In the second of our series of articles on planning and creating a digital strategy, Dan Mortimer, managing director at Red Ant, takes a closer look at the planning stages.
Aims are the foundation of any digital strategy. At the planning stage, aims should be presented in a generic form rather than a specific form so as not to overload with detail. The detail behind the aims of a digital strategy will be defined by the digital strategy process. By concentrating on specific aims from the outset, you run the risk of missing potential opportunities.
Goals normally include increased awareness, building an audience and / or educating that audience, increasing reputation, and ultimately making the conversion. Limitations generally consist of conflict of interest with existing business practices and / or outlets, initial perception (both audience and reputation), and budget. Working with these goals and limitations digital consultants can start to build clear strategies to meet their aims.
Whilst each brand will have its own specific aims and objectives, they can normally be aligned to one of these three main groups:
- Consumer awareness and demand creation
- Direct consumer drive to retail and purchase
- Education and incentive within the retail space
Each of these groups will have mirrored activities in the offline space and it is imperative that any existing activities that a brand is taking part in are covered within the background.
Positioning aims
Aims can be further clarified by ranking against:
- Focus of aim: Aims can have a very direct and specific focus that can be achieved in few ways or a broad focus that can be achieved in many different ways
- Process: Aims can require the audience to handle few or many steps.
- Length of engagement: Aims may have a short term turnaround or be long term engagements.
Background
Digital strategy cannot live in isolation from the existing activities and history of the brand. Before any meaningful digital strategy can be put in place, the brand must be understood inside and out. Misplaced brand identity within a digital strategy will at best lead to a misfiring campaign. At worst it can lead to long term damage for the brand.
The message for any digital strategy must be on brand or at least on brand aspirations as defined in the aims. Whilst a subjective viewpoint is all well and good, living and breathing the brand will open up ideas for digital strategy that will take the brand to the next level. The creative stage and the actualisation stage will require a strong knowledge of offline marketing strategy activities. Fully integrated digital and offline strategies are the most successful.
Understanding the background also helps to identify unrealistic aims and stops the digital strategy promising to deliver more than it is capable of doing. For example, it’s unlikely that a new start-up company without a great seeding budget will become an industry leader within a few weeks of the strategy commencing. Twitter for example was operating for two to three years before it reached general public consciousness.
Audience
One of the core propositions of modern digital strategies is the shift in the audience from non-participatory to engaged. Working with the brand audience in a positive engagement through digital marketing techniques can enable brand exposure to snowball. Of course the flipside to this proposition is that negative experience is also broadcast to a wider sphere. Audience management is a key factor in the actualisation stage. However, to work with the brand audience the first step must be to identify and understand each segment of that audience.
Focus
The diagram above shows a simplified message path of a single idea within a digital strategy. The idea is initially seeded through both idea creation and advertising (paid and unpaid). It is likely the idea will be picked up initially (but not exclusively), by existing advocates. When conducted correctly, this can result in a snowball effect.
The company background should be able to provide a snapshot of the audience taken from previous marketing activities and brand intelligence. Further insight can be taken from analytics tools that should be in place on all current digital activities.
One area of consideration that should be part of audience selection is that the current audience might not be appropriate for the aims of that particular digital strategy. Evaluation of the audience should consider expansion of the brand message into new audience segments where the digital strategy and brand aims require such outreach.
Persona Building
Persona building is a traditional way of segmenting the audience into identifiable groups that can be used for marketing activities. The segmentation of audience into persona should not be limited solely to identifying groups, but also to rating the specific group’s alignment to the stated aims. “Who is my audience”, is in part an irrelevant question when factoring against “who in my audience will be best suited to delivering my aims”.
Two sample personas can be seen below.
Existing customers (Audience A)
- Male / Female 25 to 32
- Higher education
- Technically adept, but not advanced (comfortable online)
- Most likely to be looking for the best experience at the best price
- Will most likely have to foot small additional charges by competitors personally
- Most likely channels are LinkedIn, Business and Sports sections of broadsheet papers
Female university student aged 18 – 21 (Audience B)
- Higher education
- Single or in a relationship
- Technically adept, but not advanced (comfortable online)
- Although they are not presently particularly affluent, there is a high chance that they will develop into an independently wealthy and affluent market – a long term relationship will need to be built
- Most likely channels are Facebook, MySpace, Google, Fashion websites and Student Union websites
Finding your audience
One of the benefits of a digital strategy is the opportunity to segment activity into spheres where the audience resides. Targeting activities in this way can be used to reduce cost whilst increasing efficiency.
Demographic segmentation location sourcing
From each of the personas defined it is possible to apply demographic filters to major locations where digital strategy activities can take place – for example, social networking sites, blogs, search engines or forums. Often locations are applicable to multiple personas and demographics (for example, Facebook, which is almost ubiquitous across western consumer audiences).
By looking at the personas, locations suggest themselves. Most locations are happy to provide anonymous statistics of their audience to help promote digital marketing.
Size of digital channels in the UK
By segmenting personas across interests, niche locations can be identified. Depending upon fiscal return, targeting locations that contain small audience numbers and low barriers to entry can be a viable digital strategy leading to high returns. Location sourcing across interest requires an element of research using either freely available tools (e.g. Google search), or paid for tools (e.g. Brandwatch).
Certain networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn), provide a combination of demographic and interest segmentation that allows for highly personalised campaigns to be developed. Other tools such as Phorm have entered the market and allow a great degree of segmentation, however these have yet to prove popular.
Location evaluation
To scope the remit of any creative, locations should be evaluated against audience size, barriers to entry and the potential for conversion of the digital strategy aims. This will avoid the scenario whereby creative ideas are developed for locations that will not benefit the digital strategy. Locations can be evaluated in-line with the following table:
Planning conclusion
At the end of the planning stage of a digital strategy, the below should be clear to all concerned:
- The desired aims of the digital strategy
- The audiences to be targeted in order to achieve the best results
- Where to find each of the audiences to achieve the goals
In the next article of this series we will be examining creativity by analyzing how ideas can be generated through the clever use of brainstorming.
