August 7, 2018

4.0 : How campaigns fit into a wider implementation

4.0 : How campaigns fit into a wider implementation of the overall strategy

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

There are four different strategies, or four different strands, that might be useful for an organization to consider when it comes to digital.

Strategic directions:

  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Operations
  • Customer Service / Support

The first strategic decision is whether you are going to go into the digital approach. This will obviously involve resourcing and provide the content in that area. In terms of marketing, some of the key areas that you would be focusing on is understanding the customers and using, as we mentioned, the buyer persona, in previous sections to try and see how the consumer is interacting using social media, search engines, email, or any other touchpoints with your organization and then feeding that information into develop products and services and, ultimately, what you can search there is how people interact with you.

The other aspect for you to try and look into is the sales strategy. So this c0uld also again help you to identify key influences in your area and then work with them to develop your products and services.

The third strategy is operational, where social media could be used for internal organizational documents and content creation.

And the fourth is the customer service so that people can provide you with the queries through social media and obviously those could be served as well.

So there are four specific areas where digital could fit in that could be integrated in your organization.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

Campaigns fit into our overall strategy by understanding and relating and complimenting what we’re doing as a business, and looking at the business plan and what the focus for the actual business is at the point in time. For example, if we open another office in a different location, for example in England it would be Yorkshire, then we will have a digital marketing campaign strategy that looks and focuses on promoting our business within that particular area.

Strategy dictates the types of campaigns that will be used

It may also relate to a new product or a new service that we release, so for example at The Candidate we recently started to recruit in the film and production sector so we had a lot of digital marketing activity that rotated and revolved around the film industry and the production industry and that opened up new social media channels for us to trial, it opened up new keywords on search engines for us to optimize against, and therefore that was all came from the business decision and the business plan to either open an office in a new location or to actually focus on recruiting in a new sector.

So that filters down throughout the business in terms of the staff that you hire, in terms of the marketing activity that you undergo, and in terms of the analysis and the monitoring of the responses that come from these different locations and sectors to ensure that you’re deploying activity correctly across all of the new areas of the business, so digital marketing is just another part of that, making sure that it works effectively and produces and turns into a commercially viable channel.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

Everything is starting from the business strategy and the business objectives, so everything has to apply to this because, at the end of the day, you have to see if you are in the right track and if you’re going to meet the objectives in the long term.

Strategy is key to drive all marketing activities – digital and offline

So everything is starting business-wise and then you are just selecting the channels that will help you – probably it can be a combination of online with let’s say outdoor or print, OK, it’s not only the online context.

Exercises

What social media strategies are used in this MOOC?

Analyse the current MOOC – based on the four strategies discussed in the introduction video, which of the four strategies are used in this MOOC and give an example of one strategy used.

Before posting your comments below, see if the same point has been made by others and if so reply to their comment. Once you have posted your contribution, comment on at least three contributions of your peers.

Additional materials

Social media marketing strategy – key areas for consideration

A more detailed overview of potential social media marketing strategies which can be integrated into the digital marketing strategy:

A text version of these ideas is discussed here:

http://businessculture.org/business-culture/what-is-social-networking/social-media-marketing-strategy-template/

References

Your Digital Strategy Shouldn’t Be About Attention

 https://hbr.org/2015/01/your-digit…

5 Simple Digital Marketing Strategies That Can Help Your Business Grow

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roge…

For other sections of chapter 4 follow these links:

4.1 Example company campaign plan
4.2 Key elements of campaign management – Gantt chart
4.3 Risk management
4.4 Digital project management tools and techniques
4.5 Project plan monitoring and review
4.6 Marketing automation
4.7 PPC campaign planning