The web and social media allow us to:

The planning of a successful digital marketing strategy follows well-defined phases:

1) Analysis

2) Definition of the Strategy

3) Creation of an operational plan

4) Measurement

5) Performance improvement thanks to the collected data

The basis of any strategy is to formulate five questions (the 5 "Ws"):

Digital Marketing and Social Media Marketing are marketing activities.

Digital Marketing therefore follows the 4p, as well as any other Marketing Strategy: 

• Product
• Price
• Promotion (communication)
• Place (Distribution)

The "4p" have recently been supplemented / replaced by the "4c":

• Customer solution
• Cost
• Communication
• Convenience

These integrations shift the focus from the company (from those who propose the Marketing Strategy) to customer.

Social Media platforms are all characterized by simplicity: For example, we are all able to create a Facebook page.

The Analysis Phase allows us to understand where we are as a Brand or Company.

Now we can define the new Digital Marketing Strategies:

That is, to create an operational plan, a real document that is structured generally as a time schedule, indicating:

Measurement: this is a primary phase that occurs during the implementation of each Digital Marketing Strategy.

Generally, the following units are measured: the number of contacts and interactions with the advertisement, how many new customers have been acquired, what is the level of engagement.

All this data tells us what worked with our Digital Marketing Plan and what can be improved.

By measuring and understanding the data it will be possible to replicate successful initiatives, avoiding to repeat those that are not effective.

THE 5W + HOW METHOD: THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

For an effective Digital Marketing Strategy ...

Why: what objectives do we want to achieve: as already said, Digital Marketing is a “real” Marketing tool: every strategy must achieve business goals. So first of all you need to have clear business objectives (what does the company want to achieve?)

Goals must be realistic (if we have a small family business that produces furniture we cannot expect to reach Ikea’s sales volume).

And they must be measurable (next to each goal we have to be able to write a number that can measure it).

It is therefore necessary to consider the    long, medium and short term horizons

In fact, well-structured companies have  multi-year development plans, while less  structured ones have annual or half-yearly development plans.

In any case, in Digital Marketing it is necessary to predict long-term goals and intermediate goals.

Who: that is the people. Who are our products for?

We must therefore think about People. For example:

An English Language School caters to two categoriesof people: students who wish to improve their English and adults who need it for professional reasons.

The two categories of people have completely different characteristics, habits, expectations and interests.

A central part of the digital strategy defines these groups of people, segmenting them).

Where: This question means two things:

The Scenario (what's around the Company: trends, threats, competitors, opportunities, legal constraints).

But also Geography: the geographic, cultural market.

Where is the company based? The farther you go from our "where", the more we will have to adapt our strategies and our products.

When: the time axis.

One of the major changes that digital has brought is the speed. We are always connected, as are our customers (our social channels do not go on vacation).

The Digital Marketing Plans foresee to work on long periods (12 or more months) and short periods (for example just one week). Enlarging the time axis, you get to consider what time of day is the best for example to post something on Twitter.

What: the content itself. The Modern Marketing Manifesto emphasizes the importance of content of any kind: text, images, videos.

Contents are the heart of every Digital Marketing Strategy: they allow us to optimize the Brand, to facilitate customer loyalty and sales processes.

Digital has allowed those who were only a recipient to become content producers.

Once you share a photo or tell something, content is generated. No Content Marketing strategy is successful if it does not start with clear objectives.