Path to build your Digital Media Excellence

With the surge of usage of mobile technologies, marketers have increased their investments on digital media to communicate their messages. However the most pressing question still lingers – “what is the path to build Digital media strategy?”.

I advise my clients to follow the below steps to build out their digital media strategy:

1. Prepare the overall strategic objective and goal for your brand/ product:

The digital strategic objective should be derived from the brands overall marketing strategy. It should be tightly linked to the non-digital investments of the brand. E.g.: if a brand’s marketing objective is to build awareness about the brand and position uniquely among a certain group of audience, the digital strategy should also echo the same objective.

2.  Decide on your target audience and build their media usage profile:

Based on the objective, the next step is to identify the segment of customers who can be potential targets of the digital initiatives.

E.g. if the brand is trying to create an image of youthfulness, then the target audience could be the people of age group 16 – 28. The next step is to analyze the media consumption of this segment of the consumers. E.g. building a media profile base on how many hours do this group of consumers spend on social media, what all social media sites or apps being frequently used by this group, like – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram etc.

3. Build Digital Asset strategy:

a.       Decide on channel strategy – identify the digital channels to target the segmented group, e.g. in this case – through website banner ads, Facebook communities, YouTube channels and Wikipedia entries.

b.       Decide on the content strategy / engagement strategy – Based on the user groups and the positioning statement of the brand, the content strategy to be decided such that:

                                              i.      It differentiates the brand from its competitors and uniquely positions the brand in consumer’s mind

                                                          ii.      It is consistent across all channels of communication (both digital and traditional channels)

4. Path to build reputation on digital media:

As the brand starts engaging consumers through its digital channels, the next step is to build reputation by:

                                                               i.      Creating an ecosystem where consumers can refer friends and families

                                                             ii.      Providing a platform for user reviews

                                                           iii.      Identifying influencers and incentivizing them

5. Measure and modulate your strategy

Last stage of your digital media strategy is to measure the interactions and engagements of the consumers and its effect to net sales. Based on the measured data and insights generated through analytics, the engagement strategies to be modulated over period of time.

The above simple steps can help a brand to build excellence in the digital media.