Exceptions

However, some exceptions remain. Several tech companies are still product-led. A number of service-based
companies are still customer-led. And some B2B industrial and engineering specialists such as Foxconn are still
production-led.

Scope of strategic marketing

The scope of strategic marketing has moved from a transactional approach to a relationship-based approach.
This allows companies to plan for the long term; invest in forming strong relationships with customers and in
retaining them, rather than just acquiring them; and invest in forming strong relationships with trade partners,
suppliers, channel members, other stakeholders, and the community.

In addition, marketers can use social media channels to build relationships with and promote their brand to
customers and non-customers alike.

STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital strategy is a plan designed to realize business goals through digital marketing best practices and
execution. This plan then operates across all digital channels used by your organization or client. It aims to
target audiences with creative formats working together to drive towards a single objective or set of
objectives.

Digital strategies govern how digital is used to achieve commercial goals. A key foundation of digital strategy
that you will learn as a part of this module is that it is primarily about understanding your audience and their
behaviors, and thinking about how you might craft new behavior that involves your brand, product, or services
online.

A digital marketing strategy details all digital marketing activities, communications and channels which work
together to drive an overall objective. The key word here is ‘objective’. All digital marketing activities must
work towards achieving a clear and measurable objective.

Having a digital strategy:

Gives a clear understanding of the purpose that digital has for your business.
Allows you to establish clearly defined success outcomes.

A digital strategy involves a mix of:

Setting goals
Executing tactics
Attempting to achieve high-level business results

It is also a blueprint for your use of digital. From the start, everyone should be aware of, and committed to, a
clear purpose and clearly identified success outcomes – such as, increase sales by 10% in 3 months, for
example.

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Components of a digital marketing strategy

A digital strategy has six core components:

Objectives
Audience strategy
Channel strategy
Content strategy
Media strategy
Tactics

Before we dive into this module, let’s explore each of these core components in more detail:

Objectives: You first need to set the goals and outcomes you are trying to achieve with your plan
overall, and also from the individual elements that make up the plan. Objectives usually fall into
three main categories: Awareness, Conversion, or Retention.
Audience strategy: Once your objectives are decided, it is important to select the audience segments
that will help you achieve them. Will you be focusing on customers or prospects? Or are there
specific segments that you will target such as Gen Z or frequent purchasers? Your selected
audience(s) will drive several elements of your digital strategy.
Channel strategy: Your channels are all the different digital platforms and locations that you might
use. A channel strategy involves understanding what you can do with the various channels, and then
selecting specific channels or features because you know they are pertinent to your target audience
and objective.
Content strategy: This is the guideline for, and purpose of, your online content. The content strategy
is informed by the overarching digital strategy. Content can be what you put on your site, but also
what you put on social media, in your email newsletter, your podcast and your blog. Remember,
content should always serve the needs of the digital strategy and your business objectives.
Media strategy: This is the guideline for, and purpose of, your paid activity. Like the content strategy,
the media strategy is informed by the overarching digital strategy. It guides formats, timings, and
platform spends.
Tactics: These are the individual executions that accompany each of your strategies. They can easily
be confused with ‘strategies’. Strategies refer to what you want to do, whereas tactics refer to how
you want to do it.

The outputs of digital marketing

So, why do you need a digital marketing strategy? What are the outputs?

Here are some key reasons:

To establish the foundations of your strategy

To establish current activity, expectations, and resources
To establish requirements, budgets, and ownership

In summary, the purpose of your digital marketing strategy is to use your available resources (channels, tools,
and people) to deliver on an agreed objective while meeting expectations (of customers, stakeholders, and
team members).

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And you can achieve this by:

Understanding available resources, as well as any additional resource you may need to source
Setting timelines and budgets
Looking at current and past activity to optimize future performance
Assigning ownership of activities and key performance indicators (or KPIs) to team members and
other stakeholders

OVERARCHING STRATEGY

The value of an overarching strategy

An overarching strategy guides your entire digital marketing strategy. It helps you to develop a high-level,
simple, and clear strategy. In essence, it’s a single sentence that tells anyone who reads it what the objective of
your strategy is, and how you will achieve it. This key phrase identifies, regardless of platform and execution,
what your digital strategy is.

Because the overarching strategy guides the entire digital marketing effort, it must be simple, focused, and
clear. People should be able to understand it without having to be educated about it.

A typical overarching strategy might be as follows:

Create a digital platform that introduces our customer to our products and services and allows for a more
seamless experience with our brand.

Digital marketing vs digital media

As you probably know, digital marketing involves using digital media. However, the two terms are not
synonymous. Let’s explore each one in more detail.

Digital marketing consists of all online activities, creative formats, and messaging that aim to engage
with consumers online, using both free and paid channels for the purpose of delivering (or part-
delivering) on a company’s commercial objectives – such as sales or branding, for example.
Digital media, on the other hand, refers to the media transmission methods and devices used to
distribute digital messaging to your audience. This includes channels such as Google, Facebook,
Twitter, email, and so on. But it also includes digital audio, videos, articles, images, in-app content
and digital advertising. To help manage the different activities, marketers use media plans for paid
media as a guide to the formats, timings, and spends for a campaign.

So, the difference between digital marketing and digital media is actually pretty simple.

Digital marketing, as the term suggests, is the whole practice of using digital assets for the purposes
of marketing.
Digital media, again as the term suggests, is more specifically the media used deliver the digital
marketing content.

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DIGITAL RESOURCES

The core elements of a digital marketing strategy

Depending on the size of your organization and the budget available, the marketing team can be large or small.
In fact, in smaller organizations, digital marketers may be required to take on several tasks and work across a
number of channels.

Regardless of the size of the team, however, all digital marketing strategies require three core elements:

Time
Money
People

Let’s dig a bit deeper into each of them.

Time: This might include schedules, campaign run dates, and creative production time.
Money: Digital marketing campaigns incur many expenses, including media costs, agency or
freelancer fees, and production costs. And thirdly…
People: A successful digital marketing campaign requires a wide range of skills. The people involved
in bringing the campaign to life include, for example, digital strategists, media specialists, SEO
experts, paid search (also known as pay-per-click, or PPC) specialists, email specialists, display
specialists, social media specialists, content creators, and so on.

An effective digital marketing campaign requires a finely tuned interaction between these three elements. All
three are integral to success. You can’t just throw money at the digital problem, in the same way you can’t just
throw time at it. Relying on just one element is likely to lead to inefficiencies and, ultimately, campaign failure.

STRATEGY AND BUDGETING

The elements of budgeting

You have to cost your digital marketing campaigns, and this is why budgeting is such an important part of your
strategy. Without a careful budget, costs could spiral out of control, eating into your return on investment (or
ROI).

Budgets are made up of media costs, creative production, agency fees, and the digital tools and technology
needed to deliver the campaign or strategy. Additionally, staff costs, training, and processes can be included as
part of the overall budget. And you always should leave in buffer money, or emergency funds, for unexpected
expenses or sudden increases in costs.

Budget considerations

What are the key considerations for budgeting?

Objectives
Reach and value of audience
Budget available, and priorities
Ad spend allocation
Under-Investing

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We’ll now explore each a bit further.

Objectives

Budget setting for channels and formats is linked to your objectives. In other words, you should allocate more
budget to those channels that will efficiently and effectively deliver on your digital marketing objectives.

But how can you predict which channels are most likely to deliver your objectives?

It’s possible to forecast channel performance by using historical performance as a benchmark for
future campaigns.
Using historical conversion rates, you can estimate how much traffic you need at that conversion
rate to deliver a certain number of sales or leads.
With paid media, you can estimate the cost of that traffic by using historical CPCs or CPMs to
estimate costs.
Alternatively, you can benchmark using industry and sector reports if you have no previous results to
refer to. For example, Socialinsider provides industry benchmarking reports.

Reach and value of audience

How many people, realistically, are within the target audience that you feel you can reach? We all want to be
highly successful and make millions of dollars for the organizations that we work for. But let’s be realistic!

Ask yourself the following questions:

How do we ascertain a successful measure of new customers?

How many customers do you need to make in order to keep the lights on?
How many customers do you need to make to be really successful?

Budget available, and priorities

What follows next is the important question: “How big is your budget?”

If you think you will be given a small budget, focus on your target audience through a specific lens. For
example, suppose your target audience is 25 to 35-year-olds, and you have a small budget. In that case, you’ll
need to prioritize where you want to spend your budget.

A key question to then ask, in this example, is: Do you think you will be more successful with a male or female
audience? For multimarket, suppose you think that you’re going to be the most effective with city dwellers. In
this case, only target the capital cities of specific markets to make sure that you’re effective.

Ad spend allocation

How much money do you realistically feel you can invest in digital? It is often the case that when you go
through this process, you will realize that you don’t have enough money to do absolutely everything you want
to do. Don’t worry! Nobody ever has enough money for their digital marketing strategy. You have to give
money to other channels or other media because, strategically, it’s the right thing to do.

This is important because a lot of brands early on don’t invest in media, and it can become quite a shock when
you realize that you actually have to pay-to-play for a lot of the media channels that you should be using.
Some brands start out with social, and then ignore search or ignore display for a long time, and then they

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realize they’re missing those elements in their media mix. So, it’s important to anticipate ad spend allocation
and if it will be enough.

Under-investing

What about the final consideration: under-investing? While it’s prudent to be cautious about how much you
spend on your campaigns, you also need to avoid under-investing. Is there a gap that you need to now make
up? This is a commonly occurring challenge for a lot of businesses that might find that they have under-
invested in digital. And then, suddenly, they need a new website, to invest in social channels, and to create
new content.

