DMIPRO9 10 Strategy StudyNotes

Study Notes
Study Notes
Digital Marketing Strategy Copyright © 2021 digitalmarketinginstitute.com 1

Digital Marketing Strategy
LESSON 1: DIGITAL STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS......................................................................... 6
STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Concepts ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Core components ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Objectives ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Channel strategy ......................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Understanding the outputs .................................................................................................................................................... 9
Philosophies of digital strategy .......................................................................................................................................... 10
OVERARCHING STRATEGY ...................................................................................................................................................... 10
What is it? ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 10
Digital marketing and digital media ...................................................................................................................................11
DIGITAL RESOURCES .....................................................................................................................................................................11
Core elements ..............................................................................................................................................................................11
Resource maps .......................................................................................................................................................................... 12
BUDGETING ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Key elements ............................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Developing a budgeting plan .............................................................................................................................................. 14
BUDGET PLANNING ...................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Key considerations ................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Building a budgeting plan ..................................................................................................................................................... 16
RETURN ON INVESTMENT ..........................................................................................................................................................17
The role of ROI .............................................................................................................................................................................17
Determining ROI ..........................................................................................................................................................................17
Determining value of lead ......................................................................................................................................................17
Measuring success with ROI ............................................................................................................................................... 18
LESSON 2: SETTING STRATEGY OBJECTIVES AND KPIS .......................................................20

SETTING OBJECTIVES.................................................................................................................................................................. 21
Purpose of the objective phase ........................................................................................................................................ 21
Objective setting activities ................................................................................................................................................... 21
SMART goals .............................................................................................................................................................................. 22
KPIs ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
What are KPIs? .......................................................................................................................................................................... 22
Reporting and measurement ............................................................................................................................................. 23
Assigning responsibilities ..................................................................................................................................................... 23
KPIs within specific business areas ............................................................................................................................... 23
FORECASTING ................................................................................................................................................................................ 24
Reviewing past campaigns ................................................................................................................................................. 24
Forecast results......................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Set KPIs ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 25
REVIEWS ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 25
Importance of reviews ........................................................................................................................................................... 25
LESSON 3: DIGITAL STRATEGY RESEARCH ..................................................................................28
RESEARCH ACTIVITIES............................................................................................................................................................... 29
Key activities ............................................................................................................................................................................... 29
THE RESEARCH MAP................................................................................................................................................................... 29
What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 29
THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT RESEARCH .................................................................................................................... 29
Knowing the difference ........................................................................................................................................................ 29
OWNED AND DESK RESEARCH ............................................................................................................................................. 30
Owned research ....................................................................................................................................................................... 30
Desk research resources ..................................................................................................................................................... 30
Using Google .............................................................................................................................................................................. 30
DIGITAL AUDIT ................................................................................................................................................................................. 31

Concepts ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 31
Structuring your audit ............................................................................................................................................................. 31
AUDIENCE RESEARCH ................................................................................................................................................................ 33
What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Audience research tools ...................................................................................................................................................... 33
Audience personas ................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Key insights for developing audience personas ..................................................................................................... 34
Prioritizing your audience ..................................................................................................................................................... 34
SOCIAL LISTENING ....................................................................................................................................................................... 35
What does it involve? ............................................................................................................................................................. 35
Observational and empirical social listening ............................................................................................................. 35
Developing insights ................................................................................................................................................................. 36
COMPETITOR RESEARCH ......................................................................................................................................................... 36
What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 36
Key benefits ................................................................................................................................................................................ 36
DEVELOPING A BRIEF .................................................................................................................................................................. 37
What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 37
LESSON 4: DEVELOPING A CREATIVE STRATEGY.................................................................... 39
CREATIVE STRATEGY ................................................................................................................................................................. 40
Concepts ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Key areas ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Transferable content ............................................................................................................................................................... 41
CONTENT STRATEGY .................................................................................................................................................................. 41
What is it? ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 41
Content planning ...................................................................................................................................................................... 42
Format plan ................................................................................................................................................................................. 42
CHANNEL SPECIFICATIONS FOR A LAUNCH PLAN .................................................................................................... 43

Channel format requirements ........................................................................................................................................... 43
LESSON 5: EXECUTING A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY ............................................... 45
IDENTIFYING CHANNELS FOR YOUR CAMPAIGN ....................................................................................................... 46
Channel strengths and weaknesses ............................................................................................................................. 46
A MEDIA PLAN ................................................................................................................................................................................. 47
The role of media plan ........................................................................................................................................................... 47
EXECUTING YOUR STRATEGY .............................................................................................................................................. 48
Campaign action plans ......................................................................................................................................................... 48
Digital adds value to other media .................................................................................................................................... 49
LESSON 6: COMMUNICATING A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY ................................... 51
COMMUNICATING YOUR RESULTS .................................................................................................................................... 52
Choosing how you communicate results ................................................................................................................... 52
REFLECTING AND ITERATING................................................................................................................................................. 53
Structure your strategy ......................................................................................................................................................... 53
Costs ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 53
Bringing it all together ............................................................................................................................................................ 53
LESSON 7: BECOMING A STRATEGIC THINKER ..........................................................................56
UNDERSTANDING STRATEGIC THINKING ....................................................................................................................... 57
What is strategic thinking?.................................................................................................................................................. 57
Strategic thinking in action .................................................................................................................................................. 57
BENEFITS OF STRATEGIC THINKING.................................................................................................................................. 57
Benefits in action ...................................................................................................................................................................... 58
CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC THINKING ............................................................................................................ 58
Strategic thinking in action .................................................................................................................................................. 58
FUTURE-BASING ® ........................................................................................................................................................................ 59
Origins of Future-basing® .................................................................................................................................................... 59
Applying Future-basing® ...................................................................................................................................................... 59

Concepts
‘Strategy’ is a word that we tend to use casually in our day-to-day business, but it is often
misinterpreted. Therefore, it is important that we start off with an accurate understanding of what we
mean when we talk about ‘strategy’.
Digital strategies govern how digital is used to achieve commercial goals. A key foundation of digital
strategy, that you will learn, is that it is primarily about understanding your audience, their behaviors
and how you might craft new behavior that involves your brand, product, or services online. Strategy
can regularly be mistaken for tactics. Short-term, generally more imminent, specific goals fit under
the ‘tactics’ moniker, whereas strategy is about your long-term digital objectives and operates across
all of the digital channels your customer utilizes.
Digital strategies
In short, digital strategies are plans that operate across all digital channels used by your organization
or client to target audiences with creative formats working together to drive towards a single
objective or set of objectives. Digital can be how you are using content on any of your online
channels. Digital can also be how you use paid advertising to reach people. Digital can be how your
customer connects with your brand; for example, by buying online, clicking like on Facebook, or
tweeting about your brand. True digital practitioners utilize all three to get results.
A digital strategy involves a mix of setting goals, executing tactics and attempting to achieve high
level business results. It is also a blueprint for your use of digital. From the start, everyone should be
aware of, and committed to, a clear purpose and clearly identified success outcomes. So from the
very start, what we have to be aware of is that we have to be committed to a really clear purpose
and really clearly identified success outcomes. Because if you don't know why you're doing it and
what the end goal needs to be then actually, what are you chasing as a result of using digital?
Core components
Before we really dive deeper into strategy, you first need to understand the core elements of digital
strategy development, and there's five of them:
Objectives
Channel strategy
Content strategy
Media strategy
Tactics
Objectives is about setting the goals and outcomes you are trying to achieve with your plan overall
and from the individual elements that make up the plan.
Objectives usually fall into three main categories:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion and Retention

These are the types of behaviors that can be most effectively influenced by digital channels.
Objectives
Awareness
Firstly, we need to identify the awareness levels of our product or brand. We can do this by doing
some keyword research using our brand name or product name in tools like the Google Keyword
Planner or Google Trends as well as our own knowledge of the market. If levels are low, we will have
to make people aware of the existence and benefits of the product to them in order to drive sales or
conversions down the line. Banners and outbound display and video on websites and social media
are good approaches to drive awareness.
Consideration
If there is some awareness of our product but the market is cluttered or our product needs
differentiation, we can use reach and frequency of messaging to drive recall of the USPs (unique
selling propositions) or ESPs (emotional selling propositions) of our product to encourage
consideration in the decision-making process of our consumers. Again, outbound display and social,
as well as wider organic and paid search, can help drive consideration.
Conversion and retention
Ultimately, we will want to drive sales or conversions for our brand or product. These can be online or
offline and will build on the awareness and consideration-based activities from the previous two
stages to encourage people to take action and buy or convert. We can use search channels to drive
this type of objective.
Finally, for retention – keeping previous customers engaged to encourage brand advocacy or repeat
purchases – it is generally accepted that it is easier to drive sales from people who have already
bought from you than to attract new customers so the retention objective should be considered high
value.
Many multi-channel digital marketing campaigns will include elements of each objective to help
customers along the sales journey. When setting objectives for your digital strategy, it’s important to
identify what the priority of the objectives is to focus resources, time, and budget on delivering the
most important goal for the campaign. The choice and priority of the objectives will influence the
channels you choose as part of your channel strategy.
Channel strategy
The channel strategy is understanding how you're going to use all of the different digital platforms
that are available to you. It is about understanding what's possible with the channel, what formats
you're going to use, and how you're going to use the features of that channel – how to be used most
effectively and how you're going to target the audience engaging with it.
Channels are all the different digital platforms and locations that you might utilize. A channel strategy
is an understanding of what is possible with channels but choosing to utilize either a specific channel
or a feature of a channel because you know it is pertinent to your target audience.

