Digital marketing strategy and digital marketing tactics
There is a huge amount of debate going on the web suddenly where everyone is talking about Strategy. Most of it is concerned with Social Media and both singular, (Strategy) and plural (Strategies) are being bandied around. The thing is that most of the time the people saying it are not talking about strategy (either singular or plural) at all. What they are talking about is tactics.
Just so we get this right. A strategy is the grand plan, and in marketing terms it has a business goal. That business goal might be to increase sales (and if we are talking about digital media I would argue that any strategy that doesn’t have this goal is shooting too low), it could be to raise brand awareness, gather more prospects, increase customer retention (which by nature should include an element of increasing sales as well). The point is that it is tangible. It is related to the business as a whole and says “This is what success looks like and this is how we are going to measure it. I like to apply an acid test when I define a digital marketing strategy and that is to ask myself “Would David Ogilvy agree with me and understand what I was talking about”. It’s amazing how focused this little mantra can make you.
Now at no point in defining my strategic goal have I used the words blogging, Facebook, Twitter, email, eCRM, display advertising, social media, search, SEO, SEM, Website, user experience, usability, accessibility, backlinks, Google, Bing, ad exchanges, PPC or any of the other terms that make up the digital marketing armoury. That’s because these are not strategies, they are tactics. Another dead giveaway for when people don’t understand the difference seems to me to be when they start talking about strategies in the plural. It’s a pretty intense and complicated thing for a campaign to achieve one strategic goal so bandying them around like baubles on a Christmas Tree is a dangerous thing to do and could quite likely lead to a confused campaign.
Once the strategic goals have been set my next task is to look at the customer. Another little mantra I like to use comes from my days as a drama student.
(As an aside, I was probably the worst drama student in the world but there were lots of extremely cute girls that were also drama students and I was in a minority of heterosexual men so this suited my strategic goal at the time and enabled me to employ many tactics to achieve it.)
The mantra takes Stanislavsky’s seven questions of An Actor Prepares and refers them to my customer.
- Who are they?
- Where are they?
- When is it?
- What do they want?
- Why do they want it?
- How will they get it?
- What must be overcome?
There is another three that I like to add in as well which are:
- What will they do with it once they have got it?
- What do they currently think?
- What do I want them to think?
This paints a very clear picture for me of my two ends. I know what I want to achieve and how to measure it and now I know a lot about the people who are going to help me do it.
At this point I start to look at my tactics. I look at how to contact them, and I start to plan the journey we need to undertake together in order to reach my strategic goal. It’s only at this point that I will start to talk about the elements of digital marketing that can help us, and there is absolutely nothing to gain by limiting myself to one tactic. I want to use as many as I can and as many as the budget will allow.
This process keeps me focused and ensures that everything I do has the goal in mind.
I suspect it’s no different to a boxer whose strategic goal is to knock his opponent out in the fifth round. He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent, studies previous fights and looks for ways to achieve his goal. He then decides to tactically use his jab and concentrate on body work. He plans the journey the fight will take so that he is ready in the fifth to land his big punch and achieve his strategic goal. Never will he talk about his body work strategy.
Tags: advertising, An Actor Prepares, business goal, business goals, David Ogilvy, digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Strategy, Digital media, Interactive Marketing, Interactive Media, marketing, ONline Media, Social Media, social media straegy, Social Media Strategy, Stanislavsky, strategic goals, Strategy, tactics, User Experience
Very good concept, I like how you convey the msg.
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To market in terms of quality rather than price, and in order to differentiate accordingly, you need to follow the standard format of the 4 P
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