Digital Marketing Strategy

An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing

Simon Kingsnorth

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749484231
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Optimize your digital channels and ensure your marketing strategy aligns with business objectives, with this second edition of the bestselling guide to digital marketing - recommended by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. There is no shortage of digital marketing resources yet finding a book that covers all disciplines can be a challenge.
This essential and highly readable book provides an accessible, step-by-step framework to the planning, integration and measurement of each digital platform and technique, all tailored to achieve overarching business objectives.Now featuring cutting edge updates on social media, SEO, content marketing, user experience and customer loyalty, Digital Marketing Strategy is an ideal road map for navigating:
-Marketing automation, personalization, messaging and email
-Online and offline integration
-The power of technologies, such as AI
-New data protection and privacy strategiesAccompanied by downloadable practical implementation guides spanning SEO, paid-search, email, lead-generation and more, Digital Marketing Strategy will show you how to effectively select, align and manage digital channels and operations, to streamline a winning digital marketing strategy for measurable, optimized results.It is an essential guide for any marketer to build an effective and practical digital strategy.

PART ONE

Knowing your business objectives and your customer

02

Understanding the digital ecosystem

What we will cover in this chapter

This chapter will provide you with a view of how the digital marketing ecosystem fits together and how the individual elements interact. Every element affects at least one other and understanding this from the start is crucial so that your strategy takes this into account when building the plans for each of the constituent parts. We will touch on just some of these areas briefly in the context of the ecosystem but you can find more on each topic later in the book. The key considerations here are:

• Paid and organic search interaction
• Social signals for SEO
• The broad reach of content strategy
• Display advertising and data strategy
• Brand and proposition effect
• The halo effect
• Attribution and omni-channel
• The full ecosystem

Chapter goals

By the end of this chapter you should understand how the digital marketing channels interact and therefore how to build a strategy that is truly integrated and highly effective.

Paid and organic search interaction

Paid search and organic search can be made to work together. Although the channels are very different in many ways, there is much you can learn from one and apply to the other. Let’s start by looking at how each can benefit the other.

Using SEO data to shape PPC strategy

Many companies will start with SEO if they need to prove the search model or have limited budgets. As you move on to building your PPC strategy you can see which keywords are likely to be expensive due to competition and volume. In that scenario it can be worth focusing your SEO here. It will take longer to achieve results but for a significantly smaller investment.

You should also review your SEO analytics at least monthly to understand whether there are any learnings you can apply to your PPC accounts. This could be trends in topics, time of day, day of week, device type, location or many other factors.

Using PPC data to shape SEO strategy

One of the most frustrating factors with SEO in recent years has been the move by Google to delivering ‘not provided’ as the keyword giving us limited data to work with. One of the most widely known interactions therefore between PPC and SEO is to use PPC keyword data to inform SEO strategy.

The other key learning is that you can quickly learn effective copy trends for ads in PPC and then apply those to your site and other marketing activities to increase click-through and conversion rates.

Social signals for SEO

There has been much debate about this area for many years but we can assume that social media plays a part in SEO. There has been confirmation that Google uses social links for social media and it is possible that social engagement is another factor. The number of followers is less likely to have any significant impact – as it should be because follower numbers are purely a vanity metric. We will talk about this more in Chapter 11.

At the moment social signals are still a relatively small ranking factor but the likelihood is that they will grow as social media continues to expand and be integrated into every digital experience.

We should consider how regularly and broadly we post, how much engagement we achieve, the links we gain and sentiment we achieve. Locality, speed of response and user behaviours on our site for those that arrive from social should all be considered. Even if the effects on SEO performance are small today, we should be preparing for tomorrow.

The broad reach of content strategy

Your content strategy, as we will see in Chapter 15, should be very sophisticated. You should be building proactive plans for what you know is a future content opportunity, reviewing historic performance to improve and develop your strategy and ensuring you have robust reactive processes in place to be able to produce content quickly when an opportunity arises.

Your content is then distributed across various channels according to relevance. Perhaps the same content in different formats (infographics, video, quotes, facts, pure advertising messages). For this you may use Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, your own website, PPC, display advertising, e-mail. The list is long. From that you must be reviewing your data and the impact of this content by channel as well as by type and topic.

For example, SEO content writing skills should be fused into your content and this can in turn not only affect SEO but also your PPC Quality Score as your conversion and engagement rates improve. Content strategy, as we will discuss later in the book, is central to any marketing strategy now.

Display advertising and data strategy

Display advertising has moved a long way from the simplistic banner ads of the early 21st century. Display in the form of programmatic and real-time buying is now a sophisticated and highly targeted channel utilizing complex data platforms. We will explain this in more detail in Chapter 10 but we can for now appreciate that, without a clear data strategy that ensures your customer and enquiry data is as complete, accurate and current as possible, it risks targeting the wrong people with the wrong message at the right time.

Your data strategy also affects your digital communications. For example, if we consider e-mail marketing, holding data that is incorrect, does not have accurate marketing permissions or is incomplete could mean not only sending out poor performing communications but could even result in a regulatory breach.

Brand and proposition effect

Your brand and proposition(s) should of course be reflected in everything you do. No area of marketing is doing its job effectively if it doesn’t reinforce or strengthen the brand and key messaging in its external communications. It should also be acknowledged therefore that this will have an impact on your performance. We will talk more about branding in the next chapter but as part of the ecosystem it should be considered as a key influencing factor.

This is not, however, under the direct influence of the digital marketer. Your brand can be affected by company performance, positive or negative PR, growth or downsizing decisions, customer service performance, pricing and many more factors, some of which we have already touched on in the previous chapter.

The halo effect

The halo effect is a term often used to describe the uplift you see across your channels as a result of above the line advertising. For example, if your marketing department runs a broad campaign across TV, radio, outdoor and press reaching many millions of consumers you are likely to see this reflected in numerous metrics across your strategy.

You would likely see an increase in brand searches on SEO and PPC, increased click-through rate on your brand terms on PPC, improved performance of display, higher conversion rates, more app downloads, stronger e-mail open rates and higher social media engagement.

Attribution and omni-channel

Finally, we need to understand that we can track all of these channels together and how they interact through attribution modelling and omni-channel management. We will look at this more later but, in the meantime, it is vital that we appreciate that understanding the picture of the data set together rather than in silos is what will really enable us to gain full oversight and therefore to apply the optimal improvements to our strategy.

The full ecosystem

Figure 2.1 The digital marketing ecosystem

The digital marketing ecosystem

Summary

No marketing channel has ever worked truly independently of the others, but now the effect is highly scientific. We will look at attribution modelling in Chapter 19 to understand this further, but for the most impact we cannot simply understand the interaction, we must also plan for it. This means using the channels to effectively amplify each other. The most effective digital marketing strategies use this technique.

Ch...