Digital and Social Media Marketing

A Results-Driven Approach

Aleksej Heinze, Gordon Fletcher, Ana Cruz, Aleksej Heinze, Gordon Fletcher, Tahir Rashid, Ana Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000041668
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

The second edition of Digital and Social Media Marketing is an up-to-date, industry-led results-driven guide to digital marketing. Mixing academic theory with practical examples from a range of different organisations worldwide, it provides insight into, and techniques to enable, the creation, development and maintenance of a successful digital presence.

This highly regarded textbook has been fully revised to bring the content up-to-date with the newest digital technologies. With topics including developing an effective digital presence, search engine optimization, and measuring brand awareness, the new edition also looks at digital ethics, General Data Protection Regulation and privacy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and voice strategies. New international case studies are explored, including Alibaba and Amazon, as well as revised practical exercises in each chapter, enabling students to see how the concepts underpinning digital and social media marketing support business success. The book's customisable Digital Business Maturity Model, and the Buyer Persona Spring, offer organisations a clear road map for understanding their own levels of technology adoption and digital strategy development.

This accessible textbook provides a hands-on, user-friendly platform to turn skills and knowledge into strategic advantage. It is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of digital marketing and marketing strategy and for practitioners aiming to be at the cutting edge of digital and social media marketing.

Alongside electronic resources for each chapter, this new edition also includes digital learning materials, case studies and exercises available in a supporting online learning environment. The online materials further enhance learners' experience and support a worldwide learning community.

Section III
Operational planning

5 Campaign planning and project management

Anna Tarabasz

5.0 Learning objectives

In this chapter you will learn how to:

• view a campaign from a strategic perspective;
• understand the stages of the campaign planning cycle;
• translate your strategic goals into SMART campaign objectives;
• estimate, budget and use evidence-based decision making processes to select and evaluate the performance of your digital marketing actions;
• communicate and document your project management processes using Gantt charts; and
• apply appropriate risk management techniques.

5.1 The importance of planning

Successful digital and social media marketing campaigns do not just happen. They are the result of good campaign project management actions, which are closely related to your digital and social media strategy implementation. The adage ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ is true for many digital marketing campaigns. In the Global Project Management survey, findings show that planning is key; when proven project, program and portfolio management practices are implemented, projects are more successful (PMI, 2018). This chapter outlines how each digital marketing campaign is essentially a project and, therefore, good project management skills are needed to control digital marketing activities.

The 24/7 culture of online activities compounds the potential gravity of issues that an organisation can face by opening up digital channels of communications. Some of the major brands have digital customer service teams who communicate with customers around the clock. Other organisations make their online ‘customer service times’ public to reduce disappointment amongst their customers. This essential decision will impact all other activities in your digital presence. Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-based adaptive learning represent the next great frontier for marketers. Indeed, certain activities may be supported by chatbots and use of AI, but you know your customers best – are they ready for it or do they prefer limited timings and a human touch?

Staff burnout and high staff turnover rates are common in digital marketing agencies. Speed is a characteristic of the fast-paced digital industry and can have negative effects on organisational structures if not managed well. Organisations and their digital teams have expanded rapidly, and many are using the same management methods that worked in a small team environment – which do not work well in a larger team setting. Likewise, for a one-person organisation – owner manager – it is essential to be well organised, manage one’s time and have good project management skills. Spending a whole day just on social media might not be an option for those in a busy organisation, but using tools to schedule and automate some of the engagement activity can be an option. For example, automatic subscription to mailing lists does not require any human intervention, but setting it up does take time and planning ahead helps in this respect.

On the positive side, the Buyer Persona Spring (see Chapter 0 for more detail) highlights how an organisation can engage around the clock, and this offers the possibility of ongoing interaction, especially if multiple aspects of this can be automated. Internal stakeholders have to be managed too. Considerations of how the marketing campaign impacts your people, finances, production and operations need to be made. In this way, having a common strategy used for aligning the processes and procedures of an organisation, in line with marketing activities, helps to focus and lead an organisation to success (Figure 5.1). Likewise, operational constraints have to be taken into account to make sure marketing does not over-generate demand for products and services, which could have a negative effect of not being able to satisfy demands.

If you plan to use digital channels for creating and curating content to engage your buyer persona, you will need to consider various factors such as products and services life cycles and seasonality. From this point of view, each campaign is essentially a project which has to be managed. Therefore, this chapter focuses on key project management practices related to stages of planning, acting, observing and reflecting.

This chapter stresses the importance of integrated activities across multiple digital channels within marketing campaigns, activities of which are prioritised by referring to your overall strategic business objectives. Collaborations with other departments and individuals across an organisation are essential; therefore, some of the projects can be managed outside of marketing team but have an impact on the deliverables of marketing activities. For example, customer service and postal delivery need to coordinate with marketing activities. Understanding digital marketing campaign project management and its key planning tools and stages offers insight into repeatable success patterns, which can be re-created and integrated into an organisation’s culture. Whilst we focus on digital marketing campaigns, we recognise that digital marketing strategy implementation will also have an impact on other areas of organisation such as Human Resources – for example staff social media policy development and enforcement and recruitment of new in-house teams and external agencies.

