Digital Marketing Strategy

An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing

Simon Kingsnorth

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781398605985
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Build an effective and practical digital marketing strategy with this bestselling guide, covering everything from automation and analytics to integrating AI. Digital Marketing Strategy is a global bestseller, and a one-stop guide to structuring and building a more strategic approach to digital marketing. Now fully updated, this third edition covers the integration of AI in marketing, e-commerce, marketing automation, affiliate marketing and how to use digital analytical tools, plus new strategies for the latest cookie changes and privacy protection. Digital Marketing Strategy will show you how to effectively select, align and manage digital channels and operations, to streamline a successful digital marketing strategy for measurable, optimized results. Recommended by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), it is supported by real-world case studies from the likes of Coca-Cola, Spotify, Airbnb, Adidas and Hostelworld as well as checklists, key terms and insights from leading industry practitioners to help you develop your own digital marketing strategy. This book is an invaluable guide for both digital marketing students and entry-level to mid-management marketing professionals. Accompanying online resources consist of practical implementation guides spanning SEO, paid-search, email, lead-generation, as well as presentation slides and activity sheets.

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 over time.

You should also review your SEO analytics at least monthly to understand whether there are any learnings you can apply to your PPC accounts and vice versa. 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 was the move in 2011 by Google to show ‘not provided’ for organic keyword data. However, some organic keyword data is now available within Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools) and can be connected with a variety of techniques. There is also an API from Google to provide more of these ‘not provided’ keywords than you can access in the web interface.

One of the most widely known interactions therefore between PPC and SEO is to use PPC keyword data and, in particular, keyword data that arrives at conversions to help 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

This area has been much debated or many years but we can assume that social media plays a part in SEO. There has been confirmation that Google uses social links for URL discovery and it is possible that social engagement is another longer term factor. Second order impacts are very real. If content does well on social media, that resource is likely to be well linked to as a result and this is a direct signal. Metrics such as the number of followers are unlikely 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 correlate highly with improved rankings but do not equal causation of those rankings.

However, we should consider how regularly and broadly we post, how much engagement we achieve, the links we gain and sentiment we achieve (Search Engine Roundtable).

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, email. 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 email 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 acros...