CREATING DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCTS What is a digital media strategy? A digital media strategy — also called a digital marketing strategy, is the practice of marketing your products or services to customers through online, digital mediums. These mediums include: Web pages Video Audio Apps Emails Ebooks And more The most successful digital media marketing campaigns focus on how you can improve your audience’s life or provide a solution to their problem. A strong digital media strategy focuses on building a digital culture around your brand to get people to turn into conversions for your business. Why does a business need a digital media strategy? Digital media strategies help you focus on creating value for your customers while retaining a competitive edge in your niche market. These strategies also help you identify who to market to online. Some of the benefits that come with having a digital media strategy are: Relevant targeting: Digital marketing enables you to reach leads most interested in your business. You can target people based on demographics, buying habits, and more. It allows you to reach people that haven’t discovered your business yet and help them learn about your company. Building relationships: As a result of your digital media marketing efforts, you’ll build meaningful relationships with your customers, turning them from leads into loyal customers. A good digital media strategy will help you provide a memorable customer experience and keep customers coming back. Quick results: With a solid digital marketing strategy in place, you’ll convert customers faster and with greater efficiency. Automated testing and bidding techniques allow you to optimize your strategy so it performs it’s best without requiring you to spend inordinate amounts of time on it. Measurability: Digital media strategies are easier to track and measure than most other marketing strategies. It increases your ability to collect data about your customers, as well as identify if you are reaching your goals. 4 easy steps for creating a digital media strategy A successful digital media strategy takes coordination between different departments within your company, including sales and marketing. You need to work together to ensure you’re meeting your customers’ needs and creating a positive experience with your brand. 1. Set your digital media marketing goals Your goals help you stay focused on your digital media strategy. If you want to see success with digital marketing, you must determine what you want to achieve with your strategy. Goals depend upon your business’s needs. Whether you’re looking to gain new leads or earn more conversions, you must think about what your company wants to achieve by investing in a digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking to increase sales, your next digital marketing goal could be raising sales by X%. In short, your marketing goal should align with your business’s overall goals. Every digital media strategy goal should work towards achieving a larger company goal. SMART goals Specific: Your digital media strategy must aim to achieve a specific goal. A vague goal, like “earn more conversions,” won’t help you know if you’ve reached your goals, but a specific goal like “increase conversions by 20%” states precisely what you want to achieve. Measurable: Your goals must also be measurable. A measurable goal is one that you can easily track, such as “increase traffic by 50%.” With a goal like this, you can visibly see how much your traffic increases or decreases over the course of your digital media campaign. When goals are easily measurable, you can identify key metrics and determine how much you’re accomplishing. Achievable: Before setting a goal, you need to determine if you have the resources and ability to achieve it. A goal like “increase sales by 50%” may not be achievable for your company and can derail your strategy and discourage the people on your marketing and sales teams. Realistic: Similarly to achievable, your goals must be realistic. You might be able to achieve a goal like “increase Facebook likes to 4000,” but if you’re trying to do that within a short amount of time, it may not be realistic for your business. Measurable milestones will help you reach those goals that are more difficult to accomplish. Timely: Your goals must have deadlines. With enforced deadlines, your teams will be more motivated to keep your digital media strategy on track. Without a concrete deadline to push your teams to accomplish your goal, your goal runs the risk of falling by the wayside. 2. Determine your product’s unique value proposition Every product and service needs to have something about it that makes it valuable to customers. If you can’t showcase the value, people won’t know why they should buy your product or invest in your services. Take some time to identify the unique value of your product or service that will address those needs and concerns. Ask questions like: What problem is my product solving? What does my product do that makes life for my customers better? How does my product solve the problem better than my competitors? What capital and means do I have to bring that value to customers? How can I sustain my product’s unique value? 3. Identify your target audience You need to know exactly who you’re marketing to with your products or services. Identify the common points between your customers, and segment them into groups according to their: Location Age Income (occupation) Goals Needs Interests And priorities/values The easiest way to do this is by using customer lists, surveys, and interviews to create representations of your ideal customers (called buyer personas or marketing personas) based on real data, not assumptions. 4. Choose your digital media tactics After you’ve determined your digital media strategy goals, your product and service’s value proposition, and your target audience, you’ll want to pick the digital media tactics that your overarching digital media strategy will encompass. Digital Media Tactics Search engine optimization (SEO): This tactic is to help search engines find and index pages on your website. Search engines will read the content on your pages to determine what the page is about, the benefit is that it will show your page on relevant search pages. When put in place, SEO will drive traffic to your website with little to no money required to make it happen. Digital Media Tactics Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Similar to SEO, this tactic gets your business in relevant search results and drives traffic to your page. PPC is a paid tactic that requires bidding to get ad placements. When you run a PPC ad, search engines will show your ad at the top of search results, above organic listings, where you can reach more relevant leads. Digital Media Tactics Social media marketing: This tactic focuses on expanding your brand awareness to audiences on social media through both consistent posting of content and paid advertisements on the platform. If implemented correctly, social media marketing will build your brand a following, increase your authority and trust, as well as drive traffic and sales. Digital Media Tactics Content marketing: Content marketing is the heart of your digital media strategy because each other tactic requires content to function properly. Content marketing allows you to lead potential customers through each stage of the marketing funnel. Content marketing is another tactic that can be done for free. Digital Media Tactics Web design: This tactic focuses on improving the user experience (UX) of your website. With it, you can improve the overall design of your website, as well as things like mobileresponsiveness and page load speed, the benefit being that visitors to your site will have a better time interacting with your site, making the conversion process as easy as possible. Digital Media Tactics Email marketing: Email marketing focuses on sending relevant, personalized emails to customers that have subscribed to your mailing lists. Email marketing makes it easy to provide a quality experience and relationship with your brand, increasing the number of loyal customers. With email marketing, you can automatically send emails personalized to your customers’ birthdays and important holidays, their product search history, and their preferences and needs.