Figure 5.1 The implication of marketing actions across an organisation

5.2 Project management in the context of digital marketing campaigns

Project management of digital marketing campaigns is a combination of processes, tools and techniques used for intelligently organising resources in order to successfully meet the set digital marketing objectives.

Processes include communication protocols such as update meetings with relevant stakeholders, both internal and external. Tools include spreadsheets for tracking campaign activities and analytics packages for measuring success. Some of the tools are channel-specific, but others, like Sprout Social, Pardot, HubSpot and Net-Results, offer integrated channel management options. Techniques include the use of Gantt charts and identification of critical paths and risk management.

There is no single approach to project management that fits all organisations. For example, detailed project management methodologies such as PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) are popular in the UK, and the Das V-Modell is preferred for digital projects in Germany. But these two represent only the tip of an iceberg, as there are many more like PMI/PMBOK, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Lean and Six Sigma. Digital marketing activities do rely, to a large extent, on the development of digital artefacts (e.g. e-commerce website application and mobile apps) and therefore, for large campaigns, these methodologies can offer more detailed guidance. Both of these two first-mentioned methodologies broadly fit into the four steps of planning, acting, observing and reflecting.

Importance of a proper canvas

At the beginning of your digital journey, you might ask yourself “where do I even start?”. The answer might be simple – literally draw a sketch on canvas. The Business Model Canvas by Strategyzer can help you to define current and future value propositions which are informed by the newly identified building blocks of the Buyer Persona Spring. After analysing your current state and defining your planned future state through the Buyer Persona Spring (Chapter 2) you may now go even deeper through the Digital Engagement Canvas (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 Digital Engagement Canvas Digital engagement framework – using the Buyer Persona Spring for operational planning

The Digital Engagement Canvas is a checklist and is used to identify new projects that support implementation of your digital marketing strategy. It uses a number of elements that are linked to the strategic thinking models such as the Business Model Canvas and the Buyer Persona Spring. To operationalise your strategy, a number of projects are needed. The links between these models are as follows:

1. 1 Audience – it is your buyer persona as developed independently and integrated in the Buyer Persona Spring and the Business Model Canvas.
2. 2 Objectives – defined by your Buyer Persona Spring.
3. 3 Information – the content aspect of the Buyer Persona Spring.
4. 4 Trends – as identified in your SWOT and PESTLE analyses.
5. 5 Co-created value – identified in the Business Model Canvas as value proposition.
6. 6 Technology – identified as part of the channels consideration for the Buyer Persona Spring as well as the data section. Now is the time to think about wider technological implications to support all your digital marketing activities and supporting services.
7. 7 Process – the key activities as identified in the Business Model Canvas, but now you can be more specific in terms of how to enable your staff and organisation to deliver the key activities. These are considerations that go beyond digital marketing activities such as customer service and the product returns process.
8. 8 Reach – using the ideas from the stimulus stage of the Buyer Persona Spring, you can identify what types of projects are needed to start buyer persona on their customer journey. For example, a need to commission a viral marketing campaign or a survey that can be used for new content creation (see more on content marketing in Chapter 9).
9. 9 Engage – use the content from the Buyer Persona Spring as the SMOT as well as brand personality, which dictates the accepted tone of voice for engagement. Hot touchpoints and trust touchpoints of your buyer persona can help to identify these engagement ideas and generate project ideas.
10. 10 Assets – using the insight from strengths that you identified in your SWOT analysis, consider what projects can help to maximise your strengths and reduce your weaknesses.

Objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) leading to success

One of the key differences between managing a digital marketing campaign and a ‘non-digital’ marketing campaign is the availability of tools for the management, automation, capturing and reporting of data. Many of these tools have a free entry-level version (e.g. Mailchimp, Google Analytics and SEMrush). These tools allow the measurement and capturing of data even at the smallest interaction along the Buyer Persona Spring. Therefore, using data to set SMART objectives and track these through related KPIs and optimising resources intelligently is one of the most important skills of a digital marketing campaign manager.

Each channel, such as search engine optimisation (SEO) or social media platforms, offers its own set of KPIs, which can be measured and tracked automatically (subsequent chapters highlight the potential KPIs which can be tracked for each channel). Whilst this information is usually available for free, one of the first activities that a project manager, and the team if relevant, would have to agree on is which tools will be used for tracking this data. Sometimes it is useful to use more than one source of data for tracking your KPIs, since no one data set is 100 per cent reliable (see Chapter 12).

Creating and setting up KPIs for tracking SMART objectives helps to define and agree on what ‘success’ looks like (see Chapter 4 for an explanation of SMART objectives). To measure campaign impact, it is therefore useful for a campaign manager to be familiar with tools such as Google Analytics and Google Sea...