If your business uses digital channels to find and reach customers, developing a complete digital marketing strategy to optimize costs and sustainability is essential. Strategy has a great impact on results as well as on business performance and all other aspects. Even so important, there are a lot of businesses struggling to build their own strategies. The strategy is not something that is too difficult or too high to be true, just to understand and understand the steps, almost everyone can build the right strategy for the business. mine.
This article is intended to help readers understand the fundamentals of strategy as well as step-by-step guidance on how to create a complete digital marketing strategy. And with these steps you can create almost any type of strategy, not just about digital marketing.
* Before entering the article, I want to say that what I write and share in the article is the way I am using to build my strategy. This is not the only way, and I believe that everyone can have their own way and that there may be others who are more efficient and better than me.
What is strategy?
Strategy is a high-level plan to achieve one or more OBJECTIVES under uncertainty conditions - Wikipedia
What you need to pay attention to in the definition above is the keyword "target." The essence of a plan can become a strategy in that it must serve one or more strategic goals. What is called a strategic goal?
The strategic objectives of a typical business or company will only be one of the following:
The strategy has only three types of goals: revenue, interest or something
Revenue: is the sum of the proceeds from the sale of goods, merchandise or services and not deducted or charged to other expenses.
Profit: The remaining amount of the company after deducting all other costs including production costs, advertising, taxes, etc.
To achieve something: there is no need to explain.
An example of a revenue-driven strategic goal is this month's $ 10 billion revenue margin with a profit margin of 10%, but next month you want to increase revenue by $ 20 billion by willingly sacrificing profit margins and leaving it hole up to 20% (by applying discount, voucher or promotion, etc ... to stimulate purchase demand). To increase sales, your strategy will often have to target the outside.
For example, the profit target for this month is 10 billion dong with the profit margin of 10 percent. In the following month, the revenue is only slightly increased by 2 billion dong, but the profit margin has to increase to 15 percent. By reducing production costs, improving workflow, saving costs, reducing marketing costs, etc., to increase profitability. To increase profits, your strategy often has to target the internal actors of the business.
An example of winning or achieving a goal would be to win the election with 80% of the votes or occupy 60% market share after 3 years.
All three of the goals set out above are linked to a clear and measurable number (sales, profits, percentages), and each of these strategies is designed to serve Achieve a predefined goal.
We will have a more detailed discussion on how to set up a digital marketing strategy below.
Floor level of strategy
The strategy also has several levels and levels that serve a certain target. Usually, we have three levels: Corporate Strategy, Business Strategy, Functional / Operational Strategy.
Corporate Strategy: This is the highest level strategy that will determine what the company (or companies) will do business, how they stand and how they do business, how to distribute financing for the applications how the business units below (if the corporation has many companies). Because of its nature, corporate-level strategies are more value-based, platform, and concept than concrete and detailed plans such as Business and Operations level strategies.
Business Strategy: A strategy at a corporate level that analyzes market factors and gives directions and how to allocate resources and how to compete with competitors. on the market and the company's financial goals.
Operational Strategy: Operational strategies are usually divided into departments such as Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, Operations, etc. The strategy at this level will go into the development of the plans. details about the operation, development direction for the operation.
Within the scope of this article we will only go into the establishment of a digital marketing strategy, a Functional / Operational level strategy.
How are the strategies and tactics different?
Many people still confuse tactics and tactics or do not understand the difference between the two terms.
Simply put, tactics are smaller plans that are part of a strategy that you set out to achieve your stated strategic goals. Tactics also pursue their own goals and the achievement of these tactical goals, though not decisive, will directly affect the achievement of your ultimate strategic goals.
The strategy is made up of many tactics
For example, you must develop a digital marketing strategy with the goal of earning a yearly revenue of $ 1 million. At this time, plans for such channels as SEO, SEM, Display, Social, etc. will be tactics created with their own goals (how much organic organic traffic, CPA and CR of SEM and Display is how much, Social must create so many engagement and traffic, etc ...).
Achieving all the tactical goals of each of the smaller channels will get you closer to achieving the final strategic objective mentioned above. Failure to achieve any tactical goals does not mean that your strategy will fail, but it will definitely make it harder to reach the common goal as the remaining channels will now have to work harder. more to complement the unsatisfactory channel.
