Blueprint: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics

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Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 1 of 7.

This is the first blog of our Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series. This series outlines mainly the WHY and HOW of digital marketing from a strategic perspective. We’ll also discuss several items to take into consideration along with how to internally structure digital roles. The main beneficiaries of this series are small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a strategic perspective. The goal of this series is to provide a framework that will help to advance your own digital marketing efforts.

Getting Started – Tactics with no Strategy

By now, most of you are already involved in some capacity of digital marketing. Let’s take a step back and start from a clean slate. We’ll call this a do-over.

Imagine you decide to embark on a 15-day European vacation with your spouse or significant other. Imagine your trip started like this: you drive to your local airport, buy two tickets to a country with the soonest departure, get on a plane, land somewhere in Europe, get off the plane, then figure out what hotel in which you will be staying. Sounds adventurous huh? I guess some people would appreciate that.

There are several problems with this approach though. These would include not packing a suitcase of clothing and items you will need for your vacation, paying more for a ticket because you bought it last minute, and spending way more time getting lost because you didn’t know where you were going and didn’t bother to research the area.  Going to Europe seemed like a cool idea because you’ve heard great things about it; however, the execution of your vacation was a disaster because you didn’t plan. This cost you time, money, discomfort, and most likely happiness. This would be considered a “hashtag fail.”

And this, my friends, is the problem of jumping into tactics before a strategy is laid out. I oftentimes see businesses executing at a tactical level, but have no digital strategy in mind. They think, “Hey, let’s do social media!” Next step they take is putting together a social media messaging calendar, oftentimes not tied to business goals. This same scenario plays out with email, content, pay per click ads, and so on. It’s the ‘ol “I’ve heard this is hot, so let’s do something like that. Now.”

Introducing….Strategy!

The reasons of having a digital strategy are very basic, yet grossly overlooked. You want to have a long-term plan in place that meets business goals by communicating to the right audience at the right time with the right content or messaging.  Notice that we said this must meet business goals. This means you must understand what comprises your company’s values and long-term goals. Once you understand this, then set forth on your digital marketing strategy.

Strategy Framework

Strategy starts with a vision. Don’t even think about establishing tactics before a vision is laid out. We’ve created the VOSTEK model, based on a fusion of strategy-creating paradigms. VOSTEK stands for Vision, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Execution, and KPIs.

Vision: What is the corporate vision or the marketing vision to support the company’s goals? This is typically a statement of what would happen in a perfect world. It can be general or specific. Specific is always better, but the point is to have something rather than nothing. Here are a couple of examples:

·      Nonprofit: Utilize digital tools that will position us as the go-to organization for human services through exemplary stewardship of donations, education of services, and local community involvement and leadership.

·      Restaurant: Utilize digital tools that will position us as the first choice in upscale dining by providing exceptional food, exceptional ambiance, and exceptional service.

Objectives: What is it that you’re trying to accomplish with your digital marketing? Here are some possible examples:

·      Increase digital revenue by 15%

·      Increase website conversion rates by 25%

·      Increase email subscriber list by 120%

·      Increase average gift (nonprofits) by 10%

Strategy: Strategy takes the objectives into account and looks at how you’ll accomplish them. Some strategy examples may include the following:

·      Integrate digital messaging with traditional marketing campaigns

·      Utilize best practices for modern digital designs

·      Enhance digital offerings through testing

·      Simplify the online shopping cart experience

·      Use multiple digital touch points to gain and redirect traffic to website

Tactics: Once a strategy is established, you’ll examine the tactics that will enable your strategy. Here are a few examples:

·      Digital content creation – create content that resonates

·      Email communication – what messaging themes you will use

·      List Building (Audience building) – you can’t make money from an empty room

·      SEM – effective search marketing experience that converts

Execution: Now that the tactics have been identified, it’s time to examine WHAT is needed in order to execute these tactics. In the digital world, this may include the following:

·      Digital Content: blogs, videos, whitepapers, slideshows, memes, infographics

·      Email: Image heavy vs. text heavy creative, messaging, cadence, email service providers, etc

·      List Building: Email list building, Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, etc

·      SEM: Adwords, Yahoo/Bing Ads, Google for Nonprofits

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Your strategy means nothing unless it can be measured. Otherwise, how will you know if you’ve been successful? It’s also important to establish measurements so that you can learn what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs to be modified or tested. You will want to consider a variety of metrics to measure performance; however, your KPIs should be the most important metrics that determine your success. Keep in mind, do not establish a KPI that you are unable to measure. KPIs are not litmus tests. Here are some examples of KPIs you might use:

·      Cost to acquire a new donor/client/customer

·      Average revenue per transaction

·      Return on Investment (ROI)

This may be a lot to digest in one setting. If you help from an expert getting this framework in place with your company, please contact us. Otherwise, stay tuned for our next blog entitled, “A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist,” which will cover the next step of putting your digital strategy together.

How do you approach strategy? Add your comments in the section below!