Welcome to PART TWO of developing your digital marketing strategy series! If you missed PART ONE, you can click here.
In this blog I am going to go over a few key steps with regards to analysis and competitors while reaching a goal.
Historical performance & gap analysis
Let’s talk about a few lessons with analyzing past performances. Consider these insights as you move forward. What worked? What didn’t? It is helpful to outline your performance in great detail so that you have a benchmark for goal-setting. Make note of any tracking issues or caveats, if applicable.
Considered your performance results. Are they strong, poor or just okay? Identifying your strengths and weaknesses allows you to uncover opportunities and growth.
Keep in mind whether there were (or are) any external influences that positively or negatively affect historical performance. At times we see deviations in performance due to things that are entirely outside of our control. Those blips should be adjusted for when creating projections for the year ahead.
Competitors
Analyzing the competition is another great way to uncover opportunities, allowing growth. Having an unbiased understanding of strengths and weaknesses also gives you a leg up.
Ask yourself these questions from a product standpoint and a marketing standpoint:
- What are your competitors doing that you aren’t?
- Realistically, what are they doing better?
- How are they messaging their value proposition?
- How can you further differentiate your offering?
You might want to see my Blog – How to Make Your Advertising Content Relative to Your Audience
Goals
Strategy is an important trait, without this it really becomes impossible to attain your goals. Before you can outline the digital marketing goals, you have to understand the business objectives and the role that digital marketing should play in supporting those objectives. From there, you can create more specific goals as they pertain to digital marketing.
The aforementioned sections (target customer, historical performance, gap analysis and competitors) should help to shape your goals. Everything in the remaining sections should be determined with the purpose of achieving the goals outlined within this section.
In order to measure the performance of the strategy and to provide clarity into the tactical elements, the goals need to be very specific and quantifiable (we’ll get to that part later). If you are promoting multiple products, there should be separate goals for each.
Goals should also be anchored in profitability. With e-commerce, this is often considered easy enough. With lead generation, there needs to be an understanding of lead value and ROAS (return on ad spend) and ROI (return on investment) on lead counts, also taking into account the point of diminishing returns. However with lead generation let’s talk briefly about customer retention. Adding in a customer loyalty goal in 2017 is a must. Using BIG Data here is really what I call your “golden nugget”. Next week I will join in the Account Base Marketing aspect, be sure to catch that Blog!
Stay tuned for additional digital 2017 marketing tips!
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