Most businesses today understand the importance of digital marketing. The internet is the first port of call for most people now when looking for a product or service. The challenge is that Digital Marketing is a very broad discipline and selecting the right tools and approach is critical.

This best approach is not going to be the same for every business, so it is important for each business to look at their own business goals, target market, starting position and competition and develop a strategy that is right for you.

Without a clear strategy, businesses tend to take a start-stop approach and will not be able to optimise the marketing performance.

The process that we follow is a co-operative process with key company stakeholders. In basic terms we do an initial current state analysis looking at your current online position, review of analytics if available and also a review of top competitors.

This is matched with a review of the business goals and how this translates to marketing goals, key performance indications and specific targets.

From this, we put together a digital marketing strategy, outlining the best tools and approaches to use as well as how performance can be measured over time.

We find that it is best practice to involve all of those who would be involved in planning or implementation. The process can be broken into different elements – so not everyone has to be involved at every stage.

Typically, the business owner, general manager and/or marketing manager would be very involved in the early stages as we look at business goals, competition and target markets. As the discussions move into areas of implementation other staff members who are involved in hands on marketing activities add significant value.

It does vary depending on the company, but on average it would be 4-6 weeks from start to finish. The general process that we follow would include 2 on-site workshops. We would carry out some initial analysis in advance of the first workshop. During that workshop – the data is reviewed in light of the business goals. 

This generally leads to an initial discussion on strategy. 

Based on the outcome of the first workshop, we would document the details as well as a proposed strategy. This is then reviewed in detail at the second workshop and further developed to include the outline implementation plan.

After the process, there are a number of details that you should have. This would include

• Organisation and Competitive Analysis
• Marketing Goals
• Defined Key Performance Indications and Targets
• Measurement Dashboard Template
• Digital Strategy Outline
• Implementation plan template
• Outline Management Review Process

Together these should form the foundation for your digital marketing implementation.

As noted above, coming out of the digital marketing strategy development, you would have the foundation/building blocks for your digital marketing implementation. As part of the process, we would agree a 6-12 month implementation plan including budgets and resource allocation. This should provide a clear roadmap as to what needs to be done online.

There would also be clear measure criteria, which are tracked and reported in the dashboard.

Critical to success would be the adoption of the management process, where the digital marketing performance would be including in regular management reviews so that decisions can be made based on results to ensure ongoing improvement.