Content strategy
The content strategy is what you're going to put in those channels. So this strategy is informed by
your overarching digital strategy.
The content can be:
What you put on your site

What you put on your social media
How you tweet
That is all content and it's important to recognize that content doesn't just mean it's a video or an
image. Content can be a top five things that you should do on an article on your site, or the content
can also be the image on the header of your site. So it's just important to recognize that content
encapsulates everything that's there, not just the things that you make.
Media strategy
The media strategy is often overlooked by smaller brands because it's a complex area to
understand. Also, bigger brands often overlook the investment required within digital to be
successful. So the media strategy is how you're utilizing your paid activity. How are you reaching
people with ads? How are you making sure that you're reaching the right people using the targeting
that's available to you and the formats that are available?
Tactics
Tactics are the individual executions that are a part of making up your strategy. It's important to
recognize that quite often when somebody says, "Our strategy is to do this," they could be, in fact,
talking about tactics.
So if I said to you that our strategy is to increase our brand awareness via Twitter, the tactic here is
to tweet, whereas the strategy is to use Twitter to communicate more positively with your
customers. That is an example of a clear strategy. There's a clear purpose, there's a long-term goal
and that is how a digital strategy becomes more effective.
Understanding the outputs
In summary, the purpose of your digital marketing strategy is to use your available resources
(channels, tools, and people) to deliver on an agreed objective while meeting expectations. Creating
a strategy to deliver on your objective can be achieved by understanding available resources, setting
timelines and budgets, looking at current and past activity, and assigning ownership of activities and
KPIs to team members or stakeholders.
There is a three-pronged approach to understanding the outputs of a digital marketing strategy:
First, you must establish the foundations of your strategy; what are you trying to achieve and
how do you intend to achieve it?
Second, you must have a strong familiarity with your current digital strategy, expectations,
and the resources available to you. What is working and what isn’t? Examine what is at your
disposal and plan to adjust accordingly.

Third, you need to confirm the crucial requirements in running your strategy, the budget you
have access to, and who exactly is in charge of the key decisions – ownership among team
members must be established.
Philosophies of digital strategy
All advertising can be digital, but not all digital can be advertising. Digital represents the medium
through which you are communicating, or the channels your audience are consuming information
through. How this can be achieved is by understanding that there are a number of philosophies of
digital strategy.
Digital as content
Digital as advertising
Digital as participation
Digital as a balance of all three
In this regard, simply engaging with your customer on social channels for customer service or
emailing useful blog content to your customer with the sole purpose of driving goodwill and
awareness falls outside the realm of advertising as you are not necessarily delivering a message
about a brand or product to encourage them to take action but you are adding value to their lives by
helping them out. As a result of good engagement, your brand equity and value will increase in the
eyes of the audience which is of significant value to the brand and was part-achieved through non-
advertising methods using digital engagement.
What is it?
Let’s begin with a very high-level look at your strategy. This is your overarching strategy: the highest
guide to your activity.
It is your strategy in one sentence, or a number of key phrases that quickly summarize your digital
strategy. It involves a simple statement of what you will do and what your objectives are.
The overarching strategy should be a simple and clear sentence that anyone could understand,
even if they are unaware of the full plan.
Your overarching strategy should be based on a core insight. You need to gather as much
information on your audience, channels, and products, for example – basically everything that has
been worked on to date. This will become the basis of your insight.
When doing your research, consider questions such as:
What are the interesting learnings that you can use to develop your core insight?
What content is your audience consuming?
What format do they prefer?
What are their interests?
Can you identify a gap or a weakness for your brand, based on what you’re seeing and
reading in your research?

When you have identified your core insight, you can begin to develop the overarching strategy for
your digital campaign.
Digital marketing and digital media
We’re going to make an important distinction now, regarding the difference between digital
marketing and digital media. The difference between the two is clear.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is the practice of utilizing digital tools for the purposes of marketing. Digital media is
part of digital marketing. More specifically, it is the medium through which the marketing activity is
delivered – for example, Google, Facebook, email, and display.
Digital marketing consists of all online activities, creative formats, and messaging that aims to engage
with consumers online, using both free and paid channels, for the purpose of delivering or part
delivering on a company's commercial objectives.
Digital media
Digital media refers to the channels used to distribute the messaging to the audience – for example,
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and email. Marketers use media plans – which include a detailed guide to
the formats, timings, and spends for a campaign – to manage these different activities.
Core elements
Depending on the size of your organization and the budget available, the marketing team can be
large or small. In smaller campaigns, digital marketers may be required to double-job and work
across a number of channels. It is important to identify what resources are required early on. You can
then plan how much is required, and more importantly, plan how to avoid over-investing. Digital is an
exciting space, so it’s easy for team members to get a little bit lost in it and dedicate too much time
to something that is more ‘fun’ to work with.
Time
Digital can be time-consuming and labor-intensive if not planned correctly, and as a result, you might
run the risk of underestimating how much time it's going to take and how many people you will need
to complete the task. In some cases, you may need to upskill existing members of staff, or bring in
someone who has a higher skill level, to begin to manage your team and the project.
Money
Money affects several areas. It can be a cause of frustration for marketers because, historically, the
perception was that digital was relatively free, it was relatively cost-effective, and that it was an
efficient use of budget. In reality, as digital has become more advanced, some of the practices that
are carried out in digital are a lot more complex; digital therefore requires more time, more
investment, and more tools to measure it effectively. Therefore, it is crucial to understand everything
that you have available to you.

People
People are the most underestimated resource. It is important to familiarize yourself with knowing
when to bring in the right people so that they're spending time efficiently towards the development
of the project more efficiently. Businesses often see early successes in digital, and don't address the
increased requirement for people – or don’t address the need quickly enough – which can rapidly
turn success into failure.
When putting your digital plan together, assess your project requirements and match them to the
skillset of your team. If you need outside help, consider an agency or freelancers to bridge the skills
gap. That way you’ll have the right people in place to deliver on your plan and objectives.
Resource maps
A resource map, providing a clear layout of all the resources you will require and identifying gaps in
your current resources, should be used to help plan your project
Resource maps don't need to be 100% accurate, but they are the first step in outlining what
resources you'll require. A resource map allows you to illustrate project requirements against current
availability. Invariably, digital suffers from under-investment, and a resource map can be a good way
to build the case for securing more resources.
In short, a resource map is a comparison between what you estimate you will need and what
resources are actually available. Using this comparison, you can see where you may have gaps and
decide whether they can be filled by more people, money, or time. Taking the time to map out the
resources required can help you secure ‘buy-in’ from managers and budget holders and it will allow
you to project manage the plan more effectively.

Key elements
The budget is a point of frustration for a lot of digital marketers. The problem with budgets is that you
need to plan for how much money you're willing to invest over a given time.
Therefore, you have to create a budget plan. You need to come up with a plan of how you're going
to implement the budget, how much each function is going to require, because if you have a
meticulously planned budget, providing all the necessary detail, it's very difficult to say no.
Essentially, budgets comprise media costs, creative production, agency fees, and digital tools and
technology for the purpose of delivering on a campaign or strategy. Additionally, staff costs, training
and processes can be included as part of the overall budget though this isn’t always the case.
Media costs
This will usually be the largest budget consideration of any digital marketing plan. In order to budget
and forecast you can use historical performance or estimates from the channels or media platform.
You should look at the overall goal of your strategy and prioritize the budgets towards the channels
that deliver on your goals. If your goal is sales, you will put more budget into PPC than the other
channels in your plan, as PPC is a conversion-driving channel. On the other hand, if your goal is
interest or consideration you will put more budget into display or social media.
As every digital marketing strategy will be different, there is no one size fits all rule for budget
allocation and you should try to balance channel and conversion costs from historical data against
your overall goal to distribute the budget across your different channels. It’s possible to move media
budget from one channel to another if you are seeing good performance when the campaign is live.
Creative production
Production costs will be the second largest expense after media when budgeting for a digital
marketing campaign. Depending on the type of media chosen, you will need to produce specific
creative assets. These include videos, social media images, advertising banners, website image
assets, email formats and other creative outputs to use on your media and website. These fees are
for designer, account manager and video production time so it’s important to remember that certain
media choices require creative formats to run or you can’t use them to their full potential. As a result,
it essential to leave enough budget available after media costs to produce the creative assets to run
on your media choices.
Agency fees
If you are using a third party to run and manage your campaign, including, booking and buying media,
managing creative assets, reporting and optimization, you will need to pay for their time - this is
usually costed on an hourly fee. It tends to be lower than media and production costs. While some
agencies will charge their fee as a percentage of media spend, this method rewards spend not
performance, irrespective of how good or bad the campaign performs. The agency gets paid simply
for spending the media, there is also little insight into how many hours are invested in the campaign.
As a result, it can be difficult to drive performance when agency fees are calculated as a percentage
of media spend. Most agencies will charge an hourly fee which is a better model for driving
performance.

Digital tools
Sometimes there are digital tools required for the campaign, for example, ad serving tools which are
used to upload, manage, and serve your image creative assets to your audience. These tools and
additional analytics tools will have associated fees. If there are additional tools that are required for
the campaign, it’s important to understand the value and purpose of the tools before committing to a
budget to pay for them. Therefore, it’s essential to understand if they are a crucial part of the
success of the campaign or a “nice-to-have” additional piece to enhance understanding.
Developing a budgeting plan
Your budget is directly dependent on what factors are influencing these areas.
People: Questions which can arise include, "Do you need a larger team? Do you need
specific skill sets within your team in order to achieve what you feel is the right way to
approach it? Do you need to adopt a new process of piece of technology to improve your
results?”
Technology: Technology, particularly in larger teams, really helps to improve efficiency. How
you achieve efficiencies is by examining existing and new tools to make sure that the teams
are linking in with each other correctly, that they're sharing data and insight correctly and
accurately. So, it's important to recognize at what point you need to invest in these should
you find reasons to address possible inefficiencies.
Training: Training must not be overlooked! You should be asking “how much training does
your team require? How much do you need to upscale your team?” It's important to
recognize this early because it's often something that falls by the wayside. If you find
inadequacies, then you should try to remedy this as soon as possible.
Process: What volume and detail are required in your ad buying strategy? If you have a high
investment in media, in advertising, in paid ads, what you're going to find is that it's going to
require more tools and more people to actually manage that advertising.
As you start to increase your efforts into your media buying, content partners or network partners or
working with other sites that use display advertising, what you're going to find is that you're going to
need more resources to actually manage this. Moreover, you will discover, not just the level of
manpower and amount of resources required, but also how much time it will take to monitor and
control your digital strategy.
When you're planning your budget, the following considerations are key areas for you to evaluate:
How many people are in your target audience?

