Planning, implementing, and optimizing your digital marketing program

Begin the launch of your digital marketing program by first determining your audience and goals, and then putting in place metrics to ensure you’re always improving.

Step 1: Identify and segment your audiences. Today buyers expect a personalized experience across every touchpoint. To do this, you must understand their demographic, firmographic, and technographic attributes as well as how to address their questions and pain points. 

Step 2: Establish goals and measurement strategy. Use audience information to determine personas and get a clear view of their sales journey to establish your goals and measurement strategy. Important metrics include impressions, reach, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate, conversions, cost per lead (CPL), effective cost per thousand (eCPM), as well as back-end metrics like return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), first- and multi-touch attribution, and lifetime  customer value (LCV).  

Step 3: Set up your AdTech and channels. Ad technology can take some time to navigate, so make sure you have the right data management platforms (DMPs), demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPS), and ad exchanges in place before you get started. Align your team, communicate everyone’s objectives, and show how their channels fit into the big picture of digital marketing.

Step 4: Launch and optimize. Digital marketing can be used for acquisition, nurturing, building customer loyalty, and branding. Review metrics regularly, so you can know where you are excelling and where you need work to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space. 

Designing a Marketing Organization for the Digital Age.

But what if you're one of the companies that don't have a digital strategy yet? Well, I think the two simple alternatives for creating a plan may suggest a way forward:

• Start with a separate digital marketing plan defining transformation needed and making the case for investment and changes to your digital marketing. Then, following approval, create an integrated digital plan which is part of the overall marketing plan - digital is fully aligned and becomes part of business as usual.

So, what are the takeaways to act on here? It seems to me that:

• Using digital marketing without a strategic approach is still commonplace. I'm sure many of the companies in this category are using digital media effectively and they could certainly be getting great results from their search, email, or social media marketing. But I'm equally sure that many are missing opportunities for better targeting or optimization, or are suffering from the other challenges I've listed below. Perhaps the problems below are greatest for larger organizations who most urgently need governance.
• The majority of companies in our research do take a strategic approach to digital. From talking to companies, I find the creation of digital plans often occurs in two stages. First, a separate digital marketing plan is created. This is useful to get agreement and buy-in by showing the opportunities and problems and map out a path through setting goals and specific strategies for digital including how you integrated digital marketing into other business activities. Second, digital becomes integrated into marketing strategy, it's a core activity, "business-as-usual", but doesn't warrant separate planning, except for the tactics.

Reference Through

If you don't have a strategy, or maybe you want to review which business issues are important to include within a strategic review, we've set out the 10 most common problems, that in our experience arise if you don't have a strategy.