All of that can be quite daunting, so you need to find a way to make sure that you understand how you might
be able to spread those costs out. If you feel you’re under-investing, then you need to make a case for more
investment. Alternatively, you might need to make a case for a better use of your resources.

The problem with under-investing is that you can find that you’re not doing enough to even try to make digital
work. It will not be a success and you will find yourself facing challenges with it not working. However, the
reality was that the business didn’t invest correctly in the first place. This, of course, then undermined the
effectiveness of your digital strategy campaign.

The budget plan

A budget plan is a document that counts all monetary costs associated with your digital marketing activities on
a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. Budgeting plans allow you to plan out all investment month by month, over a
specific period of time. Planning long term will secure investment. Without a plan, money will be moved
around, resulting in digital being under-invested in, under-performing, and ultimately being questioned.

STRATEGY AND ROI

What is ROI?

Return on investment (or ROI) is the cost of your digital activities versus the return they generate in terms of
monetary investment. This is usually reported as a percentage and can measured by using this formula:

ROI = revenue - marketing spend x 100 / marketing spend

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Commercial objectives

Digital marketing can help an organization achieve a number of commercial objectives. ROI can be understood
as the return on marketing investment in terms of success delivered.

And success is generally measured in terms of leads and sales.

Sales have an explicit revenue value.

The value of a lead can be understood by its conversion rate and average sale cost.

A simple way of determining the value of a lead for the purpose of ROI is to work out what the revenue is per
lead.

If we divide the sale value by the number of leads needed to generate a sale, we get revenue per
lead.
Once we know the revenue per lead and the cost per lead, we can determine ROI.

For example:

If leads have a 10% sale conversion rate by reps, that means it takes ten leads to drive one sale.
Suppose a sale is worth $100 and it takes ten leads to generate one sale.
On average, one lead is worth $10.

To put it simply, if ten leads are needed to drive a sale worth $100, then the revenue per lead is $10 (or $100
divided by ten leads).

Measuring success with ROI

ROI is just one way of measuring the success of a campaign or strategy. However, it’s also worthwhile to look
beyond just sales or conversions. Consider the other valuable actions, or micro-conversions.

Micro-conversions are the smaller actions that a user takes that contribute to the purchase decision-making
process. This might include, for example site visits, enquiries, and video views. These are basically the steps
people take as they move towards a larger conversion such as a purchase. (By the way, these larger
conversions are known as macro-conversions.)

It’s a good idea to explore the conversion journey on your site and note what people typically do before
converting. Do they read the FAQs, watch a video, or use a chatbot, for example?

Most of this data can be found in your digital marketing analytics tool – such as GA4 or your CRM – so you will
see what channels drive micro-conversions and what channels drive macro-conversions. From there, you can
optimize the journey by using the most effective channels and messaging for each micro- and macro-
conversion to get the results that you want.

You can use a simple table to keep track of your micro- and macro-conversions.

Micro conversion 1 Micro conversion 2 Micro conversion 3 Macro conversion

Social Followers Engagement Site visits Conversion to sale

/lead

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 SEO Impressions Site visits Conversions Revenue

PPC Impressions CTR Conversions CPA

Email Delivery rate Open rate CTR Conversion to sale

or lead

Referrals Referrals gained Site visits conversions revenue

Content Content views/ visits Bounce rate Content shares Conversions to

sale or lead

Measuring success on non-conversion channels

It’s also important to consider how non-conversion channels contribute to ROI. To apply an ROI to non-
conversion activity such as organic social media or display, you can look at how much engagement is required
to deliver a sale or lead.

Social and display can also have an indirect effect on leads and sales if they impact on conversion rates for the
conversion channels. For example, customer awareness of your brand or offering can increase during or
following a social media campaign, which could lead to an increase in normal levels of PPC or organic brand
searches and sales.

To see if awareness or consideration from non-conversion channels impact your sales, check for changes in
brand searches or PPC or SEO conversion rates in your digital marketing analytics tools (such as GA4 or CRM)
or your ecommerce engine.

For example, a social campaign might indirectly lead to more sales by stimulating awareness of your brand,
resulting in more people looking for your brand using search engines. From there, you can look at the value of
the sales increase and determine ROI from the social media costs.

Note: Paid social media can be tracked through to ROI using a pixel embedded on your website or ecommerce
site. You can also track sales made directly through social media platforms using social commerce.

Shoppable social posts

You can also use social posts to directly drive sales, using shoppable social posts. These look like your usual
social posts, but include a label or icon that brings people to your website. You can use this feature for both
organic and paid posts.

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NOTES

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LESSON 2: DIGITAL STRATEGY
RESEARCH

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STRATEGY AND RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

Key research activities

Research activities are intended to help marketers to develop key insights from historical or current
performance. You can then use these insights to guide your strategic direction, forecast results, manage
expectations, and set budgets.

Several activities conducted during the research phase are intended to develop the key insights that guide
your strategic direction. Here are some of them.

Research mapping involves identifying all the points of data that feed into the strategy.
Channel analytics covers using your existing data on existing channels to make decisions.
Audience research is essentially finding out more about your target audience, and then using this
information to reach them effectively.
Customer journey mapping involves detailing the path to purchase (or other goals, such as
conversion).
Digital auditing covers analyzing your web and mobile experience.
Keyword research involves taking insights from how your customers use keywords in search engines.
Social listening involves observing how people talk about your brand, category, or industry on social
media

The benefits of research

The purpose of researching your audience and competitive landscape is to learn as much as possible before
developing a strategy. Full of enthusiasm and excited to get going, we often enter into the strategic process
with assumptions. And then, when faced with a challenge, we often assume that we know the answer.

This is where research helps. It doesn’t necessarily always prove that your assumptions are wrong. It may
actually confirm that your assumptions are right and support your decisions.

Research plays a core role in learning as much about your target audience, industry, and environment as
possible. This information will be the backbone of your strategy, ensuring it is built upon insight, instead of
assumption.

So, before developing your strategy, try to learn as much as possible about:

Who you are targeting to deliver on your objectives

What the other players in the market are doing

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT RESEARCH

What is strong research?

Not all research is equal! Inaccurate research can be just as damaging as false assumptions. This is why it is so
important to conduct strong research.

So how can you do this? Strong research is characterized by:

Current information

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 Relevant and credible sources
Statistically significant sample sizes
More than one methodology – for example desk research and qualitative or quantitative research

Researcher bias

The researcher’s own biases and prejudices can undermine the research. For example, researchers might
highlight data that confirms their own assumptions, and ignore data that challenges them. So you need to
ensure that you are objective when conducting research.

Here are some tips for overcoming research bias:

Be aware of your own biases and develop a plan to address them.

Challenge your assumptions.
Look for data sources that might prompt you to think in new ways. Aim to collect multiple
perspectives.
Involve other team members in the research. (And challenge their biases too!)
Focus on what story the data is telling you, rather than on what story you want it to tell you.
Have your research checked by peers.
Keep records so that others can check your sources.

Critical thinking

If you apply critical thinking, you can avoid some common research pitfalls. Always check for:

Absence of sources
Old information
Small sample sizes
No origin of the report

These are often red flags that the research is not as strong as it should be.

Research best practices

So, now that you know what types of research to avoid, which best practices can you apply?

When planning research, you can maximize validity and impact, and also reduce costs, by:

Prioritizing research based on the most important areas in the strategy

Using a mix of independent research and the brand’s own content
Taking steps to avoid unconscious bias

OWNED AND DESK RESEARCH

Owned research

The research your organization conducts is likely to be a combination of:

Owned research
Desk research

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Owned research is research that your business owns, has easy access to, and is directly related to your
business. This could include:

Website analytics
Current customer research (including questionnaires and focus groups)
Social channel insights

It is worth investing in owned research because it is so valuable to organizations. For example, it:

Provides a clear insight into your own opportunities

Gives the most accurate insights directly relating to your business and customers

Desk research

Unlike owned research, desk research is not owned by your organization. Instead, you gather third-party
research and see how it can be applied to your brand.

Try to use research that is carried out by large research bodies and then made available online. This type of
research is an excellent source of multiple research studies that you can use to uncover useful insights.

There are, however, costs involved, so often this is something that larger organizations use. But, even if you’re
a small business, you can reduce the costs of desk research by starting with research carried out by
organizations such as Google, Facebook, and so on. They have research and insight groups that regularly
release free information and insights.

You can choose from a combination of free and premium (or paid-for) research sources online. Most
companies will have a range of options.

Free tools: Google offers a range of free tools including thinkwithGoogle, Google Keywords and it can
help identify information such as social media case studies by channel by simply searching online for
example for, ‘Instagram case studies’ or ‘Facebook case studies’.
Premium tools: These sources may offer some information for free, but full reports will require a
payment or subscription. Examples include WARC, ANA, and eConsultancy.

The role of Google

Google is a highly effective desk research tool. It helps you identify the right keywords. You can also specify the
analysis time period to ensure the research is relevant.

Typically, the best way to treat Google is to ask it questions about people. You can then find articles or sources
with your answers. What do you want to know about people? You can think of Google as the starting point for
your research.

AI tools such as ChatGPT can also provide useful summaries of the research available.

DIGITAL AUDIT

What is a digital audit?

A digital audit is an assessment of all your active digital channels. It enables you to document and assess the
performance and value of your current digital activities, to see how effective they are in the current campaign.

