Consider this. Strategy is like Google Maps – it’s your roadmap and will help you navigate your way through the digital sphere. You may know your starting point, but what is your destination and how exactly do you plan on getting there? Here are some important tips to keep in mind:
Strategy allows you to develop a brand voice.
Yes, your brand has a voice. And no, that voice should not just be the voice of the strategist writing your content, whether for social or anything else.
Your voice comes from a pile of adjectives. But wait. Don’t just start listing 20 adjectives that sound nice. These should be derived from 3 main groups:
- Brand Character (example: clever, welcoming, dedicated)
- Communication Purpose (example: education, awareness, sales)
- Brand Language (example: fun, quirky, simple)
Without digital objectives, you are aimlessly wandering.
This is like standing in front of your target, closing your eyes, and shooting, hoping you hit your target. While this may be acceptable in your personal life, we can promise that for a company trying to communicate to its audience, it’s going to fail more often than not. Below are some examples of common objectives for digital marketing:
- Increase consumer engagement
- Increase brand awareness
- Rank for keywords
- Drive more traffic to your website
Once you set your main and supporting objectives, don’t forget to have a plan to measure how successful you were in meeting these or what you might need to change to reach them. This is the most overlooked stepped in creating a digital presence and one of the most important.
Be sure your content has themes and sub-themes.
No one likes willy-nilly, all over the place information. Also, no one enjoys content that only targets them on an emotional level over and over. People are multi-dimensional which means your content should be too.
Your content themes should be derived from your target audience and what they want to hear or learn about. For example, if you want to target college students; a content theme could be student loans with subthemes of paying off student loans or giving information about the types of student loans that exist.