What are your objectives?
How many people could you realistically make customers?
How much money are you willing to invest in digital?
Have you allocated budget to cover busy months or campaigns?
Are you allocating enough ad spend?
Are you under-investing and limiting your impact?

Key considerations
Target audience
How many people, realistically, are within the target audience that you feel you can reach? We all
want to be highly successful and make millions of dollars for the organizations that we work for, but
realistically, how do we ascertain a successful measure of new customers? How many customers do
you need to make in order to keep the lights on? How many customers do you need to make to be
really successful?
What follows next is the important question: “How big is your budget?” If you think you will be given a
small budget, focus on your target audience through a specific lens. For example, if you told me that
your target audience was 25 to 35-year-olds, and then you told me that you had a small budget, the
first question I would ask you if you think you will be more successful with a male or female audience.
For multimarket, it's the equivalent to saying if you think that you're going to be the most effective
with city dwellers, then only target the capital cities of specific markets to make sure that you're
effective.
Setting
You need to understand that budget setting for channels and formats is linked to your objectives.
You should allocate more budget to those channels that will efficiently and effectively deliver on your
digital marketing objectives. It's possible to forecast channel performance by using historical
performance as a benchmark for future campaigns. Using historical conversion rates, you can
estimate how much traffic you need at that conversion rate to deliver a certain number of sales or
leads. With paid media, you can estimate the cost of that traffic by using historical CPCs or CPMs to
estimate costs.
Money
How much money do you realistically feel you can invest in digital? It is often the case that when you
go through this process you will realize that you don't have enough money to invest in digital to do
absolutely everything you want to do, and that is okay - nobody ever has enough money that they
want to put in digital. I regularly have to bow to give money to other channels or other media
because, strategically, it's the right thing to do.
Under-investing
Are you under-investing in digital and is there a gap that you need to now make up? This is a
commonly occurring challenge for a lot of businesses who might be late to the game. Generally, they
find that they haven't invested in digital and all of a sudden they need a new website, they need
social channels, they need to create content. All of that can be quite daunting, so you need to find a
way to make sure that you understand how you might be able to spread those costs out.
Ad spend allocation
This is important because a lot of brands early on don't invest in media, and similar to the under-
investing example, it can become quite a shock when you realize that you actually have to pay-to-
play for a lot of the media channels that you should be using. Some brands start out with social, and
then ignore search or ignore display for a long time, and then they realize they're missing those

elements in their media mix. So, it's important to anticipate ad spend allocation and if it will be
enough.
Budget allocation
The final point is the budget allocation and prioritization. When you get to the end of this, if you feel
you're under-investing, then you need to make a case for either more investment, or you need to
make a case for a better use of your resources. The problem with under-investing is that you can
find that you're not going to do enough to even try to make digital work. It will not be a success and
you will find yourself facing challenges as to it not working, when actually the reality was, the
business didn't invest correctly in the first place, thereby obfuscating the efficacy of your digital
strategy campaign.
Building a budgeting plan
Next, we're going to talk about developing a budgeting plan. Budgeting plans allow you to plan out all
investment month by month, over a specific period of time. Planning long term will secure
investment. Without a plan, money will be moved around, resulting in digital being under-invested in,
under-performing and ultimately being questioned.
Without a plan, what will happen is money that you had will all of a sudden get moved to another
department or another requirement because there was no plan for it. So, just ensure that when
you're planning over a number of months, that you address moments when you think that the
investment will need to fluctuate. For example, in campaigns during seasonal periods, try to
anticipate how your budget might need to increase or decrease. An example of this that is important
is Christmas for retailers. Retailers tend to underestimate how much budget is going to be required
during the Christmas period.
So, if you've spent time addressing your budget, you can ensure that the teams are also sticking to
the plan, everybody's following the numbers that are on the sheet. Then begins the reflection stage
where you should try to discern if you under-spent or over-spent in certain areas with a view to
making adjustments in the following period.
What can happen is over-investment in the early periods, and then by the time you get to the end of
it, you realize that you actually don't have the money to achieve something that you wanted to do.
Building a plan that tries to anticipate these possible fluctuations, to give you the room to maneuver,
can make all the difference to seeing good results from your digital strategy campaign.
So, if you know what your budget is for a year, you should plan for a year. If you know what your
budget is for a half year, you should plan for a half year, and so on. Never plan beyond where the
budget exceeds because all you're doing is guesswork then.

The role of ROI
Understand that ROI is the cost of your digital activities versus the return they generate, in terms of
monetary investment. This is usually reported as a percentage and can measured by using this
formula:
ROI = revenue - marketing spend x 100 / marketing spend
Determining ROI
ROI can be understood as the return on marketing investment. Success within your digital activities
can, generally, be boiled down to two key outcomes:
Sales: Someone buying a product through a digital channel, or as a result of digital activity, is
an effective measure of how much sales are being generated versus how much it cost to
actually deliver. In short, sales will have an explicit revenue value.
Leads: Leads, in this context, can be defined as capturing valuable data from customers who
express an interest in your product or service. This data is best captured through lead forms
on landing pages on your site. The value of a lead can be understood by its conversion rate
and average sale cost. If we divide the sale value by the number of leads needed to generate
a sale, we get revenue per lead.
Determining value of lead
To determine the value of a lead for the purpose of ROI, we need to calculate what the revenue is per
lead. If we divide the sale value by the number of leads needed to generate a sale, we get revenue
per lead. Once we know the revenue per lead and the cost per lead we can determine ROI.
For example:

If leads have a 10% sale conversion rate by sales representatives, then that means it takes 10
leads to drive one sale.
If a sale is worth $100 and it takes 10 leads to generate one sale, then we can say, on
average, one lead is worth $10.
In other words, $100 sale value / 10 leads required to generate a sale suggests a return of
$10 revenue per lead.
Measuring success with ROI
ROI is one way of measuring the success of a campaign or strategy. Another approach is to look at
other valuable actions, such as micro conversions. Micro conversions are the actions that a user
takes that contribute to the purchase decision-making process. ROI can be a monetary value but
might also apply a value to a specific action – for instance, site visits, enquiries, and video views.
To measure the value to non-conversion activity like social media or display, you can look at how
much engagement is required to deliver a sale or lead. Social and display have an indirect effect on
leads and sales. Therefore, we can look to see if our activity had impact on conversion rates for the
conversion channels by seeing what conversion rates and volumes were like for conversion channels
before the campaign, during the campaign, and after the campaign. By recording any changes in
conversion rates from the normal level, we can start to see the value of our assisting channels. This
way we can attribute any uplifts from the norm to our campaign.
When we’re talking about top of funnel or non-conversion channels, we need to measure their
impact in a different way than direct sales or leads. For example, video views can deliver higher
awareness, positive conversations about your brand, and higher brand search volumes – all of which
are valuable outcomes. Customer awareness of your brand can rise during or following a social
media campaign, which could lead to an increase in brand PPC searches/sales. To see if awareness
or non-conversion channels impact your sales, look for a change in brand PPC searches or PPC/SEO
conversion rates in Google Analytics.

Purpose of the objective phase
The objective phase sits at the heart of the process of creating a digital strategy. Setting clear
objectives for your digital marketing activity should be the starting point to build an appropriate digital
strategy.
Objective setting activities
These objectives should be business objectives that can be realized through digital marketing, for
example, increase e-commerce sales, drive more leads, build audience engagement with your brand.
The objective phase should be focused clearly on beginning with your key success outcome and
then identifying your KPIs. Once you have achieved this, then you can begin designing the strategy
that is measurable and clear.
The biggest challenge for digital is that there is so much that you can do. Being clear and concise is
crucial. You have got to make use of all your resources in an efficient manner; know where your
money is best spent and try to minimize budget waste.
Some key objectives throughout a digital marketing strategy are:
Conversion/sales: That is commercial success.

Consideration: That is evaluating if the product or brand meets your needs.
Awareness: This is about audience reach
Retention: This enables you to establish customer engagement.
Digital can help deliver on any of these goals and it’s important to establish what is your priority to
help choose channels and measure success.
Business performance is an important expectation because it is often misguided in solely looking at

direct sales. Outside of just focusing on sales, it is important to understand success can also be
measured in leads and engagement. It's important to know what metrics or KPIs are most suited to
measuring the success of your overall strategy as well as its different channels that make up the
strategy.

For example:
PPC and SEO, when used as conversion channels, can be measured in sales or leads
delivered
Email and Mobile Apps when used as customer retention channels can be measured in
customer retention, repeat use, engagement, leads and sales
Display and Social media when used as awareness channels can be measured in reach and
engagement
When you understand what the measurement and goal of a channel is, you can use
diagnostic metrics to evaluate success even further. Some examples of metrics used to
diagnose success include:
CPA and CPL for conversion channels
Sentiment and Awareness for customer engagement channels
New versus returning users and increased sales or conversions for customer retention
channels
SMART goals
Objectives are the resulting outcome of a number of KPIs combined to create an outcome that is
used as a marker of success. Firstly, you should create a rough list of all the possible success
outcomes that are relevant to your brand. Then, using the SMART goal system, you should stress-
test your objectives.
As a quick reminder, SMART goals are:
Specific: Is the goal clear and singular. Try to avoid multiple results and being vague, for
example, “we want more site traffic and positive sentiment”.
Measurable: How are you collecting and generating data from your activity?
Achievable: Is the goal feasible given the circumstances and the resources available to you?
Can you do it?
Realistic: Is this a goal that is realistic for the business?
Timely: Can you achieve results within your given time period?
SMART goals are important for your organization as they are the success outcomes on which your
performance on digital channels will be measured.
What are KPIs?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that combine to deliver on wider Key Success
Outcomes (KSOs). KPIs are used to measure the effectiveness of content, channels, and activity in
delivering your goals. It is important to set meaningful and realistic KPIs by clearly understanding
what metrics are available and best suited to measure channel performance.
For example, you can measure awareness channels like display and social with assisted conversions,
reach, and frequency, while PPC and SEO are conversion channels and can be measured in:
The number of leads or sales driven

Cost-per-acquisition or lead
CPA/CPL or conversion rates

Choose the right metrics to measure the success of a channel by setting KPIs related to those
metrics.
Reporting and measurement
Reporting and measurement are often mistaken as the same thing, and it is important to identify the
difference from the outset.
Reporting provides many metrics of performance. It's a benchmark of how certain activities
are performing in a given time, and a given day, on a given month. It's seeing how a particular
task or goal was achieved. Reporting is something for more junior team members to work on,
to ensure work is operating correctly.
Measurement is how senior members of the team identify specific measures and how they
are impacting the business. It is a specific set of metrics that can be used to measure
business performance over time.
Assigning responsibilities
You need to address the following questions:
Who identifies the patterns of success?