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It can be particularly useful to audit your digital activities before the planning stage of your next strategy. You
can then build a foundation on historical performance and determine which are the best channels to include in
your plan.

What a digital audit examines

A digital audit is crucial for establishing exactly what sites, pages, profiles, and accounts are active, and who
has been operating them. By going through this checklist, you can create a clear outline of everything that is
pre-existing. This should give you a full awareness of digital within your organization, and it can be used to
provide an independent and objective view which overcomes internal departmental politics.

You can audit the current status of digital marketing activities by analyzing the following factors:

A site audit addresses your existing website or current performance. This requires an analysis of the
site analytics on a basic level.
A social and channel audit identifies existing social media and other channels that are being used, as
well as their function and performance.
An access and login details audit helps to ensure that you have all usernames and passwords for all
channels and analytics.
An administrators audit notes who the admins of your various channels are and how email updates
are received.
An existing resources audit is used to note who is currently working on your owned channels and
how many hours are being dedicated to daily operations.
A history audit checks what history has been stored on activity management and previous campaign
activity, as well as what has previously been implemented.
A chain of command audit clarifies who is working on digital activity, what remit each individual has,
and (most importantly!) who is in command and responsible for decision making.

Elements of a digital audit

A digital audit usually involves the following elements:

Quantitative review
Qualitative review
Website crawl
Competitor review
Channel review
Accessibility
Governance
Recommendations
Timeline
KPIs

Quantitative review

A quantitative review looks holistically at your digital activity and assesses what is working or not working. You
can use measurable results and information such as:

CRM data and reports

E-commerce purchase funnel data
Google Analytics data

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 PPC ads reports
Historic SEO rank tracking data
Social media metrics

Qualitative review

A qualitative review takes an expert critical eye to review the core digital assets and engagements, including:

Website design and user experience (UX)

Calls to action (or CTAs) on your website
Brand congruence across channels
Brand messaging across channels
Social media content
Email design and messaging effectiveness
Lead generation form usability and accessibility
E-commerce information and experience

Website crawl

You can crawl your website using an automated tool to find issues such as broken links, poor site performance,
missing title tags, and so on.

Competitor review

With a competitor review, you compare your assets to those of identified key competitors.

Channel review

A channel review is used to analyze and audit each channel independently, and in terms of channel integration
(or how well the channels work together and complement each other).

Accessibility

You need to ensure that your channels are accessible to different audiences. Best practice is to follow the Web
Accessibility Content Guidelines (WACG-2).

Governance

As part of your governance checks, ensure that you have the right skills, people, and processes in place to
deliver in the short and longer term.

Recommendations

Your digital audit should recommend the next steps with budgets, responsibilities, and timelines.

KPIS

You can use key performance indicators (or KPIs) to decide how you will measure performance and check how
well the recommendations have been implemented.

Having identified the elements that you need to cover in your digital audit, you can then convert them into
project steps, and use a Gantt chart to create a timeline for implementation.

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AUDIENCE RESEARCH

Audience data variables

As part of your digital market research, you need to get to know your audiences as well as you can. These
audiences can be defined by different data variables, such as:

Geodemographic: Who they are and where they live

Psychographic: What they are interested in, why they interact with you
Behavioural: How they act - where and how they buy, what channels they use
Transactional: What they buy, how often and how much they spend
Emotional: How they feel about you, who they care about
Contextual: How and when they engage and with what content, who they follow

Additional B2B variables

Additional data variables are used for B2B audiences. These include:

Firmographic: Business information such as size, location, sector, and so on

Job role: Decision makers’ level and role

Using audience data variables

So now that you know what audience data variables are, how can you use them?

Geodemographic data variables can be obtained from market research and on all media channels, including
social media and PPC. Variables such as age, gender, income, and location are the most frequently used.

To increase relevancy and improve targeting, you can incorporate additional interest or purchase variables.
These might include, for example:

Couples aged 18-34 with combined salary of over £60k, and who have a savings account (to research
or target savings customers)

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 Low-income, single parents in the South East with children under age 5 who are interested in healthy
eating (to research or target young parents about food)

Expressed and inferred variables

In digital media targeting, the additional variables may be expressed or inferred.

If they are expressed, the person has actually bought a savings product or answered research saying
they are interested in savings products, for example.
On the other hand, if they are inferred, the person has been looking at or talking about savings
products, so it can be inferred that they are interested in them.

Developing audience insights

Audience research is a great strategy for developing specific insights into your target audience. It can help you
to identify, for example, the specific interests, channels, and demographic identities of your target audience.
This information helps you to build a clear picture of your customers, and to understand their online
movements and where you might reach them to deliver on your goals.

Audience insight tools

You can use a wide range of digital tools to develop audience insights:

Facebook Audience Insight Tool

Twitter Audience Insight Tool
Google Ads
Google Consumer Barometer
Google Keyword Planner
Brandwatch/Pulsar
Eye tracking
Testing
Google Analytics

Audience insights can also come from non-digital sources, including:

CRM data
Market research – both qualitative and quantitative
Desk research
Customer interviews
Feedback loops with sales teams and customer-facing teams
Observation of audience behaviors

Creating audience personas

Gathering all your audience research together and writing audience personas can help build your audience
insight by seeing them as real people.

Take a look at this persona, for example:

This is Trudy. Trudy is 30 years old and lives in the city. She is an accountant. She lives in a rented apartment with
her boyfriend. Trudy likes sports, mainly tennis. Facebook helps her keep up with the latest Tennis Open results.

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 She has plenty of discretionary income so she is a member of her local tennis club and tries to travel to
Wimbledon each year if she can get tickets.

Audience persona insights

When creating your audience personas, you need to be mindful of the following key insights:

Motivations and interests

Digital channel choices
Content preferences
Search behavior
Device usage
Age
Gender
Relevant quirks

When your persona is complete, you can then prioritize audience types based on how easy they are to reach
using digital channels and the value of that audience to the business.

You can plot your personas on a reach value matrix to prioritize them. Prioritizing your audience allows you to
revise and allocate budget effectively because you can give more budget to high value audiences who are
easier to reach than lower value audiences who are difficult to reach.

REACH VALUE MATIX

HIGH
BUSINESS VALUE

HIGH VALUE

HIGH VALUE HARD TO REACH

EASY TO REACH = STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES

WHERE YOU MAY BE ABLE TO
= EASY WINS DELIVER COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE

LOW VALUE

LOW VALUE HARD TO REACH

EASY TO REACH = DEPRIORITIZE – NO NEED TO

TARGET
= MAY BE WORTH PURSUING
BUT BEWARE OF TAKING TOO
MUCH RESOURCE AWAY FROM
HIGH VALUE OPPRTUNITIES

LOW. EASY AUDIENCE REACH HARD

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Bear in mind that including channel preferences in your personas allows you to optimize your channel mix and
media plan to target key personas on their preferred channels.

Finding audience data

As you conduct your audience research, you are likely to end up with data in a variety of places. Ideally,
audience data is ultimately held in a single customer view (SCV).

However, it can exist in multiple places, including:

CRM data
Offline data sources
Brand interaction data – such as purchase history, customer support, in-store purchases, and returns
Social media data – such as engagement, follows, and purchases
Third-party data enhancements – such as Experian, CACI
Website interactions – such as clicks, page views, downloads, sign ups, and so on

What audiences should you target?

Bear in mind that you may target different audiences to meet specific objectives. For example:

Audiences that are highly active on social media are useful to engage to promote brand awareness.
Audiences that have shown an interest in your website content make strong candidates for
retargeting activity.
Audiences that buy regularly could be targeted with promotions and offers to increase their basket
size or to buy more frequently
Influencers are useful for increasing SEO and reach and improving conversion.

SOCIAL LISTENING (VIDEO)

What is social listening?

Social listening involves observing or collating live social conversations to develop insights about what people
are saying about your brand or other topics, and why they are saying that. These social conversations offer
insights into your consumer interests, aspirations, dreams, products, and so on. They also show how customer
sentiment is evolving over time.

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How to conduct social listening

Although social listening is very effective, in order for it to be comprehensive, you need to use paid tools. If
you don’t have access to paid tools, social listening can be achieved observationally when developing insights
by searching keywords and making observational assumptions.

Paid social listening tools can go into incredible detail, looking at huge volumes of conversations. Because you
are working with such large volumes, you can develop more accurate insights into your audience.

For example, an airline may be interested in what its customers talk about online, in social media, in forums
and other digital conversations. A social listening tool can identify airline customers and their conversations
and categorize them into different topics as shown in the conversation wheel below.

For example, you can look at the types of conversations that airline travelers are engaging in on social media.

Each conversation topic can then be analyzed further exploring what consumers are saying about the topic
(keywords, hashtags), how they feel (sentiment) and any brands, businesses or influencers that are involved in
the conversation.

Types of social listening

When conducting social listening, you can adopt an observational or empirical approach:

Observational social listening involves making assumptions about your audience (based on what you
observe) and building a theory of how they behave.
Empirical social listening, on the other hand, involves validating your observational assumptions by
using real data.

Observational social listening

If you do not have the budget for a paid tool, you can use observational social listening to gather your data. It
will not be as accurate as the tools you pay for. However, by observing how people use keywords, hashtags,
and tags, and the content and types of media they engage with you can still develop hypotheses of behavior.

Step 1

The first step is to observe how your audience are talking about specific topics by utilizing keywords and
observing how they talk. Are they happy or unhappy? Do they use specific emojis?