Here are the basic differences of strategy and tactics in different angles:
| Strategy | Strategy |
| Target | Achieve strategic goals that directly affect the survival and growth of the organization. | Achieving tactical goals affects an integral part of a whole. |
| Role | Performed by individuals who have the power to mobilize resources within an organization and understand how to apply a variety of tactics to achieve their goals. | Experts on a certain array have the ability to use limited resources to accomplish and achieve certain goals. |
| Responsibility | Responsible for the overall development of the organization | Responsible for a particular array assigned. |
| Time | Long, often unchanging. | Short, flexible and can vary according to the market situation. |
| Result | Create clear and specific goals for the organization including plans, directions, and KPIs. | Make clear results by using manpower, tools and time. |
So I often avoid using words like SEO strategy, Social strategy, etc. For me, those channels are just tools and plans for effective use of these channels should be called tactics. The digital marketing strategy is at a higher level than the distribution channels (explained below in the Content section).
Also, the time spent doing something unnatural helps turn it into a strategy. A plan to socialize and develop a fan page for 2 years is just a tactic. Same for a link building, onsite optimization campaign lasts 3 years.
Why do we need digital marketing strategy?
Is strategy needed? And why is it so important? Because without strategy, all we do is touch the wall.
Running an ad, your CPC can only be as low as one, no matter how much you optimize. SEO too, your traffic can not increase forever, some time Google will pull it down again. Same for any other advertising channels. All tactics will come to a standstill at some point. Why?
Because without a higher strategic goal to guide all tactics, you will be more likely to get caught up in the whirlwind of what you do every day. Running KPIs does not make sense at all and ultimately does not realize what you actually do contribute to the whole or not.
Keyword rankings this month increased over the previous month, CPC lower than 10%, Facebook page this month has an additional 5,000 likes. Oh ... then? Can these things help the company sell more? Not sure.
You can argue and say that's what your boss or client wants. They want higher ranking keywords, lower CPCs or more page like. They want that and you give them what they want. But why in the end are you still ... touching the wall? The boss / client still judges that your performance is not good? Sales of the company does not increase? There is something wrong wrong going on here. Yes, that is the cause and also the problem, you are interested in tactics but forget about losing strategy and what is its purpose. And in fact, what the boss / client wants sometimes is not necessarily the right or the real benefit.
Saying that does not mean that tactics are not good because, without them, we are all just wind blowers that can not get anywhere. What I mean here is that tactics need to be driven by something higher. Tactics need to work rhythmically and move towards the ultimate goal of the strategy.
Strategy is essential for businesses to break the law of decline mentioned above and step out of the vicious circle to enter a larger playing field.
The elements constitute a good strategy
These are the factors and also the questions I often ask myself in order to determine whether my strategy is a good strategy:
Clear objective: Does the strategy have a clear goal? Unclear objectives can make your strategy useless, tactics misplaced and lead to failure.
Multi-channel: Are you using multi-channel for your strategy? A good strategy can not rely on only one distribution channel or advertising.
Intensive influence: Do the strategies I create have a profound effect on the company's development? If your strategy does not affect much (ie yes and no), what strategy do you do?
Unblocked: Will this strategy be prevented by blocking in the company? The blocks here are internal issues of the company, such as technical limitations from the Product department or noncooperation from the Sales department. A good strategy will not let those things affect but actually put those factors into the calculation.
Difficult to change: Is this strategy susceptible to change and change? If the strategy is susceptible to change and change, it is not a good strategy.
Creating Tactics: Are the strategies for each of your channels going to serve the ultimate strategic goal? It must be based on a strategic goal to create tactics rather than a set of tactics and then set goals. This is exactly what is said above about the tactics to be led.
Factors and indicators: Does your strategy make the connection between the ultimate goal and the success of each tactic? Monitor and evaluate their success factors using KPIs.
After you ask yourself questions and can answer all of the above questions in a satisfactory way, you can now launch your digital marketing strategy.
3 the foundation of digital marketing
There are three fundamentals that play an integral role in your digital marketing strategy: infrastructure, analytics, and content.
As you can see in the three elements, the infrastructure plays the most important role (to the greatest), then the analysis and finally the content. But do not think that you can skip any part because all three platforms are essential to your digital marketing strategy. Do not believe, then you try to advertise when your website is down, or do not measure traffic from the channel, or do not have any content on the website try to see.
