Brands may participate in digital spaces like social media or they understand the value of a good website. They’re “doing” digital marketing, but it’s not aligned with their traditional marketing efforts. We understand it can be challenging to find a starting point to integrate the two. At Ten Adams, we like to start with a good plan.
If your planning doesn’t include digital strategies, you’re missing an important opportunity for positioning. Your digital plans can be addressed as part of your traditional planning tactics, or they can be added, as needed. Either way, be sure you’re addressing these critical pieces throughout the calendar year. The following definitions may help articulate the many moving pieces of a digital strategy plan.
Strategic consulting and reporting
New initiatives, strategic developments, and supporting deliverables top the big picture in Digital Planning. Your team should account for regularly planned digital consultation with project leads to include: participation in support calls and meetings, liaising with any third parties (content providers, vendors, etc.), strategic planning for new features, add-ons, initiatives, optimizations, and maintenance deliverables. Consider using a measurement dashboard and monthly performance reporting that supports behavior analysis of site usage activity and proactive recommendations.
Feature additions and minor requests
Keep an eye on minor features, site changes, add-ons, and seasonal campaigns as appropriate, often managed through a ticketing solution to streamline project intake requests and submissions. This can include but is not limited to content development, design, prototyping, usability testing, visual design, front-end development, CMS integration with new designs, copywriting, new back-end functionality, etc. While these aren’t as exciting as the major strategic developments, your end-user experience greatly benefits from these upgrades and features.
Maintenance and Optimization
While regular maintenance and proactive optimization of your projects may seem routine and dull, these are an essential element to keep projects performing. Maintenance and optimization include bug-squashing and debugging any issues that arise within the website, core updates, hosting environment support, and application developments.
If your planning doesn’t include digital strategies, you’re missing an important opportunity for positioning.
Channel Positioning
Brands need to understand how they are going to communicate on each channel. Audiences engage differently on each channel, they may have different expectations from one channel to the next, and brands may learn that their channels may be reaching different audiences. Understanding and planning for these nuances will keep your marketing messages from falling flat.
Keyword Research
If you have or are adding key service line pages to your website or if you produce consumer information like a blog site, do some keyword research planning prior to copywriting. This involves identifying common and most used keywords that will later be used in the copy. It’s essential to know, prior to production, the keywords that your audience will use in search terms to find your content or website.
Content Calendar
There can be calendars for many types of content: publications, blog sites, social media, etc. A content calendar makes sure that all production is consistent and aligned with larger strategic goals despite being produced in different formats or for different channels. A good content calendar includes details like the channel, publication dates, keywords or hashtags (if necessary), author, tags, budgets, links, and related creative assets (video, photography, etc).
As with traditional marketing strategies, digital marketing strategies will also utilize many planning tools with which we’re already familiar, like annual planning, quarterly breakdowns and monthly plans.
Got planning on the brain for 2020 or 2021?
Let’s start the conversation. Our strategy experts are here to help you frame your plan and get you moving in the right direction.