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Step 2

Then, in the second step, using your own data, you can match your assumed insights to empirical data. If your
consumers are happy about a product, you should see high positive engagement on that product’s content.

Developing insights from social listening

Next, you can develop insights from your observational or empirical social listening. This involves five steps:

Identify keywords: Identify commonly used keywords when discussing your brand, product, or
service.
Use social search: Search on social platforms to confirm that these keywords are used by the
consumer.
Check for additional keywords: Check for additional keywords that the consumer is using. There may
be some that you have not considered!
Identify trends: Identify trends in subject, language, or hashtags.
Establish insight: Gain insight from the consumer’s challenges and experience with competitors.

WEBSITE RESEARCH

The role of the website in a digital marketing strategy

A brand’s website is essential to any digital marketing strategy. The website might be an ecommerce site
(driving conversions) or a content hub (driving awareness). Brands optimize these sites for SEO to maximize
visibility.

Brands can use both inbound and outbound channels to drive traffic to their website.

Inbound channels

Inbound channels include:

Organic social: Posts and content to encourage advocacy and engagement

Content marketing: Blogs, whitepapers, podcasts, videos, and reviews, to build a hub of interactive
assets
CRM: Nurturing and converting leads and customers, using email newsletters and a marketing
database

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Inbound traffic:

Is based on meeting customer needs

Takes time to build up
Is hard to measure

Outbound channels

Outbound channels, on the other hand, include:

Paid advertising: Display, TV and digital advertising, retargeting, PPC, paid social
Partnerships: Affiliates, influencers, links to external sites, third parties, and campaigns, as well as…
Prospecting: Cold email, list swaps, third-party advertising

Outbound traffic:

Is based on spend
Can be used tactically to guarantee volumes
Is easy to measure

The changing face of search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is a great way to drive traffic to your websites. However, SEO strategy has changed in recent years, with
the following developments:

Increased use of video, which has its own SEO criteria

Increased use of voice search, which again its own SEO criteria
Social media now the first place for search for younger audiences

Here you can see examples of how people are using voice search to find information.

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And here you can see how users are using video to find information.

And here you can see how people are increasingly using social media to conduct their searches:

Audience behavior tools

Knowing how your audience uses your website will enable you to optimize it. Specific tools can be used to
understand how audiences behave on websites. These tools include:

Eye tracking
Ethnographic research
A/B testing
Google analytics
SEM analysis
Content audit
Customer journey analysis

COMPETITOR RESEARCH

What is competitor research?

Competitor research is a process of establishing a clear picture of your competitive landscape by identifying
each of your competitors, assessing the quality and size of their digital media channels, and evaluating and
interpreting their strategies.

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It helps you to understand your place amongst your competitors. And it gives a clear picture of the challenge
that lies ahead of you.

When looking at your competitors, ask yourself about the size of their digital footprint:

How aggressively are they investing?

What do you interpret to be their strategy?
What do their content choices tell you about their goals?
Is there even a strategy?

Competitor research can be done using social listening and desk research, including searches for competitor
brands appearing in the news.

Benefits

So why should you conduct competitor research? Here are some of the key benefits.

Compare the size of channels: Do you need to expand your use of some channels?
Compare channels: What social networks are being used? Is their website mobile-friendly?
Identify channel gaps: Are there channels that are not being used? Is there an opportunity for your
brand to develop a presence on those channels?
Assess content: Is the content good? What need is it addressing?
Assess format gaps: Are there specific formats on specific channels that are not being utilized?
Assess SEO: When you search for your competitors, do they have a search presence?

Perceptual maps

Perceptual maps can be used to compare competitors against your brand. They show what your audience
thinks – how they perceive you.

Note: Perceptual maps are not the same as positioning maps. Whereas perceptual maps show what audiences
perceive to be the differences between brands, positioning maps show what the actual differences are.

Perceptual maps compare how different brands are delivering benefits to customers, and use this comparison
to unearth opportunities for differentiation. You can use a graph with two axes to show the factors that are
important to your audience. Typical factors include price, quality, innovation, reliability, or value. You can then
highlight the most important combination of factors.

Here is a sample perceptual map looking at different car marques. On this map Kia are shown to be low quality
and low price. The marque could then try to change perceptions here, as Kia has done with its seven-year
warranty guarantee.

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NOTES

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LESSON 3: SETTING STRATEGY
OBJECTIVES AND KPIS

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SETTING OBJECTIVES FOR A STRATEGY

Why should you set objectives?

Setting clear objectives for your digital marketing activity should be the starting point when building an
effective digital strategy. These objectives should be business objectives that can be realized through digital
marketing. So, your objective might be to increase ecommerce sales, drive more leads, or build audience
engagement with your brand.

Business objectives are usually categorized as:

Awareness or consideration
Conversion or sales
Retention

Let’s now look at some examples of these in practice.

Awareness or consideration campaign

In its awareness campaign, Heinz wanted to reach a young audience on social media. It used brand
ambassadors (#HeinzMasterz) to highlight its range of products and enticing flavors, and show how to create
appetizing meals using Heinz products. There were several HeinzMasterz:

Cultural cook, fusing recipes from different cultures

Scratch cook, using simple, cheap recipes
Vegan creator, targeting vegans
High-quality meals made easy, showing how to use Heinz products for quirky recipes
Easy family-style meals, showing how to use Heinz products to add variety to family meals

Posts were tied around seasonal eating, such as summer barbecues, Christmas, and Halloween. The campaign
saw a 15.5% increase of awareness on TikTok, and a 32.5% increase of awareness on Instagram. Overall, the
campaign reached 18.5 million people, with more than 9,000 recipe shares on TikTok. And the Garlic Black
Mayo sold out!

Conversion or sales campaign

PetCulture, an Australian pet-care company, encouraged people to get involved in its campaign to promote
pet-friendly policies in workplaces. Followers signed the PETernity PETition to raise awareness of the
significant role that pets played in workers’ lives.

After signing the petition, people were directed to the website, where they could explore the product range
and enter personal information to get customized recommendations.

The campaign led to the following impressive results:

449% increase in purchases

350% increase in conversions
193% increase in memberships
2584% increase in website traffic increased by 2584%
A dwell time of 2.87 minutes

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Retention campaign

Starbucks launched a campaign to reward loyal customers and increase retention and repeat purchases.
Customers could become members of the Starbucks Rewards program via the app, and receive benefits such
as easier ordering and paying, free in-store refills, and discounts and giveaways.

By 2021, 21 million people had signed up for the Starbucks Reward program!

Using these objectives as your starting point, you can then begin to build out your digital marketing strategy
and assess its effectiveness.

For awareness or consideration objectives, focus on increasing audience reach.

For conversion or sales objectives, look at your commercial success.
For retention objectives, seek to increase customer engagement.

The biggest challenge for digital marketers is that there is so much that you can do. This is why it is so
important to be clear and concise. You have got to use all of your resources in an efficient manner. Know
where your money is best spent and try to minimize budget waste.

Measuring success

Brand success can be measured in terms of conversion (sales and leads) and awareness or consideration and
retention (engagement).

Don’t make the mistake of just looking at direct sales! Business performance can also be measured in leads
and engagement.

It’s important to know what metrics or KPIs are most suited to measuring the success of your overall strategy,
as well as the different channels that make up the strategy. For example:

When PPC and SEO are used as conversion channels, you can measure their performance in sales or
leads delivered.
When email and mobile apps are used as customer retention channels, their performance can be
measured in customer retention, repeat use, engagement, leads, and sales.
When display and social media are used as awareness and consideration channels, they can be
measured in reach and engagement.

When you understand what the measurement and goal of a channel is, you can use diagnostic metrics to
evaluate success even further.

Examples of metrics used to diagnose success include:

Cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per lead (CPL) for conversion channels
Sentiment and awareness for customer engagement channels
New versus returning users and increased sales or conversions for customer retention channels

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STRATEGY KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS)

The role of KPIs in digital marketing

It’s very important to select the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your digital activity. To do
this, you must have a clear understanding of what your success outcome is. Set meaningful and realistic KPIs
by clearly understanding what metrics are available and best suited to measure channel performance based
on its function within your plan.

For example, you could measure awareness channels such as display and social with assisted conversions,
reach, and frequency. PPC and SEO, on the other hand, are conversion channels, so they can be measured in
the number of leads or sales driven, CPA, or conversion rates.

Choose the right metrics to measure the success of a channel by setting KPIs related to those metrics. And be
sure to link the KPIs to goals at an organizational, digital strategy, and campaign level. This will help to ensure
that all activity is focused on meeting overall business objectives.

Reporting vs measurement

Although they may seem to be similar, reporting and measurement are not the same thing. It is important to
identify the difference for your business from the outset:

Reporting gives you many metrics of performance…

Whereas measurement is a specific set of metrics that can be used to measure business performance
over time.

Reporting is something for more junior team members to ensure work is operating correctly. Measurement,
on the other hand, is how senior members of the team identify specific measures and how they are impacting
the business.

Assigning responsibilities

You need to be very careful about assigning responsibilities in an organization and within your teams. You can
ask the following questions to guide you:

Who identifies the patterns of success?

Who ultimately makes decisions for change?
Who is responsible for performance?
Who tracks performance?

Why are these questions so important? Because without accountability, there is no guidance. So, everybody in
your team should understand:

What they are responsible for

What their KPIs are
How they can be successful
What their daily and weekly goals are.

