Marketing is notorious for jargon and Digital Marketing is no different. It is easy to get confused with processes and systems that companies follow to create and implement digital campaigns. Start by understanding the steps that are required. In all planning processes there are four key steps:

The first step is all about establishing where we are now.  This is often described as Situational Analysis and for a digital marketing campaign you will need to gather information.  Begin with competitors’ digital activities, consumer digital media usage and their behavioural patterns.  Listening online is a great place to start.  Set up Google alerts for key words that apply to your market.  Use software like Radion 6 that monitors social conversations on multiple channels and search for articles, blogs and videos related to your market.

The next step is to decide where do we want to be in the future.  What would success look like in that future.  Set out goals and objectives that are clear, realistic and within an agreed time frame. Creating awareness and building relationships with your target audience are often common objectives.  Quantify the number of connections you expect, the number of unique visitors to your website  and the level of engagement you want to achieve.

The third step is working out how to meet our goals.  Here we develop digital marketing strategies that fit with our objectives, target audience and products and services.  Digital Marketing strategies are simply the decisions you make on the tools you need to implement a campaign.  What are the channels, the message and the timing?  Always check to ensure that these activities are aligned with where you want to go and are consistent across multiple platforms.

The final step is ensuring that you know if you have achieved success.  With Google analytics, Insights data on Facebook and other social media platforms you can measure impressions, website traffic, engagement and sentiment.  This data will allow you to amend and adapt your activities as you monitor them.  Ensure you regularly collect and analyse the data and communicate these reports to the team.

On week three of the course we will look at Target Audience Profiling.