1. Infrastructure
Infrastructure in digital marketing is the most essential part of digital marketing strategy. If this part is not stable then all other factors will go down. Facilities include:
- Server, hosting, domain to form a website.
- Database for storing data and customer information. The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is used to make it easier to access data from the database for marketing, sales, service.
- CMS (Content Management System) is a coat of arms to help the use, management and posting of content on the website becomes easier and faster.
A good infrastructure needs to ensure the following five elements:
Stability: If your website does not work, do not buy or anything else, it does not happen. Ensuring a stable 24/7 website is paramount. Or if the website is down, the fastest is when it can work again?
Speed: Is your website loading fast enough? No one wants to go to a slow website. And web load rates go hand in hand with your conversion rates: the slower your website load, the lower the conversion rate and vice versa.
Scalability: What if your website needs to grow from 10,000 visits to 100,000? If your website can not guarantee an increase in load capacity, you will likely lose a lot of buying and development opportunities. This is a lesson that we have seen so many times, you run a colon advertising and attract a lot of participants but at that time your website crashed, resulting in you not sell. Any item that loses many potential customers because they are frustrated and do not return anymore. Do not repeat this lesson again.
Confidentiality: If your website is hacked and all your customer information is lost then it's obviously not good for your service at all. If you have a self-built website, make sure you follow the standards of web security, if you are using open source CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, etc ... make sure you always update the version. Latest.
Compatibility: Does your website work well on all browsers, on mobile, on different screen sizes? It is impossible to test all the cases but make sure that your website is at least as good as possible in most popular browsers and devices.
2. Analytics
Analytics does not have to install Google Analytics on a website and look at indicators such as sessions, time on site, and bounce rates every day without knowing what to do with it. The analysis here involves measuring the metrics and then finding the direction to improve the desired conversion rate. A visitor to your website and then become a customer, what happens in the middle? Finding the answer is the work of the analysis process. To measure, we usually rely on three major measurement methods:
Performance Channel Tracking: Measures how much traffic comes from each channel, which channel is performing better, which channel brings more customers, and which channel has the highest number of conversions?
Audience Response Tracking: Measures on user feedback when they are on the website, such as when they were on the site, what pages they left off, what pages they viewed before conversion?
User Behaviour Tracking: Measures user behavior with tools such as heatmap to know where they mouse over the site, click on, scroll to the site?
There are 3 important things you need to identify with the analysis:
Find the right KPI to track: Is the site session or fan page followers the index you want to track? Are they indicators that directly relate to your digital marketing strategy objectives? If not then you are in the wrong track. We will talk more about how to determine the metrics correctly in the section below.
Determine the impact of customer feedback: Are customers staying on websites longer than 3 minutes more likely to buy? Or do customers who visit their company's website often leave more contact information than those who do not? Understanding the feedback from customers directly impacting the conversion will help you determine which indicators need to be set as KPIs.
Analyzing, not reporting: Exporting data from measurement tools to excel files and sending them is not an analysis, but a reporting. What you need to know is from what data you can do.
Content
Content is everything that you create, it's not just text on the website but also images, infographics, videos or even company information pages, contact pages, etc. Good content is usually good. Complete the following 5 elements:
Deliver the content you want to reach the person who finds you: the first time people visit your website and do not know your brand, what will they see and what will they have?
Strengthen the content you want to convey to those who already know you: If they ever go to the website and they come in again, your content will help them remember deeper, more strongly about what you want to convey. in?
Control the communication between the brand and the community, the media: how do you want the social community and people to perceive your brand? Content must make that impression. For example, if you are a mainstream hosting company, everyone should know about you as a hosting company, not as a web design company or web design company. you go again).
Tell potential customers about your product: If visitors are already in demand, can your content transform them into customers?
Supporting those who are already customers: Many businesses are eager to find customers who do not pay attention to the people who are customers while they are potential buyers to upsell and cross-sell. Do you have a FAQ or Knowledge Base page to assist current customers on how to use your product?
Normal content will usually be transmitted through 3 main channels: Owned, Earned, Paid.
Owned:Are all the channels that you own and have the right to control, post, modify, delete, including: website, blog, social networking, applications.