STRATEGY AND FORECASTING

Effective digital marketers take a holistic view of their campaigns, looking to the past, as well as the future.

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Looking to the past

In order to understand how your strategy might deliver on its objectives, you can forecast results by looking to
similar campaigns from the past as a benchmark of performance. And by looking at audience engagement
levels, channel conversion rates, traffic numbers, and costs, you can begin to identify key channels and
audiences to target.

To begin, you can use historical metrics such as CPC, conversion rates, and CPA. And then you can estimate
what each channel could potentially deliver for the available budget, if these metrics were to remain the
same. Bear in mind, of course, that it’s not a perfect predictor of future outcomes. However, it can help you to
set realistic KPIs.

The forecast will then need to be ‘sense checked’ against your research. This will help you to determine
whether the channel and audience mix is correct for this campaign. When your strategy is complete, you
should go back and revise your forecasts to take into account what you have uncovered in your research and
to reflect your agreed media and channel plans.

Looking to the future

As a digital marketer, you need to know how to forecast spend and KPIs. How can you do this?

Forecasting should begin with your goal. You might need to use some metrics to define your goal before you
begin. Your goals will depend on whether your website is:

An ecommerce site
A lead generation site

Let’s look at each type of site in a bit more detail.

Ecommerce site

For an ecommerce site, your goal is likely to be a revenue target. To begin, you first need to figure out how
many ecommerce transactions you need to reach that revenue target.

Then define your transaction target by dividing your revenue goal by the amount that people typically spend
in a transaction. This is known as average order value (or AOV). Many website analytics tools will show AOV in
the reports interface.

However, if you prefer, you can work out your AOV by dividing your total Revenue by your total transactions
over a period of time. For example, if your goal is $1000 and your AOV is $100, you need 10 transactions each
with a value of $100 to reach your revenue goal.

Lead generation site

And now, what about a lead generation site? In this case, your goal is likely to be sales generated from your
leads.

To find out how many leads you need to reach your sales target, divide your sales goal by your close rate. The
close rate is the percentage of leads that turn into a sale.

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You can get your close rate by dividing your total sales by your total leads over the past quarter or timeframe
you decide. For example, if your goal is 10 sales and your close rate is 10%, you can divide 10 by 10%, to get
100. In other words, you need 100 leads at a 10% close rate to get 10 sales.

How to reach your goals

In order to assess the performance of your website, you need to work out:

The traffic required to reach your goal

The budget needed
The cost per acquisition (CPA)

Traffic required

First, let’s consider the traffic required. You can work out the traffic required by dividing your goal by the
website conversion rate for that goal. Let’s look at this more closely.

Because forecasting is an iterative process, you first define your goal, and then you need to work out the
traffic needed to reach that goal. And to do this, start with your goal and divide it by your conversion rate.
(You can get your conversion rate from Google Analytics or your website Analytics tool.) This calculation will
give you the amount of traffic you need to reach your goal.

For example, suppose your ecommerce goal is to get 10 sales, and your website ecommerce conversion rate is
1%. You then simply divide your goal (10) by the conversion rate (1%) to get the required visitors on the site to
reach your goal. So, 10 divided by 1% is 1,000. You need 1000 visitors on your site at a 1% conversion rate to
get 10 sales.

Now, suppose your lead generation goal is 100 leads, and your website lead conversion rate is 10%. Again,
simply divide your goal (100 leads) by your conversion rate (10%) to get the required traffic needed to reach
your goal. So, 100 divided by 10% is 1,000. You need 1,000 visitors on your website at a 10% conversion rate
to get 100 leads.

Budget needed

Next, you need to work out the budget needed. How do you do this? To calculate the budget, simply multiply
the traffic by the cost per click (CPC).

How does this work in practice? Once you can estimate the traffic you need to reach your goal, you can work
out how much you need to spend to generate this traffic. To work out your media budgets using historical
CPCs, simply multiply your traffic required (which you calculated in the previous step) by your CPC for that
channel. (You can find the CPC in your advertising tools such as Google Ads, Facebook Business Manager, and
so on.

For example, suppose your CPC is $2 and your traffic required is 1000. So, 1,000 visitors at a cost of $2 per
click will cost $2,000. In other words, you need to spend $2,000 to get 1,000 people on your site to try to
reach your goals.

Cost per acquisition

The third step in the process is to work out the cost per acquisition, or CPA. To get this, you divide the total
budget by the total conversions.

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So, once you know how many conversions you could expect, you can then work out the forecasted CPA. You
should then sense check against your ideal CPA, which can be set by the business or from past campaigns.

Setting KPIs from your forecast

Remember that forecasting doesn’t guarantee results. It simply illustrates a possible outcome based on past
performance.

However, to improve the accuracy of your forecasting, you can forecast different scenarios to present
alternative outcomes. For example, repeat the forecast with a 5% increase in CPCs or a 10% reduction in
conversion rates to see what the outcome might look like.

When reporting in campaigns, see what your KPIs look like against the different scenarios you have created.
You can use KPIs together to understand if you are on track and set scenarios to test.

STRATEGY AND PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

The importance of reviews

It is vital that you consistently review all work. This helps you to:

Maintain the standard of work conducted

Ensure adherence to your strategy

Performance reviews are an important part of the strategic process. Before you begin building the strategy,
it’s important that the review timelines are set in stone with the teams. You may even need to put reviews in
calendars for the year, so everyone clearly knows during what period they are being measured. This should
help to ensure that teams are adhering to the guidelines and the strategy set. Everything should be guided by
specific timelines, activities, and reviews.

Through consistent measurement, you can identify performance levels and make decisions on them. For
example, underperforming content and tactics can be addressed, allowing you to improve content or simply
scrap activity that just isn’t working.

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NOTES

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LESSON 4: DEVELOPING
MARKETING BRIEFS AND
CREATIVE STRATEGIES

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DEVELOPING A MARKETING BRIEF

Creating marketing briefs

You have developed your objectives, based on your business needs. You have crafted audience personas,
based on your audience research and social listening. And you have learned more about the business
environment by conducting competitor and industry research. You are now ready to start developing your
creative content.

To begin, use all the information you have about your objectives, audience personas, and competitor and
industry research to develop some key documents to flesh out your creative strategy. The key documents are
your:

Marketing brief
Creative brief
Media brief
Media plan

Let’s now explore each of these in more detail.

Marketing brief

A marketing brief allows you to identify the most important insights and understandings that will inform your
strategy. Writing a marketing brief is important because it is essentially a series of instructions for strategy
development across media and creative.

Creative brief

The creative brief is a document where your research meets your business goals. It uses product, audience,
and competitor insights to inspire campaign ideas to deliver on your objectives.

The outputs of the creative brief should be clearly defined, including copy and messaging, creative formats,
banners, social posts, videos, and so on.

Media brief

The media brief is a document that uses audience data, motivations, and demographics – as well as media
budget, timings, content, and creative formats – to inform media choices to execute the strategy. The output
of the media brief should be a channel plan that details all channels (paid and free) and ‘go live’ and run dates
for each of the channels.

Media plan

The media plan is another essential output which will detail all the paid media channels, including cost line
items for each.

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CREATIVE STRATEGY

What is a creative strategy?

With your marketing brief, creative brief, media brief, and media plan in place, you can now move onto the
finer details of your creative strategy.

The creative strategy is one of the most important elements of your strategy because it is the most visual
element. In other words, it will dictate the overall look and feel of your marketing from a branding and
creative perspective.

Establishing a creative strategy

Developing the creative strategy is where the fun really begins! It’s time to take your strategy and build
creative messages and ideas that you will communicate through digital content.

A creative strategy is the long-term approach of how you develop visual stimuli for your brand, product, or
service. It dictates the theme, look, and feel of all your digital assets.

Needless to say, the creative strategy should adhere to the overarching strategy. Doing this ensures that all
work is following a specific guide, targeting a specific response, and cultivating repeat and specific behavior.

As previously mentioned, consider budget when developing creative strategy. It is important not to limit your
initial thinking, but at the same time, at some stage, you need to draw the line and be realistic about your
possibilities and what creative assets you can afford to develop.

You need to identify several key areas in your creative strategy.

Ideas: What ads or content will you make? What will the content say? And how are you different?
Narrative: Refer back to your content strategy – what is the story you are trying to tell?
Value proposition: Consider your online value proposition and your customer value proposition.
What is your key competitive differentiation? And how can you best communicate this to potential
customers with the help of your creative strategy?
Visual: What will everything look like? Is there a visual theme or guideline?
Execution: What media, formats, shapes, and sizes will you use as part of the creative suite?

Managing expectations

Managing expectations is a part of the job of any digital marketing manager. There is often a myth that
creative can be done for ‘free’, or that it’s ‘just pictures’, so it’s easy to do. This is not the case!

All creative, technical executions require time and money investment to produce. So you need to manage
your ambitions (and the ambitions of other stakeholders) in line with your available budget and the time to
produce the creative assets.

Because you’ll be creating ads and marketing content for different channels, you should create a list of the
various formats that you want to use in your strategy. This list should be added to your content strategy, and
include the creative requirements of each format, as well as the dimensions and specifications.

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Creative strategy vs content strategy

Let’s take a moment to consider the distinction between creative strategy and content strategy.

Creative strategy refers to every aspect of creative required for all media channels. This includes
both inbound and outbound channels and the website or ecommerce site.
Content strategy, on the other hand, focuses on the website and inbound channels.

