The business of marketing has become an ever-expanding
sprawl of options and complexity. There are multiple partners with niche
expertise rather than truly broad- based integrated offerings. Moreover, the traditional Advertising
and Public Relations agency model’s are dead and competitors from unexpected
quarters are moving in, forcing us all to work harder: whatever it takes to
stay relevant – and valuable – to our clients.
To succeed today clients need broad-based, integrated
offerings – not one individual agency’s niche area of expertise. Therefore the role of the Brand
Strategist has never been more valuable.
Today’s Brand Strategist must be a polymath. Their expertise must span a
significant number of different subject areas and draw on complex bodies of
knowledge to solve specific problems.
Today’s Brand Strategist must also have a solid understanding of all
media past and present: specialists and authorities in any number of
disciplines.
We would further argue that if everything is digital, then
nothing is. And now that our
"old media" as well as our modern channels are digital, the very term
has perhaps outlived its usefulness. "Like air and drinking water, being
digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence," as
technology guru Nicholas Negroponte put it. So, by definition, today’s Digital
Brand Strategist is simply a Brand Strategist.
The task may appear Herculean, but the goal has not
changed. Today’s Brand Strategist
must understand the complex world we have come from, the world we are in, and
also be forward-thinking to anticipate future trends and create a path that
ensures the success of a product or service.
Being an on-trend, relevant, inspiring, purposeful,
innovative and community-centric brand are the things that will make people
pause, listen and pay attention.
Customers want to identify with a brand they can grow with, that earns
their trust and makes them feel valued. People want to evolve with a brand whose products and
services help give their business or life meaning and significance. End to end, a brand must become a
consumer’s best friend.
After well over a decade of constructing digital strategies
on behalf of clients, one thing has become abundantly clear: most are often
confused about what digital strategy is and how to develop one. When defining and developing any strategy, it’s imperative
that clients understand that strategy follows structure, people and an
idea. Second, clients must
understand that profit and return-on-investment (ROI) are outcomes, not the
strategy itself.
There are numerous approaches to conducting digital
strategy, but at their core, all go through similar steps:
- Identifying the opportunities and challenges,
- Developing a vision around how the online assets will fulfill those business and external stakeholder needs, goals, and
- Prioritizing a set of initiatives/tactics that can deliver on this vision.
It goes without saying that within each of those stages, a
number of techniques and analyses may be employed.
IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES
First, you have to define what you’re hoping to achieve for
the brand, product, or service. Start by analyzing the following five factors:
- Presence: Measure of the brand’s digital footprint,
- Influence: Branded message adoption,
- Perception: Emotional reaction to the brand,
- Engagement: People organically participating in conversations,
- Resonance: Reaction to the overall conversation about the brand.
You need to define your business’ overall mission/objective
first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan. Therefore it’s imperative that you ask
the right questions and that you understand the brand objectives that most
closely align with those key business opportunities and challenges. You also need a very clear understanding
of your brand truth. You should also answer this question: what is the
overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve?
Once you’ve benchmarked the brand’s current equity and
position, you must segment your target customers. Customer segmentation allows
marketers to connect all customer touch points and identify what motivates a
brand’s core consumers in a multi-channel environment.
VISION AND CLARIFICATION
Once you have a clear understanding of the target, their
path to purchase, goals, opportunities and challenges, it’s time to formulate
your message and positioning. Positioning is a marketing strategy that aims to
make a brand occupy a distinct position (relative to competing brands,) in the
mind of the customer.
The idea is to identify and attempt to “own” a marketing
niche for a brand, product, or service using various strategies including
pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging, and competition. Ultimately, as we have previously
explained, this power resides in the marketers' ability to cloak their product
in the universal dreams, fantasies, and values of the masses. We are therefore creating and selling
modern myths that leverage the collective pool of cultural, psychological and
mythical elements to create a "brand mythology."
Now look at your brand's story/positioning and ask yourself:
- What is the story/positioning telling my target customer?
- Why does my target customer care about this story/positioning?
- What sort of emotions does my story/positioning evoke?
- How does my story/positioning connect to the emotional needs of my target customer?
- How will that story/positioning incite action on behalf of my brand, product, and service?
- What is the source of competitive advantage for your digital business model?
- How can you manage business complexity in the global digital economy?