Earned: These are the channels where your brand is referred to, without any cost, such as social sharing and referrals, reviews, reprints, or organic traffic.
Paid: The channels that you must pay for your content to appear on include: paid search, display, re-targeting, social ads, seeding, KOL / influencer, etc.
These content delivery channels also have the ability to support each other to increase the likelihood of transmission, for example:
Share good content from your website or blog on social networks to increase earned traffic.
- Advertise for great content to help them increase coverage and efficiency, such as boosted post on Facebook (owned - paid)
• Advertise for good content to increase viral potential and thereby earn more paid (earned - earned)
3 Preparation of strategic money
In my personal opinion, a digital marketing strategy is complete and should be shaped very much depends on the preparation steps and this is actually the more important part. There are 3 steps you need to do:
1. Assess situation
Build a checklist for what you have by allocating it based on the three core elements outlined above. Here is an example table for you to imagine:
For example, with Infrastructure, you need to review what kind of hosting your website is currently using, how long your page loads on average, what CMS is using, whether it has CRM, what kind of database, the programming language of the website what. For Analytics you need to determine whether you are using a measurement tool, whether you have online tracking to offline, using other heatmap or A / B testing tools, or have other data demographics in your possession. the customer's not. With content, check how much you spend on advertising channels, how many blogs you have, how many emails / sms you get per month, whether you have a review or PR in the newspaper.
Of course you will in fact need to be more detailed and informative. In essence, this is a step where you will need to spend a lot of time gathering information and making a judgment on each of the factors you collect. You will need to evaluate the pros and cons of each of these factors and determine what you can change right away or what you will need to take.
2. Identifying metrics
In this step you need to identify which indicators are important to care and use as KPIs. Contrary to popular belief, sessions, bounce rates, time onsite may not be something you should be concerned about. Most people just understand that running ads will generate orders / contracts. But what's inside is important.
To be clear I would use an example of an English language center where the sales process goes from online to offline.
By using ads, I created 10,000 visits / sessions on the website and if 10,000 of those sessions had a conversion rate of 10%, then I had about 1,000 leads. Of these 1,000 leads after the filtering of duplicate forms, the information is incorrect, about 800 leads are qualified and will be telesales call to invite to the center for further consultation on the course. Approximately 50% of them will agree to set up appointments, ie 400 appointments to get to the center. Of the 400 dates, there will actually be only 200 people present. Of the 200 people who come to the center for advice, if the consultants are able to make 10% sales, the center will have 20 contracts.
So from 10,000 traffics, we have created 20 contracts. Each step in this process has a certain conversion rate and step by step will directly affect the adjacent steps after it. Each conversion step in this is called a micro conversion. These micro conversions are the KPIs and metrics that you should monitor and evaluate. So, leads, appointments, shows, contracts should be your KPIs, not sessions, bounce rates, time onsite.
Knowing step by step in the process will also help you find out which part has the problem to be able to improve and solve it. For example, if the number of quality leads decreases, it may be that your ad's settings are not performing well. If the number of appointments is minimized, it may be due to a problem with the telesales call, or if the conversion rate from the show to the contract is reduced, are you selling it? difficult?
Each business will have a different sales process, but it is important that you understand the whole process and the transition situation at every step before you can get on your digital marketing strategy.
3. Set up a strategic goal
Before going into setting a strategic goal, there are some basic definitions that you need to understand:
Average basket size: average price of the order = total sales / number of orders sold. For example, you sell 3 orders, one order cost 50,000 VND, one order 10,000 VND and one order 30,000 VND. Total is 90,000 and divided by 3, the average value of your order is 30,000.
Profit margin: Profit margins are the percentage of interest rates on revenue after all other fees have been subtracted. For example, the company's revenue is 10 billion VND but after deducting all office expenses, staff, electricity, water, tax and money
CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost: For example, you run ads, spend 30,000 and sell 3 orders. CPO (cost per order) the average cost you put out to sell each order is 10,000 VND. But in the 3 orders there are 1 order from the new customer, the other 2 orders from the old customer. So CAC is 30,000 dong - the amount you have to spend to get a new customer.
CLTV – Customer Life-time Value: The value of the customer life cycle: How much will they spend on buying the brand's product throughout the length of the relationship?