Who ultimately makes decisions for change?
Who is responsible for performance?
Who tracks performance?
Without accountability there is no guidance. Everybody in your team should understand:
What they are responsible for

What their KPIs are
How they can be successful
What their daily/weekly goals are
By explicitly setting KPIs and measuring performance against these KPIs, you can ensure you are on
track to deliver your goal. If you are ahead or behind on your KPIs, you will be able to identify this
before the campaign finishes and make any necessary changes while ‘in-campaign’ to over deliver
or get back on track.
KPIs within specific business areas
KPIs are milestones to measure success and keep everyone accountable to measurable goals at all
times.
Each department has specific strengths and areas of expertise. It therefore makes sense to make
each department responsible for different KPIs and KSOs:
Marketing: Responsible for sales, awareness, awards, and engagement

Product: Responsible for sales, CTR, and conversions
Customer service: Responsible for sentiment, response time, and response rate
PR: Responsible for company image, reach, and sentiment

Just as it is important to assign the right KPIs to your channels, you need to assign the most valuable
KPIs to different teams and departments based on their core function and what they can realistically
achieve. Remember, it can be demoralizing to set unobtainable KPIs or incorrect KPIs.
Reviewing past campaigns
To understand how your strategy might deliver on its objectives, you can forecast results by looking
to similar campaigns from the past as a benchmark of performance. When your strategy is complete
you should go back and revise your forecasts to take into account what you have uncovered in your
research, and to reflect your agreed media and channel plans.
Forecast results
By looking at audience engagement levels, channel conversion rates, traffic numbers, and costs, we
begin to identify key channels and audiences to target. Moreover, using historical metrics like CPC,
conversion rates, and CPA, it is possible to estimate what each channel could potentially deliver for
the available budget if these metrics were to remain the same. It's not a perfect predictor of future
outcomes, but it can help with KPI setting.
The forecast will then need to be analyzed against your research to understand if the channel and
audience mix is correct for this campaign. When it comes to conversion channels for leads and
ecommerce, forecasting is an iterative process that begins with traffic. We sell to people, so we need
to drive people already on the site with our channels to buy. Traffic and users are our starting point.
Traffic: You can estimate the traffic you could drive for your available budget by using
historical CPCs or cost per user. Simply divide your available budget by your cost per user or
cost per click to see how many users or clicks you can get.
Total conversions: Once you have your estimated clicks or users, you can use historical
conversion rates to estimate the number of conversions you might get for this traffic. All of
these numbers will turn into KPIs; in other words, you need to have a specific cost per user or
CPC to drive the traffic you need for your budget, so CPC or cost per user is the first KPI.
Then you must deliver a specific conversion rate to drive the sales or leads from your traffic.
Conversion rate is your second KPI.
CPA: When you know how many conversions you can expect, you can then work out the
forecasted CPA and evaluate against your ideal CPA. This can be set by the business, or
from past campaigns.
It can be difficult to estimate engagement as it is so reliant on people engaging with your creative.
However, we can work out some numbers by using historical data from engagement channels to
help us estimate how much engagement we could expect for a budget. If we count all of the
comments, likes, video views, or shares from a previous campaign, and divide the budget for that
campaign by these engagement numbers, we can work out our cost per engagement – our cost per
like, cost per share, or cost per view. We can then look at our current budget and divide it by our cost
per engagement metrics to estimate how much engagement this new campaign might yield. If our
campaign drives more engagement than the forecast, we could hypothesize that the creative for the
new campaign was better than before. Likewise, if our new campaign performs worse than the
forecast, we could infer that the creative was less engaging. This gives us insight into the
effectiveness of our messaging, social media competitions, and creative pieces.

Set KPIs
When you have an agreed forecast there will be a number of metrics that you need to keep an eye
on to ensure you are on track. These metrics are your KPIs and they are evident in your forecast. The
goal should be to achieve or exceed your forecast as this is the ideal outcome you expect based on
your overall objective. As mentioned, in order to ensure you are on track, you can use your forecast
to set the required CPC, CPM, conversion rate, or CPA as KPIs to deliver your plan. These KPIs are
useful when optimizing in-campaign.
For example, if conversion rates are lower than expected you will need to deliver more traffic (and
spend more budget) at a lower conversion rate to meet your targets. This will have a knock-on effect
on the CPA, so it's important to stress test this against what is an acceptable CPA by business
standards.
Likewise, if CPCs are lower but your conversion rate is on target, you can deliver more conversions
than expected because you will be able to drive more traffic for the budget. Higher traffic levels at
the expected conversion rate will drive more conversions than forecast, so it’s important to see how
KPIs work together to measure success.
Role of forecasting
Remember, forecasting doesn't guarantee results – it simply illustrates a possible outcome based on
past performance. It is also possible to forecast different scenarios to present alternative outcomes.
Repeat the forecast with a 5% increase in CPCs or a 10% reduction in conversion rates, for example,
to see what the outcome might look like. When reporting in-campaign, assess how your KPIs are
performing against the different scenarios you have created.
Importance of reviews
Reviews are an important part of the strategic process. Before you begin building the strategy, it’s
important that review timelines are set in stone with the teams. It is sometimes important to put
reviews in calendars for the year, so everyone clearly knows during what period they are being
measured against. It is also an important part of ensuring that teams are adhering to the guidelines
and the strategy set. Everything should be guided by specific timelines, activity, and reviews.
1. We put in place a process for examining our strategy a number of weeks after launch.
2. Then we review and we adapt. We review what our changes have caused, we adapt.
3. And then we report on our findings. So, we should be addressing, within that report, what
adaptions were made, what changes were put into place, and how they started to shift.

But, it's really important to give your strategy room to breathe. Strategies should always be
considered long-term, but during that time, through review and reflection, you can make them
iterative and transformative.
Through consistent measurement, you can identify performance levels and make decisions on them.
Underperforming content and tactics can be addressed, allowing you to improve content or scrap an
activity that just isn't working.

Key activities
The following activities conducted during the Research phase are intended to develop key insights
that guide your strategic direction:
Research mapping: Identifying all the points of data that will input to strategy
Channel analytics: Utilizing your existing data on existing channels to make decisions
Audience research: Finding out more about your target audience that you can use to reach
them effectively
Keyword research: Taking insights from how your customers utilize keywords in search
engines
Social listening: Observing how people talk about your brand, category, or industry on social
media.
The purpose of research is to learn as much as possible before developing a strategy. We often
enter into the strategic process with assumptions. When faced with a challenge, we often feel like
we know the answer. Research is not necessarily to prove you are wrong, but can also confirm you
are right and support your decisions.
The research phase plays a core role in learning as much about your target audience, your industry,
and the environment as possible. This information is going to become the backbone of your strategy.
It ensures that your strategy is built upon insight instead of just assumptions alone. You will start to
learn more about people, you'll start to discover new things about the audience and the platforms
that you have already, and that will start to inform what you're trying to do.
What is it?
For larger plans and more sophisticated strategies, marketers can use a research map. This is a plan
that ensures all areas of research are being read correctly, beginning with the challenges you are
facing. This plan allows you document and map your research to derive insights.
A research map is a plan that ensures all areas of research are being read correctly, and allows you
to map this research to derive insights.
Think of it as a simple mind map. When creating one, plot the things you begin to learn about your
audience, or insights regarding the challenge you face. We do this so we can look at all our
information in one place to identify patterns and connections between our findings. You should place
your audience and challenge at the center and begin to plot findings around the challenge.
Knowing the difference
It is important to think critically about your research or the research you discover. Being able to
differentiate between strong research and possible false reports can lead to a profound impact on
the decisions you take.

