Analysing The Prepare Phase Of Digital Strategy
The PREPARE phase involves gathering all materials and assets so that you can begin to take action and implement your activity. Now it’s time to build your strategy.
A strategy is made of a number of parts. The purpose of the prepare phase is to construct these parts e.g. over-arching strategy, content strategy, media strategy.
- Asset Development: Making the pieces of creative that you will target people online with.
- Strategies: There is never one strategy, but strategies for a variety of activities e.g. creative, content, media etc.
- Connection: A modern approach to not just reaching people with things but reaching them with something that is relevant and connects with them.
An overarching strategy is the highest guide to your activity. It is a key phrase that identifies, regardless of platform and execution, what your digital strategy is. It involves a simple statement of what you will do and what your KSO is.
The overarching strategy should be a simple and clear line that everybody understands without having to be educated on it.
Example: Create a digital platform that introduces our customer to our products and services and allows for a more seamless experience with our brand.
When developing a strategy, we work off what we previously developed in the brief. You need to begin to look back through everything that has been worked on to date. This interesting information will become the basis of your insight.
What are the interesting learnings that you can use to develop your core insight to use to develop your strategy? What content are they consuming? What formats do they prefer? What are there interests? Have you seen a conversation that identifies a gap or a weakness for your brand?
Once you have insight, this insight can be used to develop a strategic platform. A key tactic used to develop these platforms is to think in simple terms. Hashtags don’t necessarily have to be consumer-facing, but they challenge you to develop a short interpretation of what your creative platform needs to be built upon. Hashtags make you create the simplest definition of your strategy. Hashtags might be a social tool but in this instance, they challenge you to think in clear and simple terms.
Search marketing is an incredibly expansive topic. In terms of strategy, having a more developed understanding of strategy will be required to implement a search strategy. However, there are a few beginner pieces of information that can help you to understand the role search plays in your digital strategy:
- Search Engine marketing has two streams of delivery. Organic search which is determined by the quality of your content and how relevant the content on specific pages on your site is to the users’ search. Paid search which involves presenting ads to a user by bidding on and having your ad served when a specific keyword is searched by a user.
- While there are a number of search engines, it’s important to recognize that Google is the most dominant. If your budgets are small to moderate, you should consider focusing 100% of your efforts within this platform.
- Meta Tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. Google’s algorithm uses these tags as well as the content on the page to determine search ranking.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the discipline of optimizing your site and content to take advantage of the search algorithm and ensure your content features higher up on search rankings.
The Google Keyword Planner is a tool that allows you to plan out the keywords that are being searched in connection to your own keywords. Use it to determine:
- How your brand is searched
- How your product is searched
- How your category is searched
- What needs there are that you can answer on your site and thus rank higher.
Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent & the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Alexa is an example of Voice Search and is connecting the internet of things e.g. order a pizza to turning off lights.
Search advertising has always overwhelmingly been dominated by keyboard input. With further developments in the Internet of Things and wearables, meaning the next big consumer adoption trend is voice. For years, the iPhone and Google have been including voice options in there products. The consumer was not ready. However, with the launch of voice search in Amazon Alexa, Google Home and even TV Remote, we are seeing a growth in consumer adoption.
With this growth comes the challenge of adaption to voice. It requires technical edits to your site as well as an understanding of how we say things vs. typing them. The trick is to adopt before it arrives. Disrupt yourself before you get disrupted when the consumer requires it.
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