To explain how to set a strategic goal, I would like to use a simple example to make it easy to understand: a production workshop, specializing in clothing distribution outside Nguyen Trai. As a B2B seller, every sewing workshop sells at least 100 items per order. The store is retail (B2C) so it can be sold in quantities of each.
Garment Factory (Production)
Store (Distribution)
Build a digital marketing strategy - step by step
After you have completed the other three steps, you now have enough information, data, and a goal to start building your strategy towards it. In the process of planning this it is important that you determine what factors will affect your overall strategy and which ones to include in the calculation. You should take one step outlined below to get a complete overall strategy:
1. The master idea
Your business should have a core idea, which can also be understood as core values or tagline and it symbolizes the brand's existence and direction. Why is the key idea important and needs attention when it comes to strategy? Because it has a great influence on which channel you choose and how to advertise and navigate when content is up.
2. Estimated factors
When you set up a digital marketing strategy, you need to account for all the factors that can affect your strategy's performance. This includes the estimated factors such as:
- Seasonal effects: depending on the industry, depending on the time of year will be able to sell different. For example, raincoats will sell more during the rainy season.
- Trend of the market: the market is in what stage, go up or down? Will there be any changes in the future?
- Advertising vehicles: if a natural day Baidu on behalf of Google and Weibo replace Facebook in Vietnam?
- The rise of new technologies: What new technologies are going to become popular and how does it affect the advertising channels?
.v.v ...
3. What factors can not be estimated
There are many of you are wondering, if it was not estimated then how to know to put in the plan? But sometimes you still have to address issues such as:
- Communication Crisis: How does it affect brands and sales?
- Personnel issue: major change in senior personnel positions.
- An advertising channel disappears: if Facebook blocked in Vietnam?
- Disasters: flood, storm, earthquake.
Etc ...
Think of all the things that can have a negative impact on your strategy and for each factor, although it may or may not happen, but if it does, then the backup plan How do you tell the situation?
3. Resources: hard and soft costs
You also need to reconsider your resources.
Hard cost - all you have to pay is money. This may include the cost of marketing activities, advertising costs, personnel costs for team members. Generally all kinds of charges that you can measure.
Soft cost: all that can not be paid in money but can be converted into money. This is the part that many people miss while it has great impact. Your time as well as everyone in your team is an example. If another part of your designer designed a banner to support and this cost 3 hours, then it is soft cost. Energy as well as interest is another soft cost that you need to pay attention to.
So every time you count on the whole and think about the hard cost, you also need to consider whether there are soft costs, other opportunity costs that you have to pay or not and compare it to the efficiency, The results are worth watching. For example, the event that you are organizing may cost not only 500 million in organizing expenses but also costing the designer 2 hours a day to design, executive 4 hours a day to work with the agency, 1 hour per day to set up your ad and spend a few hours per week for meetings and follow ups. All of that is the opportunity cost that if you do something else, the effect will be better. Therefore, you need to look at these factors carefully when planning.
3. Strategy
The tactics we have discussed above are what we will need to achieve in order to achieve our strategic goals and the strategic part. For digital marketing the strategy can be viewed as the channel that you will use to convey the master idea mentioned above to potential customers. This section depends on the industry, product or service you will need to use different tactics. There is no tactical structure suitable for all or you can bring what your opponent is doing to pressure your business.
Basically every little tactic will need to have a master plan that includes what you will do, the direction, the target audience as well as the number of goals and information you want to achieve for that tactic. .
You will also need a timeline and a road map to work on that tactic. You may also need some tools to manage the tasks your team is doing, Slack and Trello are the ones I use often.
Strategy: easy speech, difficult but still have to do
Through all of the things I have said above, I hope you will have a clearer view of strategy as well as know how to set up your own right digital marketing strategy.
I say "yes" rather than say good because I think that strategy and everything else, you must have a lot of experience, have to do a lot and have to go through many times to do well. For a person with 1-2 years of experience, setting the strategy may be a bit out of the question, but if you need it for the job, hopefully this article will be useful to you and as I say, All you have to do is to do wrong, but you will learn more from that.
And when you have a digital marketing strategy, then you are just the easy part. The more difficult part is to implement that strategy, bring all your theories to prove and achieve the ultimate goal. To accomplish it and achieve the goal, then you can say that your strategy is "good."
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