Some examples of types of research which should be examined closely include:
Absence of sources
Old information
Small sample sizes
Origin of the report
Owned research
Owned research is research that your business owns, has easy access to, and is directly related to
your business. Owned research is valuable because it provides a clear insight into your own
opportunity, and it gives the most accurate insights directly relating to your business and customers.
Examples of this include:
Website analytics: This is your website traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics. This
data can be used to forecast results and set acceptable benchmarks based on observed
past performance.
Current customer research: This is any research you have conducted on your customers,
from surveys to conversations between customers and salespeople. It can also include
large-scale market research.
Social channel insights: This is a look into engagement, follower levels, audience interests,
and demographics from your social channels to provide a snapshot of your audience
characteristics.
Desk research resources
Desk research is quite simply the research you can access easily from your desk through a simple
Google search. It involves finding free to access articles, studies, and research papers online. They
help you discover demographics, insights, and trends. Desk research is also the most cost-effective
research tool as it allows you to easily access information for free.
Try to use research that is carried out by large research bodies and then made available online. This
type of research is an excellent source of multiple research studies you can use to uncover simple
insights. In some cases, there are costs involved, so this is generally something that larger
organizations access. Look to organizations like Google, Facebook, etc. They have research and
insight groups that regularly release free information and insights.
The following are resources available online:
Premium: WARC, ANA

Free: Think with Google, Consumer Barometer
Using Google
Google is a highly effective desk research tool. It allows you to use the right keywords but also
dictate the time you wish to look at them, to ensure the research is relevant. Typically, the best way

to treat Google is to ask it questions about people. You can then find articles or sources with your
answers.
What do you want to know about people? Take the time to use search engines to find out answers
to your audience, industry, and channel questions – you’ll be amazed what you can find.
Concepts
A digital audit is an assessment of all active media channels and to evaluate how effective they are
in the current campaign. Audits are useful to conduct in advance of the planning stage of your
strategy to build a foundation on historical performance and to understand the available channels to
include in your plan.
When you're really going to start to dig into it, one of the first things that you're going to do is carry
out what's called a digital audit. Is it good, is it bad, is it effective, and how many channels do we
have, and what we're operating within them?
For this, we utilize a process of how you actually get the audit done. It's a step-by-step process that
you just go through to make sure that you understand what's going on.
It's crucial for establishing exactly:
What sites we have

What pages are on the site
What profiles we have on social media
What accounts are in existence
Who has been operating them
It is often the case that social has taken ownership when it was popular, and now it's being operated
from outside of the marketing function, or it's being operated by another team, and it is helpful to
understand the politics of it, but also how it's being utilized.
By going through this checklist, you're going to create a clear outline of everything that's pre-existing
and a key outcome of the audit should be a full awareness of digital within your entire organization. It
is important to know that this can be used to overcome internal politics. If one channel is being
managed by another team, if you show them the depth of understanding that you're trying to
establish for digital for the whole business it's not to say that you need to take it away from them, but
you might actually be able to increase your control.
Structuring your audit
A digital audit is crucial for establishing exactly what sites, pages, profiles, and accounts are in
existence, and who has been operating them. The following checklist is not a comprehensive
approach, but it is a good example of how you might structure your audit.
You can audit the current status of digital marketing activities by analyzing the following factors:
Site audit: Address your existing website or current performance. This requires an analysis
of the site analytics on a basic level.

Social and channel audit: Identify existing social media and other channels are being used,
their function, and performance.
Access and login details: Ensure you have all usernames and passwords for all channels
and analytics.
Administrators: Note who the admins of your various channels are and how email updates
are received.
Existing resources: Note who is currently working on your owned channels and how many
hours are being dedicated to daily operations.
History: Check what history has been stored on activity management, previous campaign
activity and what has previously been implemented.
Chain of command: Understand who is working on digital activity, what remit each individual
has and most importantly who is in command and responsible for decision making.
Let’s dive into these in more detail.
Site audit
You need to address your existing website and its current performance. This requires an analysis of
your site analytics, but at a more basic level. So, whether you're using Google Analytics or another
provider, what you'll be doing is you'll be looking at how many visits you get per month, and how
often they're coming, what times they're coming at, just to start to build a better picture.
Social and channel audit
This is identifying all the existing social media channels, and their function and their performance.
Access and log in details
It may sound strange, but it is a source of incredible frustration for a lot of marketing teams. When
someone has set up a Twitter account, the email address that's linked to it is their personal email
address. They've created the password, and all of a sudden they've left the organization, and then
you don't have access to those channels anymore. So, make sure that for every channel, you have
the login details, and you know what email it's being sent to, making sure that it's not a personal email
address. If you need to, try to create business-owned email addresses, so that you can transfer any
of that information cross-team, and especially when people leave, because there's nothing worse
than losing an account for a month because somebody has left the organization.
Administrators
For some account systems, they run off an administration system instead of login details. So,
Facebook is like this, Google Analytics is like this, where you can identify people as administrators.
Again, it's important to do this because oftentimes, what happens when you do this audit is, you
realize that 10 people are still the administrators of the Facebook page and they no longer work at
the company anymore. This is also a security concern as it would leave ex-employees with access to
your accounts.
Existing resources
Note who's currently working on your own channels, and how many hours are being dedicated to
certain daily operations. For example, who works on a website, who adds pages, how often do they
add pages, and with your social channels, who's responding to the queries, how long are they

spending daily? Because what you'll find is that you need to efficiently use everyone's time. You
might learn that there's a resource dedicated to social that's only being half used that could be used
for your website, or you discover someone who's working on the website could actually be used
more functionally to create additional content for your social channels.
History
Obviously, with digital, we've quite a lot of data available to us. It's important to understand what
historical data exists and how you can actually begin to learn from that. Additionally, it can mean
asking people that have worked on the account, what works, what doesn't. This can help to
understand how the tags are set up on your various pages, on your website, how is your YouTube
channel configured, and how often do you post on your social channels? All of this is very important
to starting to build a better picture.
Chain of command
For some people, this will be relevant, others it won't, depends on how senior or junior you are in your
organization, or whether you're the owner. But, chain of command is crucial to understanding any of
the activity that you're doing, who approves it, who agrees what each person is doing, and who's
responsible at the end of the day. Effectively, where does the buck stop? If something goes wrong,
who's the person everyone's going to look to. And it's important to know that, because if someone is
pulling up content or saying things online without having agreed with one of their superiors, then that
superior can hold it over them. Therefore, an agreed sign-off process is strongly recommended. This
means that if something goes wrong, everybody knows who's accountable and what the process is.
When your digital audit is complete, you will have a good understanding of your digital capabilities
based on past campaigns, employee/agency skillsets and resources available. When your audit is
done you can draw on learning and understand the tools and strategies available to proceed with
your digital marketing plan.
What is it?
Audience research involves developing specific insights into your target audience that guide your
activities. Audience research is great for building key insights, as it allows you to identify the specific
interests, channels and demographic identities of your target audience. This information allows you
to build a clear picture of your customer, to understand their online movements, and to gain insights
on where you might reach them and deliver on your goals.
Audience research tools
There are a number of audience research tools available, including:
Facebook Audience Insight Tool: Details audience interests, locations, engagement rates,
and demographics which can help refine your messaging and targeting on Facebook
Twitter Audience Insight Tool: Similar to the Facebook Insights tool; marketers can discover
audience characteristics within the Twittersphere, so you can more effectively engage with
their conversations
Google Ads: Details the interests and demographics of your remarketing audiences so you
can see the characteristics of your visitors and customers

Consumer Barometer: A free tool on ThinkwithGoogle.com that allows you to measure
patterns and gain insights from consumers in different locations and across many industries
Google Keyword Planner and Display Planner: Provides search trends; the Display Planner
details website visitor characteristics, allowing you to identify the types of sites your
audience browse
Brandwatch and Pulsar: Audience listening platforms that allow you to monitor brand
mentions on social and around the web to understand who is talking about your brand or
competitors
Audience personas
Writing audience personas can help you build your audience insight by seeing them as real people.
Consider this persona, for example. Trudy is 30 years old and lives in the city. She is an accountant.
She lives in a rented apartment with her boyfriend. Trudy likes sports, mainly tennis. Facebook helps
her keep up with the latest Tennis Open results. She has plenty of discretionary income, so she is a
member of her local tennis club and tries to travel to Wimbledon each year if she can get tickets.
An audience persona is a clever tool for creating a story for your audience. Creating this persona
allows you to easily put yourself in their shoes, and often you’ll find you naturally begin to build on
their story without specific data points.
Key insights for developing audience personas
Just based on starting to understand the ideal target audience. Make sure to give them an age,
gender, interests, family, content choices, and quirks, among others. What can we discover about
Trudy’s persona?
Motivations and interests

Digital channel choices
Content preferences
Search behavior
Device usage
Age
Gender
Quirks
Prioritizing your audience
When your persona is complete you can prioritize audience types based on how easy they are to
reach using digital channels, and the value of that audience to the business. As such, you can plot
your personas on a reach value matrix to prioritize them.
Prioritizing your audience allows you to revise and allocate budget effectively as you can give more
budget to high-value audiences that are easier to reach than lower-value audiences that are difficult
to reach.

Furthermore, including channel preferences in your personas allow you to optimize your channel mix
and media plan to target key personas on their preferred channels.
What does it involve?
Social listening involves observing or collating live social conversations to derive insight from the
language and topics that are appearing in conversation. Indeed, social conversations offer insights
into your consumer interests, aspirations, dreams, products, and more.
Although social listening is very effective, paid tools are required to maximize your insights. If you
don't have access to paid tools, social listening can be achieved observationally when developing
insights by searching keywords and making observational assumptions.
Observational and empirical social listening
Keep in mind that paid tools can go into incredible detail, looking at huge volumes of conversations.
These large volumes allow you to make more accurate assumptions of insight into your audience.
If you do not have the budget to avail of a paid tool, you can achieve social listening outputs through
observational social listening. It will not be as accurate as the tools you pay for. However, by
observing how people use keywords, hashtags, and tags, you can develop hypotheses of behavior.
Observational
Review your social channels, customer emails, and phone conversations, and set up Google Alerts
for brand mentions to observe how your audience is talking about specific topics. Gather a list of
common keywords and phrases to understand patterns in how they talk about you. From there you
can discover more about their sentiment and attitude to your brand. Are they happy or unhappy? Do
they use specific emojis?
Empirical
Now that you have made some assumptions and uncovered insights, it’s important to match this to
hard numbers to verify your hypothesis. If your consumers are happy about a product, you should
see high engagement on that product’s content. If this is the case, you can draw a link between the
frequency of certain common phrases about your brand with results from sales and conversions.
You can begin to test using these keywords in your content and marketing assets to see if they have
a further positive effect on performance. This way you have researched the audience and integrated
insights about how they like to talk about your brand into your activity to drive better results.

