Digital Marketing: Channels and Strategy

 What tools do digital marketers use and how is a long-term media strategy developed to promote a brand? What are the risks for marketers by discarding any tools from the final promotion plan? Let's try to figure it out.

Digital marketing is an integrated promotion of a group of goods or services that uses digital technologies to achieve goals.

Many are simplifying the term to internet marketing, but this is partly wrong. Online marketing uses only network resources, while digital marketing uses many more possibilities.

Advertising on a board with a flight schedule at the airport, a QR code on the pages of a magazine - all these are tools that pave the way to the client through the "digital".

The most common digital marketing tools today

There are so many ways to attract and retain a client through numbers that it is difficult to list them all, and there is no need for it. It is enough to have an idea of the most popular and, therefore, the most effective tools.

• Efficiency means the price/quality ratio, or rather “the effort expended/the result achieved”.
• All digital marketing tools can be roughly divided into three large groups:
• External resources: advertising outside the company's sites, which needs to be constantly paid;
• Own resources: website, store, advertising sites owned by the company, etc.;

Earned (organic) resources: forums, places where product advertising is distributed without visible efforts of marketers, and is almost free. In practice, because many such resources do not arise spontaneously, but as a purposeful work of a marketer.

Let's group the most popular tools.

1st group:

Digital TV, radio, podcasts, youtube channels of influencers, popular bloggers, etc .;

Mailing in messengers, SMS, e-mail marketing as a separate area. Newsletters by e-mail stand apart since “electronic” is considered a kind of business communication channel, through which it is easier for a marketer to reach a client than in instant messengers or a short SMS;

Interactive platforms (screens and displays in public places), a certain analog of visual banner advertising;

Advertising in applications and games, on all platforms;

Contextual advertising, display advertising

Partnership programs. This tool provides a much higher conversion rate than general advertising. Partners are directly interested in sales, as they usually receive a reward for the completed transaction.

2nd group :

SMM One of the “fastest” tools that allow you to get a large number of “visitors” for a short advertising campaign. The specificity of this tool is that the tastes of the audience and its localization in various social networks are constantly changing, and for its effective use, the marketer must be aware of all trends and formats, and also clearly know the tastes and specifics of the behavior of his target audience (CA);

SEO and SEM - promotion using content and its optimization for search engines. The benefit of this tool is that it works for the future. High-quality content can bring new visitors for a very long time, especially if its relevance does not decrease over time.

3rd group:

"Tails" of discussions in social networks, on specialized platforms, and in narrow professional communities. A small part of such resources is indirectly “earned” by competent SEO and SMM. The quality of the product/service, the final value that the product generates for the consumer, and its competent positioning on the market also make a big contribution to the formation of the “sundress”.

From tools to their application - digital strategy and how to develop it

So we skimmed over the popular instruments, in some places we remembered important nuances. But these are all common causes, and digital marketing usually faces a particular task - promoting a particular product. And for each particular case, there will be its own set of tools, its own plan for the frequency and sequence of their use.

A digital strategy is a coherent plan to promote a product, service, or brand. The process of its development can be roughly divided into six stages:

• Purpose formation.
• Study of the target audience.
• Selection of channels for promotion.
• Creation of advertising campaigns, development of offers.
• Media plan.
• Analytics and optimization.

At each of these stages, we will need our own digital tools, most of which we have already mentioned above. From this point on, the focus shifts from the toolbox to achieving the required results. So, for example, for one-time purchases, there is no point in e-mail newsletters, and for small businesses, branding may not be a priority. All this is determined exactly at the first stage.

Setting goals

• You must define the basic goals of promotion, choose a clear direction of work.
• Basic goals can be marketing, media, and communication.
• marketing - the formation of the need for your product among the target audience;
• communication - to convey to the target audience the properties of the product, to show what tasks it solves, what value it creates;
• media - maximum coverage of all target audience segments.
• Global goals should be broken down into smaller and more detailed ones and, ideally, be guided by SMART technology, in which the achievement of goals will be most likely and timely.

Building a clear target audience profile

At this stage, it is necessary to formulate an approximate portrait of a representative of the target audience: who he is, by what criteria he chooses certain services and products. With the help of tools for collecting statistical data, it is possible to assess the dynamics of the number of target audiences, which will allow us to assess the market potential and anchor the strategy on a solid foundation.

The audience needs to be segmented according to different criteria: age, gender, income, marital status, shopping preferences (online/offline), deliberate or impulsive purchases, etc. After that, you need to work out several purchase scenarios with the participation of different segments of your audience.

Selecting channels for advertising

Based on the studied data on the target audience, it is necessary to determine all the channels in which the promotion of a service, product, or brand will take place. They are selected according to a simple principle:

All channels of promotion should complement each other and cover the largest possible target audience. The impact of different channels should amplify the effect and lead the customer to the purchase.

This requires a comprehensive analysis of the result. For example, we have a bad conversion rate from contextual advertising. We understand and understand that the point is in the bad reputation of the product on the network. This means that it was necessary to simultaneously work on the image, forming an opinion (opinion building), otherwise, the context would simply drain the budget.

At this stage, you need clear targeting settings and prioritization. You should understand that if some channels perform significantly better than others, they need to be more emphasized. Be sure to pay attention to associated conversions (auxiliary channels), which were not the last point of purchase, but helped the user to complete it. So you will surely understand which channel is worth disconnecting, and which one needs to make more investments.

Also, at the stage of choosing channels, it is necessary to finally form the positioning of the product.

Creation of advertising campaigns

We already have answers to all basic product positioning questions. Now you need to translate this knowledge into creating clear proposals for the client.

Depending on your audience segment, choose the benefits and values that are closest to your specific sample.

For example, if you are selling a travel package, you have conditionally 2 groups: married couples with children and young couples under 25. For the first group, comfort, and predictability, the absence of any force majeure, and a calm rest will be more important, while the second group will prefer exotic countries, a turnkey vacation, with the opportunity to get more impressions and emotions.

To increase efficiency, you need to create an offer, taking into account the needs of each of the groups. We have already done segmentation before, now we can offer each group exactly what it needs.

Media plan

• Advertising channels are launched, we already have some initial data. Now we need to evaluate all the data by the following parameters:
• current traffic and conversion;
• predicted traffic, for example, for a month (checked by analytical tools of search engines). Here we calculate the budget based on the expected conversion;
• We estimate the approximate flow of leads from each of the channels.
• We predict the percentage of sales from each application.
• We estimate the cost of attracting one client for each of the channels and adjust the application of efforts. We increase volumes where it brings more results.
• We draw up a media plan for the next few months based on the data received.
• Now we have a plan, in fact, a digital strategy in the form of a diagram, in which we see the distribution of budgets between channels at certain periods (for example, there is a seasonal dependence in the tourism business) and an “activation map” - the points where you direct the consumer (landing pages, order form, etc.). At this stage, sales, profitability, and scalability of advertising campaigns are roughly predicted. Also, all kinds of data are collected for further analytics.

Analytics and optimization

This stage is only formally the last one, but we carry out verification and optimization at each of the stages, after drawing up the strategy itself. Ideally, long-term planning requires real-time statistics collection and monthly performance snapshots for the fastest possible response to any changes. The more often such an analysis is carried out, the faster points of decline in indicators are found and processes are optimized.