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Consumers rarely have a single channel experience with your brand. It’s an increasingly noisy place out there, with shiny new platforms appearing constantly. Feeling confident that you are spending your time and your company’s money in the right place has never been more important than in today’s global economy.
And whether you are accountable for the whole of your digital marketing plan or a channel specialist it is essential to appreciate and understand the fundamentals of digital strategy.
The complexities of each channel partnered with continuous tech advancements means it’s easy to get lost in the jargon and focus solely on a single metric. ROI alone as a metric can be misinterpreted without clarity on the role the channel plays in your overall marketing plan.
So, let’s get back to basics with 5 easy steps to reconnect you to your digital strategy.
Each brand and business will have its own nuanced opportunities and challenges. If you are only working on a revenue target then it is critical to take a step back and check in on your overarching marketing objective.
If not, you could be missing out on massive potential in your channel - whether that’s driving insights to share across your business, or using what the channel has to offer to meet wider business objectives over and above sales. This could be something like, changing consumers perceptions of a brand, attracting a new customer base or improving profitability for the business.
Do you know where your customer is online? How they are using different platforms? And what they are looking to get out of an interaction with your brand? Whether that’s education, inspiration, price, content, knowledge or entertainment, are you able to give them what THEY need. It’s a common mistake for marketeers to map out customer journeys purely from the brand’s point of view. In the digital world, the customer is the one in charge, the one calling the shots. Our job as marketeers is to understand THEIR optimum journey and make it as frictionless as possible.
Just because a customer can be found by a brand, doesn’t mean that’s where they want to engage with you. How many times do you see comments from customers when an influencer starts to talk about a brand when the fit is wrong, or they feel like they are being sold to when all they want to be is entertained? If you get it wrong you risk having a negative impact on your potential customers. Do your research, think about it from their point of view and check on yourself that you are able to reach their expectations on what they need from you. So remember, just because you’ve found them doesn’t mean they want to be found by you!
What does good look like? That’s a really good question. Sadly there is no generic right or wrong KPI in digital marketing. What is a positive metric for one brand is not for another, but to find out what is the right one you must go back to your overarching objectives. A brand who is looking for aggressive and ambitious growth might be happy to accept a lower return on investment on their activity and they might have a great LifeTime Value programme so bringing in new customers is worth the investment. But a brand struggling with their profitability will need a very different ROI figure. Driving revenue alone (at any cost) isn’t right, they need to be driving it at the right margin to be sustainable. Of course it’s always useful to look at benchmarks and your agency can help you know what good looks like on certain KPIs. However, always take other brands’ view of success with a massive pinch of salt because everyone’s objectives, brand and strategy is going to be very different.
So, you should be in a position now where you can successfully articulate the role of each channel in your marketing plan. This will give you the confidence that you are spending your time and money in the right place and at the right point in the consumer journey. It also gives you the opportunity to be critical about your activity, challenge your thinking and understand all the options. Could that money be better spent on another channel? Should you test that new platform? It will give you the chance to have an agnostic approach to your media planning which ultimately benefits the brand, not just the individual channel. At Genie Goals, this is how we approach work with all of our clients whether we support them on one of many channels.