Developing insights
Here are five simple steps you can use to conduct your own social listening study:
1. Identify keywords: Identify commonly used keywords when discussing your brand, product,
or service.
2. Utilize social search: Search on social platforms to confirm these keywords are used by the
consumer.
3. Check for additional keywords: Check for additional keywords the customer is using that
you have not considered
4. Identify trends: Identify trends in subject, language, or hashtags.
5. Establish insight: Gain insight from the customer’s challenges or experience with
competitors, for example.
As in the previous method, when you have gathered your insights about these customer traits you
should then verify, for example, if a higher frequency of certain words and actions drives higher
conversions. If so, it’s worth testing how they can be included in your content and ads.
What is it?
Competitor research is a process of establishing a clear picture of your competitive landscape by

identifying each of your competitors, the quality and size of their digital media channels, and applying
your own interpretation of their strategies. It is a process of understanding your place amongst your
competitors. This can help identify gaps and opportunities to capitalize on.
Ask yourself about the size of their digital footprint: how aggressively are they investing? What do
you interpret to be their strategy? What do their content choices tell you about their goals? Is there
even a strategy?
Competitor research can be done using social listening and desk research, including searches for
competitor brands appearing in the news.
Key benefits
The following are some key benefits of competitor research:
You can compare the size of channels.

You can identify the mobile ability of their site.
You can compare channels. What social networks are being utilized?
You can identify channel gaps. Are there channels that are not being used, and is there an
opportunity?
You can assess content. Is your competitor’s content good, and what need is it addressing?
You can assess format gaps. Are there specific formats on specific channels that are not
being utilized?

What is it?
A brief allows you to identify the most important insights and understandings that will inform your
strategy. Writing a brief is important because it is essentially a series of instructions for strategy
development across media and creative.
The creative brief is a document that uses product, audience, and competitor insights to
inspire campaign ideas to deliver on your objectives. The outputs of the brief should be
clearly defined, including, copy and messaging, creative formats, banners, social posts, and
videos.
The media brief is a document that uses audience data, motivations, and demographics.
media budget, timings, content and creative formats to inform media choices to execute the
strategy. The output of the brief should be a channel plan which detail all channels, paid and
free, and go live and run rates for each of the channels.
The media plan is another essential output which will detail all the paid media channels
including cost line items for each. You can find an example of a brief template within the
Resources tab of this module.

Concepts
The creative strategy is one of the most important elements because it is the most visual element
that will dictate the overall feel and look of your brand.
This is the documentation and understanding of your objective in relation to your audience and
brand. Ideally, you are trying to develop a strategy that engages with your audience in such a way to
deliver on your business objectives in the context of your brand values.
Now it’s time to take your strategy and build creative messages and ideas that you will communicate
through digital. A creative strategy is the long-term approach of how you develop visual stimuli for
your brand, product, or service. It dictates the theme, look and feel of all of your assets. The creative
strategy should again adhere to the overarching strategy. Doing this ensures that all work is following
a specific guide, targeting a specific response, and cultivating repeat and specific behavior.
Remember, you must consider the budget when developing a creative strategy. It is important not to
limit your initial thinking, but at the same time, at some stage, you need to draw the line and be
realistic about your possibilities.
Key areas
The key areas to identify in creative strategy are:
Ideas: What content will you make, what will it say, how are you different?
Activations: What will you do that will encourage the consumer to respond, engage and
converse?
Visual: What will everything look like, is there a visual theme or guideline?
Narrative: Refer back to the content strategy – what is the story we are trying to tell?
Managing expectations is unfortunately part of the job of any digital marketing manager. There is a
myth out there that digital marketing is free. Highly creative, highly technical executions require
investment. It is important that you temper your team’s ambitions slightly.
The next step for your team is to compile a full format list for your content plan. This should be added
to your content plan and include not only the creative requirement of each format, but the
dimensions and specifications as well.
Creative strategies can become quite complex and with more technicality comes more resource
requirement and also time. If digital is quite new to you then it’s recommended you keep things
simple at first with a view to building up to more technical pieces.
Formats
Remember to identify what formats are possibly not worth the effort if they will require more
resources. Don’t forget, if you're investing in a big piece of work, you should be matching that in paid
media to deliver it through paid channels. Things do not go viral on their own; rich media display is
costly to make, but equally expensive to deliver. It is important to consider drafting a budget for paid
media on a particular piece of creative which is commensurate to the cost of developing the
creative.

Formats all require different dimensions. Becoming familiar with the formats can be a challenge. The
best thing to do is to become familiar with the platforms and the formats they offer as you require
them. There are thousands of formats. In display, they are delivered in the sizes of pixels, e.g. MPU
300 x 250 pixels.
When assessing your creative you should consider if it fits your brand values, uses the language of
your audience (so it can be understood) and aims to deliver on your overall objectives.
Transferable content
The biggest challenge in the asset development stage is maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness
of your assets. Essentially, how you can ‘sweat’ your assets:
You can begin by creating assets that can easily be converted to suit other social platforms. Develop
creative that is platform agnostic and then tailor it to specific platforms. For example:
Shoot high-quality video: Shoot video in the largest quality and consider video being
effective as a vertical or horizontal video. During production, you should consider readability
and video resolution across devices to ensure you can engage your audience on a mobile or
desktop.
Capture GIFs: GIFs can be captured out of video creative to be used in other campaigns or
to complement existing ones.
Convert assets: Convert existing creative assets into dynamic assets if appropriate.
Examples of this would be on Facebook canvas where advertisers can create a rich mobile
experience to target their audience on Facebook and Instagram mobile apps.
Use existing assets: Take existing visual assets, like TV ads, and editing them to suit digital
formats and channels.
Aid SEO: Identify and use anything that you built as more content for your site to aid SEO.
These assets include things like infographics which can be distributed on social or email and
drive links for SEO off-site link building.
What is it?
A content strategy is a guide to how you create content, what content is written, and what formats
are selected that drive toward your success outcomes. The content strategy should be based on of
the overarching strategy.
The number one priority for your content strategy is to produce content that is consistently effective
and builds the same behaviors with consistent audiences. From your overarching strategy, you can
define how it will guide your content strategy. Essentially, where necessary, rewrite your content
strategy to work toward the same goals outlined by your overarching strategy.
Essentially, a content strategy:
Is based on your overarching strategy

Explains your brand or campaign story and narrative
States the main purpose of content, in relation to delivering on your objectives
Details key content elements, such as format, tone, and messaging
Ensures content is developed for purpose and effect

An example of this would be if part of your strategy involves communicating with customers in
unique and different ways that change perceptions of the brand. Your content strategy, therefore,
would comprise delivering exciting content to your social audience in ways never seen before.
Content planning
Planning is a key activity for all elements of strategy. This is no different with content. Content
planning involves addressing all details of your content strategy that will help plan content, from
targets to implementation.
You need to address questions such as:
What platforms will you operate on?

How often will you post, tweet, or snap?
What is your tone and personality?
What is your core narrative, and what stories are you telling?
From this, you create a platform-specific plan that details actual posts.
The key attribute of a content strategy is designing effective content, and consistency is crucial for
content. Brands often bounce from one story or narrative to another, which reduces engagement
and recall – the audience simply finds it difficult to piece together all the inconsistent content they’re
exposed to. Remember, a consistent story creates a consistent audience response; and a consistent
response builds behavior and positive perception of your brand with your audience.
The role of narrative
A narrative or story is the cornerstone of your strategy; it is what you use to build engagement and
affinity with your audience. Regardless of your overall objective, your content strategy should have a
narrative that tells a story – and that story must work to help you achieve your overall objective.
Format plan
A format plan is a list of all the formats that you will be implementing. It is necessary to ensure your
creative formats are being developed to the required specifications. Developing a format plan allows
you to completely understand the number of varying formats you will require. This is important as you
move into the creative development phase.
Creating a format plan involves listing out all the various formats you will aim to use and the various
specifications that are required – for example, video, canvas, link, and embed ads. Content on your
site should utilize dynamic content and text that is relevant to you brand. This will help build your SEO
approach.
You can start by:
Laying out all content in a given time period

Listing all relevant channels
Detailing all copy
Listing format details
Understanding dimensions and requirements

Listing out all your channels, formats, and dimensions is a task that will reveal where you can be more
efficient. It acts as a quick reference guide and checklist for your designers or content creators to
ensure all content pieces are being delivered. It also allows you to quickly sense-check formats
against KPIs. For example, if ‘clicks to site’ is your objective, formats like ‘photo image’ will draw
wasted clicks opening the image instead of clicking to the site. Link embed would be much more
effective. If hashtag usage is a goal for your campaign, consider using ‘conversational ads ‘, and
using one hashtag in the copy.
At a later stage, you will need to determine how many channels you wish to support.
Channel format requirements
Each channel will require specific format requirements. There are lead formats which are the most
commonly used formats and are very effective. You should understand what formats you will
implement as a part of your activity:
Video: VOD, Social, Pre-Roll

Display: Image, copy and dynamic
PPC: Texts ads, sitelinks, phone, and other ad extensions
Facebook: Video, Canvas
LinkedIn: Display Formats, Posts, InMail
Twitter: Video, Cards, Lead Generation
Instagram: Carousel, Video
Snapchat: Real-time asset creation