The content strategy seeks to maximize SEO, brand consistency, and visibility. And it ensures that content
creation maximizes value to the customer and attracts and retains them. Remember, you are creating content
for your potential and existing customers.

CONTENT STRATEGY

What is content strategy?

A content strategy is a guide to how content is created and what creative formats are selected that drive
towards your success outcomes.

A content strategy:

Is derived from your overarching strategy.

Captures what your story and narrative is.
States main purpose of content.
Details key elements (such as format, timings, and so on).
Ensures content is developed for purpose and effect.
Ensures consistent approach to SEO and reputation building.
Adds value to the customer journey.

The content strategy should flow naturally from the overall business strategy.

For example:

Business strategy: Communicate with customers in unique and different ways that change
perceptions of the brand.
Content Strategy: Deliver exciting content to our social audience in ways never seen before.

Content pillars

You can use content pillars to provide an overarching framework to your content strategy. They provide a
theme around which you can build related content assets.

Content pillars:

Support a distinctive, ownable brand proposition for your target audiences.

Provide focus for your content creation.
Help you align with trending topics.
Encourage content ownership.
Ensure content is aligned with SEO objectives.
Provide a consistent basis for reputation building. (In other words, what do you want to be famous
for?)

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The elements of a content strategy

When developing your content strategy, always use your overarching strategy to guide the direction of your
content in tone and creative format.

Planning

Planning is a key activity for all elements of strategy. This is no different when it comes to content. Content
planning involves addressing all details of your content strategy that will help you to plan content from guide
to implementation.

What platforms will you operate on?

How often will your post, tweet, or share?
What is your tone and personality?
What is your core narrative and what stories are you telling?

From this you create a content plan by platforms that details actual posts.

Creating a content plan involves listing out all the various creative formats you will aim to use and the various
specifications that are required (for video, canvas, link embed ad, and so on, for example).

Developing content

Content on your site should use as much dynamic content and text that is relevant to your brand. This will
help build your SEO approach.

Although the key attribute of a content strategy is designing effective content, do bear in mind that
consistency is crucial for content. Too often brands bounce from stories or narrative without keeping a
consistent story. Consistent story creates consistent response. Consistent response builds behavior and
perception of your brand with your audience.

So tell a consistent story! A narrative or story is the core to what your strategy aims to build with your
audience. Whatever your objective listed in your strategy is, you should have a narrative that tells a story that
will work toward your overall objective.

The content plan

Let’s take some time to explore the content plan in more detail.

A content plan is a list of all the creative formats that you will be using. It helps you to ensure that content is
being developed to specifications.

An effective content plan will:

Lay out all content in a given time period.

List out all relevant channels.
List all copy.
List creative format detail.
Explain dimensions and requirements.

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So you can see that developing a content plan allows you to better understand the various content
requirements you might have. This is important as you head into content development.

When selecting your creative formats, take into account what your Objectives are. Do you need people on
your site to be talking positively? Engaging? Viewing video? Or converting to sales?

Listing out all your channels, formats, and your dimensions will indicate where you can be more efficient. Are
there any wasted clicks in your content?

For example, if ‘clicks to site’ is your objective, formats such as ‘photo image’ will draw wasted clicks opening
the image instead of clicking to the site. For this objective, a link embed would be much more effective. If
hashtag usage is a goal for your campaign, consider using ‘conversational ads’ and using one hashtag in the
copy.

At a later stage with media, you will need to determine how many channels you wish to support.

The content value matrix

Finally, you can use the content value matrix to ensure your content is valuable and important to your
audiences.

The matrix includes six types of content that are used at different stages in the customer journey and are
either emotional or rational in focus:

Entertainment: Interesting or engaging content that is enjoyable to consume

Inspiration: Unusual and motivating content that that sparks something new
Education: ‘How to’ content that teaches the user
Conviction: Persuasive content that presents compelling ideas
Information: Sharing knowledge and leading thought, and…
Support: Demonstrating care or providing a helping hand

INFLUENCER MARKETING STRATEGY

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is an important element of every digital marketing strategy.

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Influencer marketing is defined as:

A methodology for integrating influencers into a marketing strategy by matching influencers to brands and
monetizing access to the influencer’s community.

Source: Social Media Strategy by Julie Atherton. Published by Kogan Page Ltd.
Reproduced with permission ©Julie Atherton 2019

Influencer marketing is three-way symbiotic relationship between:

A brand
The influencer
The influencer’s community

Types of influencers

Many people can be influencers, even including your customers and employees!

Here are some of the most important influencer groups to consider:

Brand ambassadors: These are long-term advocates of the brand. They vary from mega or celebrity
influencers with millions of followers, to micro and nano influencers with 10k – 100k followers.
Affiliates: These are brand partners who are paid for bringing in leads.
Industry professionals and experts: These are individuals with strong personal brands and expertise
in particular areas.
Creatives: These include people working in the arts who create unique content and bring people to
the brand.
Loyal customers: These are your own followers and committed customers. They could become
advocates for your brand.
Employees: These are individuals who work in your business. They can use their own social profiles
to promote your brand.

Influencers in action

Mega influencers

Mega and celebrity influencers, such as Michelle Wie West, can have millions of followers.

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Micro influencers

Micro influencers, on the other hand, might have just hundreds of followers. However, they are respected for
the authenticity of their content, and are often used for user-generated content (UGC). For example, I and
Love and You, a sustainably sourced pet food brand, used micro influencers to increase awareness and reach.
These micro influencers created 122 posts (cross-promoted on multiple platforms), resulting in a reach of 7.8
million, and 64,000 engagements!

Affiliates

You can use an Influencer Marketing Hub to find suitable affiliates for your brand to partner with.

Industry experts

You can use various sites, such as P2P, to find suitable industry experts to work with on your brand promotion.

Creatives

Vodafone partnered with young creatives to launch VOXI, its youth brand. The creatives generated their own
content, which they shared across several social channels. This content received more than 31 million views on
social media. And it led to 31% awareness levels in the 16-24 age group.

Loyal customers

Your customers can become influencers and brand advocates. For example, the clothes company ASOS
encourages customers to create and share content about the brand. The #AsSeenOnMe hashtag is used to
generate buzz around the clothes and latest styles, and it enables customers to become part of the brand
story.

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Employees

When employees advocate for their brand, it can greatly enhance brand reputation. It can also increase reach,
as employees share content on their personal social channels.

Starbucks refers to its employees as ‘partners’, and it uses the #ToBeAPartner hashtag to encourage
employees to create and share content that captures the brand personality and also provides engaging
behind-the-scenes (BTS) insights into what it means to be a Starbucks partner.

Influencer marketing strategy

An influencer marketing strategy is a guide to how influencers are selected and utilised to drive towards your
success outcomes.

The influencer marketing strategy:

Is derived from your overarching strategy.

Identifies your influencer partners.
States main purpose of influencers in your business.
Details key elements (including influencer type, objective, costs, and so on).
Ensures influencers are developed for purpose and effect.

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Risks of using influencers

When using influencers make sure you consider the following to minimize risk to your business:

Follow the CAP code for influencer marketing to make sure you are within the law regarding
transparent influencer content and payment.
Enter into a contractual relationship with influencers with agreed SLAs and behaviors.
Take time to select your influencers, and check out their content and values to make sure they are
aligned with your brand’s values.
Monitor your influencers’ ongoing content and engagement to ensure they are meeting objectives
and continue to be relevant.

CHANNEL SPECIFICATION FOR A LAUNCH PLAN

Creative specifications

As a digital marketer, you need to understand the different creative specifications across channels. Each
channel will require very specific format requirements. There are lead formats which are the most commonly
used formats and are very effective.

You should understand what formats you will implement as a part of your activity. Here are some possible
choices:

Video: VOD, social, pre-roll

Display: Image, copy, and dynamic
PPC: Texts ads, sitelinks, phone, and other ad extensions
Facebook: Video, canvas
LinkedIn: Display formats, posts, InMail
Twitter: Video, cards, lead generation
Instagram: Carousel, video
TikTok and Snapchat: Real-time asset creation
Podcasts: A only or video (hosted on YouTube)
Website or content hub: Chatbot, blogs, video, case studies, interactive content, community

You also need to keep up to date on changing trends on social formats. For example, YouTube is now the most
popular platform (at 33%) for podcasts, beating Spotify (24%) and Apple (12%). This reflects a growing
customer preference for video podcasts.

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WORKING WITH AN AGENCY

Why work with agencies?

Although you have may a lot of in-house talent to draw on, you often have to reach out to specialist agencies
to help with certain parts of your campaign.

For example, an agency might help you develop your:

Strategy
Data collection and analysis
Media
Influencer marketing
Social media
Creative assets
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Campaign management

You may decide to work with an agency for several reasons. Working with an agency gives you:

Access to expertise and tools

New thinking and fresh perspectives for your marketing activity
Cost-effective and scalable service, because you only pay for the expertise you need, rather than
hiring full-time employees

Choosing an agency

When choosing an agency, make sure you:

Consider your budget and your needs.

Evaluate the staff numbers and expertise of the agency.
Ask them what they believe to be their unique selling point (or USP) in relation to your marketing
challenges. For example, why are they a good fit for you?
Ask who their clients are and any global, local, or industry specializations they can offer.

Paying an agency

Different agencies offer different payment structures:

Some charge an hourly rate for work done.

Some charge a percentage of media spend.
Some charge by project or on a retained basis.
Some charge a fee per lead/sale

Note: Be careful when paying a percentage of media spend. This might encourage the agency to recommend
spending more so it can get higher fees. This model rewards spend rather than performance.

