The question is often asked: how is an effective Digital Strategy developed? Digital Strategy follows the same principles as developing your broader business or brand Strategy. First, assess your business situation and understand what’s working and not working. Secondly, prioritise and set the digital goals that will make the biggest difference to your business. Thirdly, know your audience, as they will largely direct your choices on which digital platforms to activate and how.
1. What is your Business Situation or Context?
Category & Competitor Landscape: First and foremost, be clear on your category frame of reference. Who are you largely competing with or wanting to take share from, is it within your immediate segment or category, or other categories that satisfy the same need or occasion? This will help you to establish your key competitors, who you should profile as to their digital presence, strengths, and weaknesses vs. yours.
Your Brand Performance: What’s your market share? According to the purchase funnel, do people know who you are, are they considering you, and are they purchasing you? Is this the case for both your brand and any hero products in your range? Is this the case in any new market or category you are entering? This will help you to understand where along the purchase funnel you will need to focus your efforts and help you to frame your goals.
Your Existing Digital Infrastructure: Take stock of what digital assets you have already, and what’s working and not working, in the form of a digital audit. The digital channel has the benefit of highly measurable performance, where you can easily obtain figures for the number of impressions or visitors, engagement and time spent, and transaction frequency and value on your website – as just a few examples. This will help you to understand any issues or bottlenecks you may have in the online buyer journey that requires focus.
2. What are your Digital Channel Goals?
Strongly linked to the outputs of your Business Situation Assessment, it’s time to prioritise and frame your Goals specific to the Digital Channel. Following are broad principles that can be used as a guide.
If your brand has low maturity in market, signified by low market share, it is likely your brand is suffering from low awareness. In this case, building awareness (top of funnel) should be your primary goal, measured through reach, impressions and views. Also, engagement might could be considered to improve familiarity with the brand, and can be measured through social media likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates.
If your brand or product has greater maturity in market, you primary goal may be increasing sales prospects or lead (middle of funnel) measured through owned or 3rd Party website visits, or customer acquisition or conversion (top of funnel) measured through increased transaction volume or value.
To drive conversion in the case your brand is less mature in market, you might also consider leveraging and optimising your presence via 3rd Party E-Commerce websites which are already obtaining visitors for your category. Where your brand is more mature, you’d rather be investing to grow your Owned Website E-Commerce transactions which come at a lower cost (no 3rd Party Retailer Margins).
3. Who is your Target Audience?
Identifying and understanding your target audience’s digital behaviour is key to developing an effective digital strategy. Ultimately, you want your brand to be visible on the platforms where your audience is spending their time, and engaging them with ideas and offers that are relevant to them and how they information search, entertain themselves or shop online. Consider developing Audience Personas, which for your target audience(s), capture and bring to life key demographic, psychographic, lifestyle and online media consumption and purchase behaviour information.
If you need help in identifying your target audience, perhaps when entering a new market or for a new product, the digital channel has the benefit of quick and cost effective test and learn ability, where through paid media, you can develop a campaign against a broad or multiple audience profiles to gain insights on the best performing segments and optimise towards those.
About Kindred
Kindred is a digital marketing agency based in Hong Kong, with a multi-lingual team servicing the broader Asia Pacific region. We build human-centric brands for a digital world. Backed by data-science, we place the user at the centre of our digital strategies and build a compelling user-centric narrative to connect your brand with new customers around the world. To grow your brand, contact us today.