Channel strengths and weaknesses
Each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses, benefits and costs, freedoms, and limits, and
should be scrutinized carefully to understand how it will or won’t improve your campaign strategy.
When you begin with your objectives and choose the optimal channel mix, you should identify the
creative formats required and make sense of the value of production for these assets in relation to
media costs. This is a good way to understand what media choices you need to produce for the best
outcome.
Social
Choose social channels that are used by your customers and use paid social to drive reach and
frequency of your ads and content to raise awareness and drive customer engagement and
retention. Social can drive some direct conversions but social tends to have more of an assisting role
in driving sales though it can sometimes directly drive sales of low-cost products. In most cases,
awareness and engagement metrics are best suited to measuring the success of paid social with
assisted conversions showing how it impacts on conversions and sales.
Display
Display placements on websites that are used by your target audience or target, retarget specific
audience groups on multiple websites to drive awareness of your product or service. The success of
display is best understood in terms of how effectively you can reach your target audience and serve
your ads enough times that audience recall of your offering increases. Reach and frequency metrics
are best suited to measuring the success of display campaigns while assisted, post-click or post-
impression, conversions can illustrate display's impact on sales.
Paid search
Paid search, or PPC, keywords that are used by your target audience to buy products. Organize your
keywords into ad groups and campaigns with compelling copy and ad extensions to encourage
clicks from searchers who are actively interested in your product or brand. Google is the most widely
used search engine but adding Bing or Yahoo along with any other search engines to your plan can
open up your search activity to different types of searchers and drive incremental opportunities. Total
sales, leads, cost per sale, conversion rate and other conversion metrics are best suited to measure
success for PPC.
SEO
Choose to optimize the non-paid aspect of your search activity by ensuring the technical features of
your website are working efficiently, particularly, in terms of load speed, mobile friendliness and
limited or no broken links. Ensure the content you create contains frequent but natural use of search
terms and phrases that your target searcher might use. Quality and well distributed content will
accrue links from websites. Link building from quality websites will increase the visibility and rank for
your website over time. Organic search drives most clicks on desktop devices and is considered
more trustworthy than paid search by many searchers. PPC will drive more clicks on a mobile device,
as it takes a few scrolls to get past the PPC results to the organic results below them. PPC and SEO,
ideally, work together to try to capture as many searches as possible. Metrics used to measure the

success of the SEO activities include conversion metrics, total sales, leads, conversion rate, and
when assessing blog engagement, use metrics like repeat visits, average time on site, traffic levels to
understand the value of SEO.
Email
Choose the email channel to drive retention of customers by engaging your mailing list. Those on
your mailing list are ideally engaged with your brand, that's why they signed up. Distribute content to
engage, special offers to entice and build customer loyalty over time. Use marketing automation to
automatically email content to different persona types which you have defined at key times – as
such, they will be best received and consumed by the audience. Be mindful of GDPR compliance
when undertaking an email program. It is important to realize your retention objectives with email and
measure success by looking at open rates, email click rates, mailing list growth, repeat visits, and
higher lifetime customer value of mailing list subscribers versus site average. Email can directly drive
conversions and, depending on the type of email program, this metric can be used to measure
success, but for the most part, email drives retention.
Content
Finally, content marketing types can resonate with your audience and be distributed on the most
appropriate channels to deliver on your objectives. Content marketing will feature in all aspects of
digital marketing from videos to blogs, copy and whitepapers. Repeat engagement of content will
have a positive effect on customer engagement and retention. It can drive awareness and assist in
conversion activity. Content can be measured in terms of how it impacts the channel on which it is
distributed, for example, engagement rates on social media, conversion rates is SEO and so on.
The role of media plan
A media plan serves as a guide plan to how you will spend your ad budget, but it also serves as a
way to track spends. At the end of each month, you should be reconciling your plan, which involves
putting actual spends in the columns moving budget either forward or, if you've overspent, moving it
back. Media plans are usually tables in Excel with each channel written on its own row as a line item.
The channel name, for example. Facebook is written on the left and the audience targeting, objective,
ad delivery, cost and run dates are written on the right of the table.

The benefit of detailing each platform line by line is that now you can determine how much content
you have against how much support they will each receive. When campaigns are being set up, this is
important because you'll know exactly what you're going to be doing throughout the whole
campaign. And if you have an idea for a piece of content that's adding to this, then you'll need to
actually find budget first.
The plan will also contain estimates of impressions and clicks which should be delivered for the
budget. Digital marketers can work out ad delivery, impressions and clicks, by agreeing a CPM in
advance for premium display. By dividing the budget by historical CPMs for GDN and social channels
and historical CPCs for paid search, digital marketers can estimate what the budget could deliver in
terms of click traffic and impressions.
Sometimes including the historical conversion rate for the channels could help forecast conversions
from the campaign. Simply multiply the forecasted clicks for that channel by the conversion rate for
the channel to broadly estimate conversions for your activity.
Once executed by the different in-house or agency stakeholders, such as PPC specialists, social
media specialists, display and video specialists, checking-in daily becomes part of the routine to see
if the plan is working or if changes are required to rectify errors or capitalize on opportunities.
Campaign action plans
Campaign action plans are similar to media plans, but they cover all aspects of the campaign. They
are the project plan for all the moving parts in a digital strategy, and will detail:
Paid media channels (They tend not to include ad delivery or finer details of the paid media
piece though)
Non-paid channels
Briefing deadlines for creative

Run dates for channels and timings for production
Budgets per line item
Ultimately, they are a project management document to outline the budgets, channels, production,
and timings of all elements in the campaign execution.
Like a media plan, they are formatted visually – like a calendar or Gantt chart – to make them easier
to understand.
Digital adds value to other media
For larger campaigns with an offline element, we can look to integrate digital media to amplify and
enhance performance across other channels – for example, TV. TV is definitely one of the strongest
mediums which digital can support. Many viewers sit down in front of the TV while using social sites
on their mobile device. This ‘dual screening’ presents an opportunity to enhance performance.
In this instance, there are two key tactics that can be implemented:
Trans-Time Mapping
When you buy a TV commercial, you are given very specific times and channels for when it will be
shown – these are called trans-times. If you ensure TV audiences are targeted with both your
creative and search activity to support the TV commercial during those times, two things can occur.
Users are more likely to click on social content or search for your product, and there is higher recall
of your TV creative.
When you map your TV trans-times to website traffic changes or social engagement, we can see the
impact of the TV commercial on changing online behavior in your audience. Tracking the difference
between normal levels and the traffic spike after a TV commercial airs helps measure the impact
your TV slot.
Hashtag Integration
If your TV commercial has social planned at the center of it – in the sense that you hope to create
some conversation about it – then a hashtag would be highly effective. If your hashtag is clearly
listed at the end of the TV commercial it will give audiences the correct hashtag to participate in your
conversation. This also applies to radio, print, and outdoor advertising.

Choosing how you communicate results
The final output of a digital marketing strategy is a single document that presents your objectives
and how they will be achieved.
At this point you have:
Identified the high-impact goals you want to achieve

Set your KPIs and budgets
Researched the audience
Agreed a creative strategy
Chosen your paid and organic channel mix
Now you need to collate this in a single document for approval by key stakeholders and execution by
in-house or agency partners. It's incredibly efficient and valuable to have all the thinking and project
pieces in one document for easy reference, sense-checking, and execution.
There are numerous ways to gather and present your digital marketing strategy together and this
can vary depending on the audience.
Presentation
For example, if you want to secure budget or get approval, doing a presentation on objectives,
outcomes, creative, channels, media plans and costs and presenting your strategy in PowerPoint is
standard practice. However, it's not common to include complicated or technical elements of your
strategy in a PowerPoint as these are executional pieces which should be shared with the
appropriate teams, as the detail can confuse higher level stakeholders. In this instance, mention that
there is an executional document to supplement the appropriate pieces within your strategy.
PowerPoint is best suited to communicate the top-level outcomes, actions, and costs of the strategy.
It's stylish and, when delivered in person, can be effective in building trust with stakeholders and
getting their feedback before it is signed off and executed.
Document
Microsoft Word and detailed documentation is best suited to technical pieces for execution. This
document can be referenced as a supporting document to the PowerPoint to demonstrate that the
finer details have been considered and are available if requested by stakeholders, but are intended
for development teams, media planners and other executional departments. It's good to reference
the existence of a technical document to build trust in the strategy without going through the actual
details.

Structure your strategy
At this point we have covered all the elements of a strategy and why they are important. We now
need to pull it all together into a single document for input, changes, and sign-off by stakeholders.
When writing your digital marketing strategy, it's best to begin in MS Word and detail everything
before distilling it into a PowerPoint presentation. Remember to include a table of contents for easy
reference. An example of a table of contents could be:
1. Introduction
2. Objectives
3. KPIs and Measurement
4. Research – Audience and Competitive Landscape
5. Creative Strategy and Sample Ads
6. Media – Paid and Organic
7. Costs
8. Project Plan and Timelines
When you have decided on the sections to include, and the most appropriate order in which to
include them, reproduce the highlights in a PowerPoint presentation that you can send or present to
internal stakeholders or clients.
Costs
Most agencies and marketers don't reveal the costs involved until the end, though this may differ
depending on client or internal stakeholder relationships. Choose the best method and moment to
reveal costs on a case-by-case basis. Revealing costs towards the end of the strategy presentation
allows you to first show the plan in greater detail, and the reader can go through each item in the
plan without the bias of the cost implications.
Once the strategy has been read and understood, putting a cost on its execution will allow the
reader to understand the value of the strategy and allow them to decide how best to proceed. Built
upon your research and skill as a digital marketer, this document is the summation of your
groundwork to understand the core objectives and plan a successful outcome.
Bringing it all together
When undertaking a digital strategy, take time to complete the various research and planning stages.
Draw on what you know about the business problem or objectives, consumer insights, channels, and
KPIs to pull together all of the appropriate elements of digital marketing into one document – also
summarized in PowerPoint – to deliver on a single or group of objectives.
Once signed off, you can refer to this document throughout the campaign to ensure all elements are
being pushed live, on time, and performing as expected. It also provides a historical record of what

was signed off by clients and stakeholders before the campaign began, which can be a useful
record if people try to change the strategy from what was originally agreed. However, if there are
changes, you can note any changes or modifications to the strategy as a result of live data and
changes in expected performance. This can then be compared to the original strategy when the
campaign is finished.