Best practices for working with an agency

Working with agencies can involve some risks.

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What best practices should you follow to help ensure a good return on investment?

Be aware of lead times and dependencies when asking for work. How long do they need to put a
campaign or creative piece together? Try to plan effectively and give enough time.
Give feedback on success levels, good and bad!
Avoid asking for free work. It’s a business relationship. Although they might do some work for free as
an act of goodwill, prolonged requests for free work will put strain on the relationship.
Try to move towards a consultative partnership model where both client and agency are heavily
invested in success outcomes.

Red flags when working with an agency

Working with agencies doesn’t always result in successful outcomes, of course. Here are some red flags that
might indicate there is a problem with the business relationship:

The agency switches account managers often.

The agency is unable to explain campaign performance, whether that performance is good or bad.
There’s a lack of transparency around access to agency tools or financials.
The agency refuses to commit to deadlines.

Setting expectations with agency

So, given that working with agencies can sometimes become problematic, how can you best set expectations
to nurture a positive working relationship with the agency?

Here are some tips:

Collaborate to set realistic results.

Use historical performance (good and bad) to set deliverables.
Never rush writing a creative brief. Tease out the problem and give them as much information to
help them complete the job.
Add audience, brand, or product insights to inspire creativity.
Include image sizes, messaging, logos, and other specifications and requirements.

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NOTES

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LESSON 5: EXECUTING A
DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY

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IDENTIFYING CAMPAIGN CHANNELS

Choosing your channels

If you want to effectively execute your digital strategy, you must choose the right mix of channels to target
your audience and deliver on your objectives. To help you to justify the details of your chosen channels, you
can use several models and frameworks in your digital strategy document or PowerPoint, such as SOSTAC,
RACE, The 4C’s, and AARRR.

The RACE Framework

For example, the RACE Framework, created by Dave Chaffey, helps you to develop a digital channel and
campaign strategy in a structured way. It can be customized and applied to all types of B2B and B2C
businesses, from small businesses and startups to larger organizations working on digital transformation.

RACE summarizes the key online and channel marketing activities that need to be managed, and covers the
full customer lifecycle.

Using your business objectives, you can start to plan how you can:

1. REACH your audience.

2. Encourage your audience to ACT and engage with your brand and content.
3. Drive your audience to CONVERT and take the valuable actions you want them to take.
4. ENGAGE your audience and drive repeat business from your existing customer pool.

Understanding outbound and inbound digital channels

As a digital marketer, you need to understand the uses and nuances of the different digital channels and how
each can contribute to achieving your objectives. You can include various channels in your channel plan and
then prioritize them, based on the insights from your digital research.

Your metrics will show you how some channels contribute more to your business objectives than others. This
means you should prioritize the channels that make the most impact. Begin by categorizing your channels as
inbound or outbound to determine how they will impact your goals.

Outbound

For the most part, outbound channels will drive awareness and help you show your message to a wide
audience. Outbound channels are those that allow advertisers to show ads to audiences because they fit a
certain profile or have specific interests. The audience may not be interested in your product at this moment,
but showing them your ads when they’re on websites or watching videos aims to make them aware of your
offering.

If your goal is primarily to drive awareness of your brand, sales event, or products, then choose more
outbound channels as part of your channel plan. Common outbound channels include display ads and video
ads that are shown to audiences on websites or social media.

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Inbound

When it comes to lead generation or ecommerce objectives, inbound channels tend to be more effective.
Inbound channels begin with the customer seeking your products, services, or brand as the solution to their
needs.

When the audience is motivated to find your business so they can make an enquiry or browse your
ecommerce site, they are likely to take action once they visit your website. This action can be an ecommerce
transaction or filling out a load form, for example.

If your primary objective is to drive sales, leads, or conversions, then choose more inbound channels as part of
your channel plan. Common inbound channels include paid search and SEO, as well as enquiries through social
media and email sign ups (because people are saying they want to hear from your business via email).

CHANNELS AND STRATEGY

It’s important not to rely solely on inbound or outbound channels to deliver on your objectives. It’s best to do
a mix of both. In other words, inbound channels such as PPC and SEO can be supported by outbound
awareness channels to drive more searching as more people become aware. Likewise, you can support your
awareness-driving outbound channels with SEO content so people can discover your brand, for example.

The channels in detail

Display and video

Display and video are outbound channels.

Choose display, video and native ad placements on websites that are used by your target audience (or target
or retarget specific audience groups on multiple websites) to drive awareness of your product or service.

The success of display is best understood in terms of how effectively you can reach your target audience and
serve your ads enough times that the audience recalls your offering increases. Reach and frequency metrics
are best suited to measuring the success of display campaigns, while assisted (post-click or post impression)
conversions can illustrate display’s impact on sales.

Social

Paid social is an outbound channel, but organic social is inbound.

Choose social channels that are used by your customers. And then decide on your paid social and organic
social strategies.

Use paid social to drive reach and frequency of your ads and content to raise awareness and drive customer
engagement and retention. In most cases, awareness and engagement metrics are best suited to measuring
the success of paid social, with assisted conversions showing how it impacts on conversions and sales.

Use your organic social media to build communities of followers who are interested in finding out more about
your brand. This activity and the comments and questions on posts are considered inbound actions, as the
consumer starts the engagement and wants to know more.

So remember, social is both an outbound and an inbound channel, depending on whether it is paid or organic.

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Content marketing

Content marketing is generally an inbound channel.

Choose to develop content types that will resonate with your audience and can be distributed on the most
appropriate channels to deliver on your objectives. Content marketing will feature in all aspects of digital
marketing from videos to blogs, copy and whitepapers.

Repeat engagement of content will have a positive effect on customer engagement and retention. It can drive
awareness and assist in conversion activity. Content can be measured in terms of how it impacts the channel
on which it is distributed – such as engagement rates on social media, traffic levels through SEO, and so on.

Although content marketing is generally an inbound activity, the content created for inbound channels can be
repurposed and reused in outbound paid channels to increase reach and engagement.

SEO

SEO is an inbound channel.

Choose to optimize the non-paid aspect of your search activity by ensuring the technical features of your
website are working efficiently in terms of load speed, mobile friendliness, and few or (preferably) no broken
links. Ensure the content you create contains frequent but natural use of search terms and phrases that your
target searcher might use.

Quality and well-distributed content will accrue links from websites. And link building from quality websites
will increase the visibility and rank for your website over time. Organic search drives the majority of clicks and
is often considered more trustworthy than paid search by many searchers. PPC will drive more clicks on a
mobile device because it takes a few scrolls to get past the PPC results on a search engine results page (SERP)
to the organic results below them.

PPC and SEO should ideally work together to try to capture as many searches as possible. Metrics used to
measure the success of the SEO activities include conversion metrics, total sales or leads, and conversion rate.
When assessing blog engagement, use metrics such as repeat visits, average time on site, and traffic levels to
understand the value of SEO.

Note: Video and voice search are increasingly an important part of your search strategy, and they work in a
different way from traditional search.

PPC

PPC is an inbound channel.

Choose paid search keywords that are used by your target audience to buy products. Organize your keywords
into ad groups and campaigns, with compelling copy and ad extensions to encourage clicks from searchers
who are actively interested in your productor brand. Google is the most widely used search engine but adding
Bing or Yahoo along with any other search engines to your plan can open up your search activity to different
types of searchers and drive incremental opportunities.

Total sales or leads, cost per sale, conversion rate, and other conversion metrics are best suited to measure
success for PPC.

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Email and marketing automation

Email and marketing automation are regarded as inbound channels.

Choose email to drive retention of customers by engaging your CRM contacts and mailing list . Remember,
these people are usually already engaged with your brand because that’s why they signed up to your mailing
list! Distribute content to engage, and use special offers to entice and build customer loyalty over time.

Use marketing automation to automatically email content to different persona types. (You should have already
defined your persona types earlier in the process.) Send emails at key times when the content will be best
received and consumed by the audience. Be aware of GDPR compliance when undertaking an email program.

You can achieve your retention objectives with email, and measure success by looking at open rates, email
click rates, mailing list growth, repeat visits, and higher lifetime customer value of mailing list subscribers
versus site average. Email can directly drive conversions and, depending on the type of email program, this
metric can be used to measure success – but, for the most part, email drives retention.

OFFLINE CHANNELS

Marketing channels are often divided into online (or digital) channels and offline (or traditional) channels.
However, all channels can complement each other. Offline channels can support digital media, and digital can
add value to your other media activity, such as TV, radio, outdoor, and press.

For larger campaigns with an offline element, we can look to integrate digital media to amplify and enhance
performance across other (offline) channels. TV is definitely one of the strongest mediums that digital can
support. Many viewers sit down in front of the TV, while using social sites from their mobile device. This ‘dual-
screening’ presents an opportunity to enhance performance.

In this instance, there are two key tactics that can be implemented.

Trans time mapping

The first is trans time mapping. When you buy a TV commercial, you are given very specific times and channels
for when it will be shown. These are called trans times (or transmission times). If you ensure TV audiences are
targeted with both your creative and search activity to support the TV commercial during those times, two
things can occur.

Users are more likely to click on social content or search for your product. And…
There is a higher recall of your TV creative.

Hashtag integration

The second technique is hashtag integration. Suppose your TV commercial has some social media activity built
around it. In other words, you hope to use social media to create some conversation about it. If your hashtag is
clearly listed at the end of the TV commercial, it will give audiences the correct hashtag to participate.

