“Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man, who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine, and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”
Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible
As the world becomes more digital, I am constantly amazed by the lack of companies that have a digital strategy in place. They have offline strategies that will drive their business goals, however very few really understand that importance of aligning their online and offline objective in order to be most effective and generate a great ROI!
In this post I’m going to outline the steps that will take you from virtually no digital presence to a comprehensive digital strategy. This will help you to relate your products/services to your personas, engaging them and getting those phones ringing!
Strategy
It is so important to understand what the end goal of your strategy looks like. You start by asking yourself why you do what you do and what you want to get out of your strategy. At this stage you need to identify what products or services you want to promote and establish actionable metrics that will allow you to measure the success of your campaign.
Personas
Once you have identified your strategy’s focus, this will then inform the people who are likely to consume your products and services. These are called your personas.
It’s important that you understand here, that your personas do not dictate your strategy. Another way to approach this is to identify who your best five customers are and why they are your best customers. Do you have the best relationship with them? Are the products they’re consuming providing you with the best profit? Whatever it is, it must tie in with your objectives above.
Content
Great, now you have identified who it is that’s going to make the phone ring and what products or services they are going to consume. Understanding who your personas are will allow you to understand what content they are likely to engage with.
Ensuring that your content marketing is engaging and relevant to your personas is an absolute must. Think about it, when you go to the pub, you want to speak with people who have similar interests. It’s the same online! If your target audience aren’t interested in what you have to say you can forget waiting for the enquiries to flood in.
Social Media
Once you understand your personas interests, it is also key to understand where it is they hang out online. This will determine where you put the carrots on sticks (that’s your content) to engage with them and bring them back into your website. Your content and social media channels will complement each other in a very unique way throughout your strategy process.
Thinking about other acquisition tactics such as SEO and paid ads is key as not everyone is as active on social media as others. To create effective marketing it’s crucial we know when to join existing conversations and start new conversations, timing is everything!
Once you have finalised a strategy, identified your personas, created your content plan and established which social media channels your content will be promoted via, this will then feed into the See, Think, Do, Delight funnel.
Marketing Funnel
The See, Think, Do, Delight (STDD) funnel is pretty fundamental to how we do things at flatdot. We believe it’s the best way to attract and engage with your ideal personas, ultimately leading them to conversion.
Convert
Your conversions can be anything from a sale of a product, downloading an eBook or making the phone ring. Whatever the end goal of your strategy, it’s important that it ties in with all of the points above and that leads are nurtured into customers and ultimately brand advocates.
