August 6, 2018

1.1 : Introduction to Strategic Planning

1.1 : Introduction to Strategic Planning

Dr. Tahir Rashid, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

In this introductory unit, we are going to look at why Digital Marketing is important today and in the future. Marketers have been trying to seek the attention of their audiences for a long time. They want to understand why customers buy products and services

Why customers buy products and services?

and how we can actually promote these products and services better than our competitors.

How can we beat our competition?

Digital Marketing is about using digital mediums to understand the audiences and what they need and then as an organization, providing an offering which the audience, or your customers, actually can make use of.

Identify and satisfy audience needs

Increasingly, organizations are spending a lot more of their marketing budget on Digital Marketing rather than traditional marketing.

Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its long term plan, or direction, which is used for prioritizing its resources to pursue this strategy.

Digital marketing is a strategic decisionand many organizations are increasingly investing into this way of engaging with their target audiences

Hence, we will see that Digital Marketing will continuously be a much more effective and also a long-term strategy for many organizations whether they are large or small, whether they are from a public sector or whether they are in the private sector.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

Digital Marketing activities are absolutely key and core to our businesses in terms of building the brand and building our presence and awareness and being the “go to” recruitment agency for candidates and clients.

Prioritization and investment into a digital marketing strategy is fundamental to the success of The Candidate Ltd

Alongside that has been the actual success and the results that we have seen from digital activities. We actually do sit down and analyses the figures and we are very conversion-rate driven within the business itself, not only from a branding point of view but also from an accountability point of view and also from an ROI point of view.

Digital Marketing is core in tracking:

Branding, accountability of investments & return on investment (ROI)

Digital Marketing activities are core to what we do here at The Candidate.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing strategist, MONKS, Greece

To establish a presence for digital marketing services – this is our first objective. But not to be in the mind of clients that we are only offering digital services – again, we like the term “integration” so we like to combine offline and online channels.

One year is a reasonable duration to expect results from your digital marketing communications strategy

It takes time to develop the owned, earned, and paid online presence for any organization

Usually, for every new business or every new client, we have a planning of one year, so we are trying to have minimum contracts of one year because this is the time you need in order to have some good results online, especially for SEO. You cannot do anything if you are running something less than six months.

Kristina Chokoeva, Marketing Director, DINO, Bulgaria

Social media is a massive cultural shift that has profound impact on how society uses the Internet. We use it because it’s the easiest way to connect with our customers.

Social media is the easiest way to connect with customers

It gives us an opportunity to hear what their want, what they like or what they didn’t like on an instantaneous basis. What I’m trying to say is that yes, we use it for direct sales, but mainly we use it to form relationship with our clients.

Additonal materials

Learn more about strategic planning

Strategic planning is the responsibility of the leadership of an organisation. However, as a marketer you are expected to contribute to these strategic decision through market research as well as implementing strategic decisions in practice.

If you would like to explore more about the importance of strategic planning and what it is, please visit Balanced Scorecard Institute (BSI): http://balancedscorecard.org/Resources/Strategic-Planning-Basics

Please note that we are linking to Harvard Business Review – HBR.org – a great resource of articles on business and marketing management.

According to HBR policy, in order to read more than 5 articles a month, you have to register at their site – for free. Although we usually link to HBR for additional course materials, we strongly encourage you to register in order to get full advantage from these resources.

References

Marketing Is Everything

McKenna, R. (1991). Marketing is everything. Harvard business review, 69(1), 65-79.

Please follow these chapter 1 related links:

Why is Digital and Social Media Marketing important today and in the future?
1.2 SWOT analysis
1.3. Developing SMART objectives for strategy and campaigns
1.4. Digital Business Maturity Model
1.5. The consumer journey to online purchase
1.6. Introduction to core concepts and technologies of digital and social media marketing
1.7. Introduction to online branding