The same applies to radio, print, and outdoor advertising.

Note: QR codes are often used on offline content to easily connect consumers to digital content.

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COMMUNICATING A STRATEGY

The importance of communicating your strategy

It is very important that you communicate your strategy in a succinct way!

The final output of your digital marketing strategy is to present, in a single document, your objectives and how
they will be achieved.

At this point, you have:

Identified the high-impact goals you want to achieve

Set your KPIs and budgets
Researched the audience
Agreed a creative strategy
Chosen your paid and organic channel mix

Now, you need to collate this in a single document for sign-off by key stakeholders, and execution by inhouse
or agency partners. It’s incredibly efficient and valuable to have all the thinking and project pieces in one
document for easy reference, searching, and execution.

How to communicate

You can communicate your digital marketing strategy in different ways, depending on your audience. For
example, if you want to secure budget or get sign-off, doing a PowerPoint presentation on objectives,
outcomes, creative, channels, media plans, and costs is standard practice.

In general, you should not include the complicated or technical elements of your strategy in a PowerPoint,
because this level of detail could confuse higher-level stakeholders. Because these are executional pieces,
they need to be shared with the appropriate teams. When presenting to the higher-level stakeholder, simply
mention that there is an executional document to supplement the appropriate pieces within your strategy.

Communication tools

In most cases, you’ll present your strategy using Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint is best suited to present the top-level outcomes, actions, and costs of the strategy. It enables you
to create a clear, but elegant and engaging, presentation. And, when delivered in person, it can be effective in
building trust with stakeholders, and getting their feedback before the strategy is signed off and executed.

Word

Word and detailed documentation are most useful for technical pieces about strategy execution. The Word
document can be referenced as a supporting document to the PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate that
the finer details have been considered and are available if requested by stakeholders. Such details, however,
are intended for dev teams, media planners, and other executive departments.

It’s good practice to assure stakeholders that such technical documents exist, because this can help to build
trust in the strategy, without going through the actual details.

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Structuring your digital marketing strategy document

You need to structure your strategy for optimum comprehension and execution. When writing your digital
marketing strategy, it’s best to begin in Word and detail everything, before distilling it into a PowerPoint
presentation.

Table of contents

Remember to include a table of contents for easy reference. A sample table of contents could include:

1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. KPIs and Measurement
4. Research – Audience and Competitive Landscape
5. Creative Strategy and Sample Ads
6. Media - Paid & Organic
7. Costs
8. Project Plan & Timelines (e.g. Calendar/Gantt chart)

The presentation

When you have decided on the sections to include and in the most appropriate order in your Word document,
include the highlights in a PowerPoint presentation. You can then send or present it to internal stakeholders
or clients.

Most agencies and marketers don’t reveal the costs until the end, though this may differ depending on client
or internal stakeholder relationships. Choose when the best time and way is to reveal costs on a case-by-case
basis. Revealing costs towards the end of the strategy allows you to show the plan in its fullest first, and the
reader can then go through each item in the plan without the bias of the cost implications.

Once the strategy has been read and understood, putting a cost on its execution will allow the reader to
understand the value of the strategy and allow them to decide how best to proceed.

The technical document

This document is the summation of all your groundwork, research and skill as a digital marketer to understand
the core objectives and plan a successful outcome. When undertaking a digital strategy, take time to complete
the various research and planning stages, draw on what you know about the business problem and objectives,
consumer insights, channels, and KPIs to pull together all of the appropriate facets of digital marketing into
one document (and summarized in PowerPoint) to deliver on a single or group of objectives.

USING A MEDIA PLAN

What is a media plan?

The media plan is the blueprint for how paid advertising is implemented for the duration of your campaign.

Media plans are usually tables in Excel with each channel written on its own row as a line item. The channel
name (for example, Facebook) is written on the left of the table, and the audience targeting, objective, ad
delivery, cost, and run dates are written on the right of the table.

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The plan will also contain estimates of impressions and clicks which should be delivered for the budget. Digital
marketers can work out ad delivery (impressions and clicks) by agreeing a CPM in advance for premium
display. By dividing the budget by historical CPMs for Google Display Network (GDN) and social channels, and
historical CPCs for paid search, digital marketers can estimate what the budget could deliver in terms of click
traffic and impressions.

Sometimes including the historical conversion rate for the channels could help forecast conversions from the
campaign. Simply multiply the forecasted clicks for that channel by the conversion rate for the channel to
broadly estimate conversions for your activity.

Implementing the media plan

Implement your media plan and manage your ads so that you are hitting your previously agreed KPIs. The plan
might be executed by different inhouse or agency stakeholders (such as PPC specialists, social media
specialists, display or video specialists, and so on).

Be sure to check in daily to see if the plan is working or if changes are required to rectify errors or capitalize on
opportunities.

The POE model

You can use the POE model to ensure you integrate channels effectively. Campaigns that incorporate paid,
earned, and owned channels are more successful than those that use only one or two elements.

Paid channels: These include paid advertising and your outbound channels.
Owned channels: These are the channels that belong to you where you control the content, such as
your website, blogs, and podcasts.
Earned channels: These include PR, organic social media, word of mouth, and so on.

DEFINING A CAMPAIGN ACTION PLAN

What is a campaign action plan?

A digital marketing strategy contains lots of elements, and these need to be planned for the strategy to be a
success. This can be documented in a campaign action plan, which might be illustrated as a schedule,
calendar, or Gantt chart to show timings and coordination between campaign elements.

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Campaign action plans are similar to media plans, because they will detail:

Paid media channels (although they tend not to include ad delivery or finer details of the paid media
piece)
Non-paid channels
Briefing deadlines for creative
Run dates for channels
Timings for production
Budgets per line item

Ultimately, they are a project management document to outline the budgets, channels, production, and
timings of all elements in the campaign execution.

Like a media plan, campaign action plans are formatted visually, like a calendar or Gantt chart, to make them
easier to understand.

End dates and lead times

The first part of your action plan is to set the end date of the campaign itself, and work backwards to ensure
all the elements are taken into account.

Keep in mind the importance of lead times when planning elements such as creative production and media
buying. It can take time to brief and create videos, images, and ad copy or text. It can also take time to
research keywords and create PPC and paid social media campaigns, and so on. For these reasons, it’s
important to ensure there is enough lead time for creative production and media buying or campaign
creation.

Parallel elements

Some elements of your plan can run in parallel, or simultaneously. For example, the person who does your
graphic design is unlikely to also be the person who also creates your Google Ads or Paid Meta campaigns. So,
when there is capacity in your team or organization, it’s a good idea to run elements side-by-side to manage
time efficiently.

Having a visual representation of the different elements in a plan that come on stream and run side by side in
a Gantt chart or calendar is a good way to plan and manage a digital strategy. This helps to ensure that
nothing runs late, and the campaign is launched on time.

Dependencies and blockers

Be aware of the dependencies and blockers in a plan. For example, your Meta Ads can’t go live without the ad
creative! So it’s important to identify the elements of your plan that require other elements to be completed
so they can move forward.

It’s always worthwhile building in some contingency time into the plan to allow for dependent items being
late, but not putting too much risk on the plan not going live.

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DELIVERING A CAMPAIGN ACTION PLAN

Automation tools

There are several automation tools available that can help you deliver your campaign. These include:

CRM tools, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics

Project management tools, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Trello, Hive HubSpot, Notion, and Salesforce
Content audit tools, such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Search Console
Content management tools, such as HubSpot, Wiki, WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace
Social media management tools, such as Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Brandwatch
Influencer marketing platforms, such as HypeAuditor, Upfluence, and Story Clash

Selecting a project management tool

When selecting a project management tool, you should ask yourself these questions:

How well can I assign and track multiple tasks?

Does it allow for parent and child projects?
How visible and flexible is collaboration?
What are the document sharing capabilities?
What is the cost?
How much support will I have for implementation?
How intuitive is it?
Who else is using it effectively and can I talk to them?

Factors to consider

When choosing a content management system (CMS) or a CRM tool, consider these factors:

Functionality
Ease of use
Customization options
Implementation time
Customer service
Price

Strategy risk

Finally, bear in mind that your digital marketing strategy could be at risk from several factors. These include:

Dependencies: When one stage of the project cannot proceed until the preceding stage is complete,
you can have delays caused by bottlenecks. Knowing where the dependencies exist can help you plan
to mitigate any potential problems.
External suppliers and their contingencies: When you work with external suppliers, you need to
ensure that they can supply what you need, at the right cost, and to the expected quality. Establish
good communications with your suppliers so that you can quickly address any issues that arise.
Social media crisis management: Bad publicity on social media can quickly damage brand reputation.
Make sure you have a social media crisis plan in place to address any controversies that arise. Always
be transparent and honest when responding to social media crises.

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 Cost and scope creep: No matter how well projects are planned, the unexpected has a habit of
happening! It is always good practice to have buffer time and buffer budget built into any digital
marketing plan to prepare for the unexpected. However, do keep an eye out for escalating costs or
drifting timelines. Also, watch out for scope creep, where additional tasks keep getting added to the
project plan.
Internal training and skill development support: When developing a digital marketing campaign, you
need to ensure that you have the people in place to deliver the objectives. However, because digital
marketing is such a rapidly evolving field, you often have to upskill team members to ensure they can
stay on top of their tasks. This additional training can initially lead to project delays and increased
costs, but it is usually a necessary extra investment.

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NOTES

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