Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As we’ve already outlined, your digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. Your digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal.

For example, you might decide to run a campaign sharing some of your best performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through that channel. That campaign is part of your strategy to generate more leads.It’s important to note that even if a campaign runs over the course of a couple of years, it doesn’t make it a strategy -- it’s still a tactic that sits alongside other campaigns to form your strategy.

Now we’ve got to grips with the basics of digital strategy and digital marketing campaigns, let’s dig into how to build your strategy....

Creating a marketing plan without performing a proper digital marketing audit can cause you to invest in unnecessary initiatives and to overlook gaps in your current strategy. Many marketers forgo performing an in-depth audit because it can be an intimidating and time-consuming process.

Being so closely involved with your marketing on a daily basis often makes it hard to have an objective idea of where you stand. This article will attempt to outline a plan to help you objectively examine your online presence across multiple platforms and help you optimize your efforts using the latest tactics and best practices....

The 16-page guide Content Marketing Institute published on documenting your strategy can certainly help you get started. But, once you’ve gone through the initial documentation process, you’ll need to know how to implement that strategy — and keep it updated on an ongoing basis.

While you will want to follow your strategy closely in order to keep your content marketing focused on your organization’s goals, it should also be flexible enough to account for new insights and information you receive as time goes on. There is no specific template you can use to build a strategy; but below, we share some guidelines you can use to determine what elements should stay consistent and what will likely evolve:

Your goals and mission should be sticky

The first two things you need to identify when building your strategy are the goals and mission of your content marketing program. Coincidentally, these are the same two that should change very little....

We are all early adopters now,” James McQuivey said to a rapt audience at the recent Forrester Research 2015 Forum for Marketing Leaders. “Welcome to the era of hyperadoption.”

McQuivey, a Forrester VP and principal analyst, defined hyperadoption as rapid and simultaneous uptake of new behaviors. He asserted that in just a few years we'll all be quick to do things that in the past we might have taken longer to try—if we would've even tried them at all—because we thought they were weird or were concerned about trying them.

“But isn't adoption hard?” he asked rhetorically. Consider, he said, how long it took electricity to be adopted. “Yes, people resist a new order of things,” McQuivey said, “even if it's awesome.” But that time lag is shortening. In 1999 Forrester asked consumers, “When will you go online?” Thirty percent of those who said never did so a year later....