- How do you create digitized platforms that enable new and evolving digital opportunities?
- How can you simplify your customer experiences without creating burdensome organizational complexity?
- How can you create new information offerings that generate bottom-line value?
The resulting narrative enables the use of social channels,
for example, as a means to convey a product, service, or brand’s benefits. Brand stories are what drive
interactions with customers. If
you need further assistance in refining your brand's positioning and subsequent
messaging, we would suggest reading through the wealth of information provided
by Beloved Brands.
You now should ideally have an intimate understanding of
your brand’s current positioning, goals, objectives competitors and challenges.
From here you should be able to ascertain where a winning brand message and
position can be found in the future.
You also now should have a clear understanding of your
target consumers demographics, psychographics, and technographic profile
keeping in mind that you may have multiple target segments within any target
group. Note: At any number of agencies we have
worked at (or with) in the past, many have also employed the use of detailed
Buyer Personas, which can be a helpful exercise – as the better understanding
you have of your target(s), the easier it is to engage them.
TECHNOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION
As your target consumer base varies, the technologies and social
networks you utilize to reach them will naturally vary, too. Imagine you’re a retailer and based on
your research and planning you’ve discovered that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
and a variety of social retail oriented platforms such as Pinterest or Fancy
are best suited to help reach your brand’s target audience.
Let’s say that you’ve also discovered that more than
one-third (33%+) of the activity surrounding your brand is based on your target
consumer’s mobile behavior. You’d naturally want to define the experience that
consumers will have with your brand’s products by channel, across multiple
platforms, based on their behavior patterns. This exercise is also known as
User Experience (UX) Mapping but the most important things you must ask yourself
prior to creating any map are:
- How do customers search and find information about my product, service, or brand?
- What social platforms do they favour (Technographic Segmentation)?
- What’s the purpose of the specific social platforms and technologies we’ve chosen to utilize?
- How do these mediums play into our mobile strategy?
- What is going to differentiate me from my competition?
As the world has shifted to digital and social media
specifically, consumers look to fellow consumers to inform any purchasing
decision. Influencers are
therefore a critical part of the digital market success as we move towards the
new marketing models that make up social commerce and consumer experience.
Another helpful exercise at this stage is to create a
Marketing Calendar that shows your brand’s marketing efforts across the
channels you are leveraging in your marketing programs. Use it for benchmarks
related to your digital strategy.
What are important dates for your brand's success? This could be based, for example, around
a Holiday, trade show, product release or any other points in the year that
align best with sales. A social media content calendar can also be developed to
support your Marketing Calendar.
Always keep in mind that when it comes to engaging prospects or
customers that quality is far, far more relevant than quantity.
Creating benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) by
channel and platforms is also extremely important during this phase. This is imperative in order to estimate
your brand’s expected return per channel — and whether this return is measured
based on awareness, engagement, online sales, or any number of other
components. From an agency
standpoint this stage is also imperative to setting realistic expectations with
clients.
The ultimate goal of engagement is to create a feedback loop
that allows you to meet the goals you set forth in the strategy development
phase. In order to be successful, you must continually evaluate and alter your
digital strategy based on the information that you gain from your campaigns and
digital initiatives. As marketers, it’s important that we measure everything.
Throughout every campaign, you must also utilize social
listening tools to get insights into campaign performance, variances in brand
health, and language cues that are indicative of purchase intent and overall
brand performance.
ENGAGEMENT/ EXECUTION
Extending consistent on-brand, on-message content and
collateral across all selected channels is imperative and the cornerstone of
brand building. Approach your
constituents with the goal to engage their personal lives and experiences. Be
authentic, honest and try not to increase friction or decrease participation.
Execution is what brings the strategic plan to fruition. Sounds simple, right?
With a clear understanding of the elements above you’re in a
strong position to frame and articulate a winning digital strategy for your
brand. Keep in mind we’re
discussing digital strategy versus tactics. The terms tactic and strategy are
often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while
strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational
patterns, activity, and decision-making that lead to tactical execution.
OVER TO YOU
This framework/overview is based on our experience (and is a
work in progress) however, what would you adjust based on your experience? What do you think about it? Is there
something irrelevant? Is something missing? Looking at the sector you are working in, would you approach
this differently?
Written by Andrew B.
Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at
Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook.
Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.