What is strategic thinking?
Strategic thinking is a process you can use to view, weigh up and create the future for yourself and
others. It is an extremely effective and valuable skill. When used correctly, it can help you make good
decisions related to work or to your personal life.
In order to understand strategic thinking, you first need to understand strategy. Now, there are many
ways to define strategy, so let’s settle on just one! Consider how you can bridge the gap between
policy and tactics. What tactics can you use to implement the policy? This is your strategy. You can
also think of strategy in terms of means and ends. You have an end in mind. What means can you
use to reach that end? This again is the realm of strategy. We have resources available to us to get
us to our end. Then how we deploy or arrange those resources is our strategy, and how we actually
execute the actions are our tactics.
The classic 1987 Harvard Business Review article, “Crafting Strategy” by Henry Mintzberg, presents
the idea of ‘emergent strategy’. An emergent strategy is one that was not initially planned. Instead, it
was formed through consistent actions that formed a pattern over time or through solving an
unexpected issue that emerged. Rather than being planned for, it emerged naturally.
Strategic thinking in action
An in-house printing department printed a monthly sales list for the company’s freight shipping
agency. This was printed on the company’s standard letter-headed paper. The company was
successful, and its list of containers for hire was growing. This made it necessary to print on both
sides of the paper. The headed paper was tearing in the printing machines when it was turned over.
The print department supervisor, using strategic thinking, proposed turning the sales list into a
simple, folded page printed on plain paper with illustrations in one color on the front. The use of color
in this context was unheard of. The trial run of the first leaflet produced a sensation in the London
Baltic Exchange, multiplying the company’s sales, as well as solving the printing problem. The result
was, because of the publicity, the company won the largest container agency contract in the world
at that time. Every other company was still printing its list on standard headed paper.
Now that you know what strategic thinking is, consider the benefits!
With strategic thinking, you become proactive rather than reactive. You take the initiative
and look actively for possible ways to improve. You don’t just wait around hoping that
something turns up, or that someone else will force you to change.
Strategic thinking can also give you a better sense of direction. When you see, or indeed
create, opportunity to achieve a change, this spurs you to move towards it.
Better operational efficiency is another benefit. You begin to notice opportunities for better
ways of organizing or doing work. Seizing them tends to lead to efficiencies and savings in
time and resources.
Did you know that strategic thinking can help to increase market share and profitability?
This is because deliberately applying future thinking to building vision contributes directly to
this.

You can make your business more durable. Each of the benefits already mentioned creates
a foundation for durability.
Efficient strategic thinkers tend to notice windfall opportunities and take advantage of
them. When something fails, they don’t throw their hands up in despair. No, they notice some
new opportunity or idea that arises from the failure. They don’t think in terms of solving
problems. They think in terms of seeking solutions. This creates a more positive mindset.
Benefits in action
Intrinsically, strategic thinking feeds and enhances a company's vision to achieve its goals. Here’s an
example of how it can be applied to creating vision in the first place.
A group of radiography superintendents in a hospital specializing in the treatment of cancer had

heavy workloads treating patients themselves. They reported being unable to find time to supervise
their team members. Each of six superintendents reported treating ten patients per day on average.
When asked how many patients each of their five or six team colleagues were treating each day,
they did not have that information.
Someone suggested they give one of their own patients to each member of their team. This meant
that they would have five or six fewer patients each day. And this, in turn, would leave them time to
ensure their colleagues had their support and direct help at extra busy times. The new strategy
increased productivity, and also improved working relationships and enabled better supervision.
Natural strategic thinkers tend to be big-picture oriented and direction-setters. These skills come
naturally to some. And even if you don’t already have these skills, they can be learned.
What are some of the main characteristics of strategic thinking? It is conceptual, systems-oriented,
directed toward the future, and opportunistic in nature.
At its core, strategic thinking involves planning for the future. This means preparing strategies and
conjuring ideas that will both cope with changing environments and consider the various challenges
that lie ahead. This is strategic thinking in its forecasting or predictive form.
But there is another form of strategic thinking. A more powerful form of strategic thinking involves
designing the desired future, and planning to make it happen. In other words, instead of just planning
for the future, you aim to create the future!
Strategic thinking in action
A group of six outdoor education centers served the education system’s inner-city schools in a
major UK city. They were concerned that, with budget cuts, they were vulnerable to withdrawal of
funds and to closure. In fact, three other centers had already been closed in the previous three years.
A Senior Education Officer persuaded them that, although they had always been competitors, the
centers would be stronger if they joined forces, shared resources, and supported one another. This
was a new strategy!

One way to do this was to create a shared vision of how successful they could be. Guided through
the visioning process, they developed the skills to think strategically about many of their systems,
procedures, and operating plans.
Origins of Future-basing®
Rather than trying to predict the future, you can create it instead. One specific method you can use is
called Future-basing®. It’s a powerful process that involves four stages:
Creating a vision
Deciding clearly how to achieve it
Building operational plans
Generating a motivation to act
It encourages creative thinking and the sharing of ideas. This in turn builds a strong sense of
common purpose between people who work on it together.
Future-basing® was learned by a commercial team in a military aircraft manufacturing and servicing
organization. It was part of a project team formation process, and they used this technique to design
their vision for a successful signing of an order on time and within budget. Because they were skilled
at project management, they quickly recognized how they could develop their strategy, including the
steps they could take and the deployment of their resources. The visioning process itself helped
them to create a genuine sense of common purpose. The contract was signed in time and within
budget!
Future-basing® can be used to develop and focus team objectives, create new systems and
procedures, and resolve conflicts by thinking beyond them. It can help you build an organization-
wide vision and cascade it through and across the business. And then you can design, plan, and
evaluate projects in order to make that vision a reality.
Applying Future-basing®
Step 1: Stimulate imagination by ‘reviewing the future’
In other words, you actually base yourself in the future when building your vision. A good way to do
this is to describe your future vision as if it is already real. The first step is to fix a date and time as the
basis for your vision, no matter how far ahead your goals lie.
Step 2: Create a frame for success
Think about what you are successful at. A helpful tip here is to generate a series of short headings
describing important success areas, based on how your team or organization analyzes its operating
environment. This enables you to focus attention on streams of achievement. Since you will naturally
choose success areas that are important to you and the organization, your values are automatically
built-in.
Step 3: Develop the vision

Under each success heading, list specific achievements. These are things that have been achieved
in the imagined future. Phrase the achievements in the present tense and use positive terms. In
groups, members are invited to write their own desired achievements, and to personalize their
descriptions with ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘my’, ‘our’, and so on.
Step 4: Analyze your feelings
Did you realize that strategic thinking involves more than just the logical part of the brain? You need
to pay attention to your feelings too. So the fourth step is to note the evidence from your feelings.
Now your achievements have been realized in this ideal future, how good does it feel? Are you
pleased, amazed, excited, happy, relaxed, or energized?
Step 5: Map out how you got to this ideal future
Now that you know where you want to reach, the fifth step is to map out how we got to this ideal
future. Remaining in the imaginary future, people ‘remember’ that, for each achievement to be true,
there must have been at least one critical action or event which led them to here. Indeed, there may
have been more than one event. As they are ‘remembered’, these actions or events are mapped out
onto a progress chart to create a critical path plan or analysis.
Step 6: Generate buy-in
One way to achieve buy-in is to have in the room as many stakeholders as possible when the vision
is being generated. You can also cascade Future-basing® across the organization. This can be done
by creating the central vision, and then training people in various divisions or departments to create
their own appropriate parts of the vision and action.
Finding metaphorical or symbolic ways to capture the vision and share it in story form is a way that
leaders inspire their people to become involved and make things happen.


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Digital Marketing Strategy Copyright © 2021 digitalmarketinginstitute.com 1

STRATEGY FUNDAMENTALS ..................................................................................................................................................... 7

Core components ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Channel strategy ......................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Understanding the outputs .................................................................................................................................................... 9

Philosophies of digital strategy .......................................................................................................................................... 10

OVERARCHING STRATEGY ...................................................................................................................................................... 10

What is it? ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 10

Digital marketing and digital media ...................................................................................................................................11

DIGITAL RESOURCES .....................................................................................................................................................................11

Core elements ..............................................................................................................................................................................11

Resource maps .......................................................................................................................................................................... 12

Key elements ............................................................................................................................................................................... 13

Developing a budgeting plan .............................................................................................................................................. 14

BUDGET PLANNING ...................................................................................................................................................................... 14

Key considerations ................................................................................................................................................................... 15

Building a budgeting plan ..................................................................................................................................................... 16

RETURN ON INVESTMENT ..........................................................................................................................................................17

The role of ROI .............................................................................................................................................................................17

Determining ROI ..........................................................................................................................................................................17

Determining value of lead ......................................................................................................................................................17

Measuring success with ROI ............................................................................................................................................... 18

LESSON 2: SETTING STRATEGY OBJECTIVES AND KPIS .......................................................20

Digital Marketing Strategy Copyright © 2021 digitalmarketinginstitute.com 2

Purpose of the objective phase ........................................................................................................................................ 21

Objective setting activities ................................................................................................................................................... 21

SMART goals .............................................................................................................................................................................. 22

What are KPIs? .......................................................................................................................................................................... 22

Reporting and measurement ............................................................................................................................................. 23

Assigning responsibilities ..................................................................................................................................................... 23

KPIs within specific business areas ............................................................................................................................... 23

Reviewing past campaigns ................................................................................................................................................. 24

Set KPIs ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 25

Importance of reviews ........................................................................................................................................................... 25

LESSON 3: DIGITAL STRATEGY RESEARCH ..................................................................................28

Key activities ............................................................................................................................................................................... 29

THE RESEARCH MAP................................................................................................................................................................... 29

What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 29

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT RESEARCH .................................................................................................................... 29

Knowing the difference ........................................................................................................................................................ 29

OWNED AND DESK RESEARCH ............................................................................................................................................. 30

Owned research ....................................................................................................................................................................... 30

Desk research resources ..................................................................................................................................................... 30

Using Google .............................................................................................................................................................................. 30

DIGITAL AUDIT ................................................................................................................................................................................. 31

Digital Marketing Strategy Copyright © 2021 digitalmarketinginstitute.com 3

Structuring your audit ............................................................................................................................................................. 31

AUDIENCE RESEARCH ................................................................................................................................................................ 33

What is it? ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 33

Audience research tools ...................................................................................................................................................... 33

Audience personas ................................................................................................................................................................. 34

Key insights for developing audience personas ..................................................................................................... 34

Prioritizing your audience ..................................................................................................................................................... 34

SOCIAL LISTENING ....................................................................................................................................................................... 35

What does it involve? ............................................................................................................................................................. 35

Observational and empirical social listening ............................................................................................................. 35

Developing insights ................................................................................................................................................................. 36

COMPETITOR RESEARCH ......................................................................................................................................................... 36