With 2013 already in play, it is time to evaluate your digital marketing strategy and develop a solid model to drive improved results. In this post, we will discuss the critical components of a digital marketing strategy and how these components work together.

1. Digital Marketing Model

#1 PAM (Persona, Audience and Messaging)

The first step in developing an effective digital marketing campaign is to develop a persona. A persona is a very important aspect of any marketing campaign, and it should not be overlooked. Your business must have its own distinct persona and voice. A persona is basically a personality for your business, which you convey in your communications with your customers.

Your products or services could be perceived differently across your customer base. It is critical to understand the types of customers you serve and deliver your marketing message in accordance. As an example, if you sell mobile games, you need to cater your persona to suit this particular audience. If your customers see they can relate to your company, you will gain their trust and get them to buy your product or use your services. Make sure that your company uses the same persona, and communicates with the same tone or voice in all of your messages.

2. Persona development

#2 Digital Marketing Mediums

In your digital marketing strategy for 2013, you must use as many different marketing mediums as you possibly can. The more marketing mediums you use, the more successful your marketing strategy will be.

Earned Media

Earned media in the digital world is a term used for generating traffic and customers through organic means instead of paid advertisement. Earned traffic can be gained through content marketing, search engine optimization, social media or editorial impact. Earned media does not involve advertising, and it is the complete opposite of paid media. It is a way of promoting your business without paid advertisements.

Paid Media

Using paid media is the fastest way for businesses to advertise their products and services. Paid advertisement comes in various flavors and forms. Paid search marketing involves paying for advertisements for your company to move high up in the search engine results page. Your company can also benefit from using display advertising in its digital marketing strategy. Display advertisements are ads that you pay to be placed on websites. Forrester research forecasts interactive display media to triple by 2013. The chart clearly shows how important paid media is for your overall online marketing strategy.

3. Online display growth forecast (Forrester Research)

Owned Media

Owned media is one of the best ways that your company can build relationships with its customers. Earned media and paid media may draw potential customers to your website, but owned media is what can help turn these potential customers into paying customers. Using owned media in your digital marketing strategy is essential. Owned media involves lead nurturing using email marketing. Email marketing is essential to build customer relationships, and to turn potential customers into customers who purchase your company’s product or service.

Email marketing involves sending out a newsletter periodically, which is filled with useful information for customers. If your company doesn’t already have one, it must develop a newsletter. If a person goes to your website and signs up to receive your newsletter, but they don’t buy anything, using email marketing is a great way to turn that person into a paying customer. The content in your newsletter must be good, but this is discussed in more detail below.

Types of Content

4. Content marketing

Content plays an important part in all three media types. Content that your company produces must be of higher quality, authoritative and helpful to your customers, prospects and followers. There are essentially three main types of content:

Dedicated Content: This is the type of content that you use on your website and on any other websites that you use to promote your company. This content must be informative, SEO optimized to include the right keywords, relevant and of use to the reader.

Supplemental Content: This content is used to supplement the main, dedicated content that appears on your website. The primary goal of the supplemental content is to educate your target market about your products and services. It also helps you establish your company as the thought leader in the market.

This type of content includes blog posts, articles and whitepapers, all of which must be well-written and valuable to customers. If content is poorly written, and does not contain useful information, it will reflect badly on your business. Supplemental content also includes slides and videos, which also must also be high quality.

Social Content: Social content is designed to increase syndication on social media sites. Social content should be developed to spark conversations, attract comments and generate fan following. This type of content must not only be informative and useful, but it also must be engaging and original in order to attract potential customers.

#3 WAM (Web and mobile strategy)

Your website is an important foundational element of your digital marketing strategy. It is also one of the first major interaction points for your customers with your company. The key goals for the website should be to engage or convert or retain customers, or all three in most cases. With a huge spike in the growth of smart phones, it is extremely important to add mobile component to your website strategy.

Website strategy is critical to the growth of customers and revenue as it provides the framework for sales generation. Here are some of the key areas of focus for a robust WAM strategy:

a. Hosting infrastructure: Hosting could very well be the biggest investment component of your web strategy. It is extremely important for you to consider a hosting provider than understands your needs. Some of the consideration points when choosing a hosting provider are uptime, scalability, redundancy, compliance and support.

b. Web dev/design and UX: Web design is another major element to achieve success online. Your customers deserve nothing but the best web experience and your job as a marketer is to recruit the best team or vendor to design/develop your site. Customers will bounce away immediately from a low quality site and this could have a significant impact on your revenue.

c. Mobile site: According to Google, mobile online usage will surpass PC usage in 2013. A mobile site is not an option, but a mandatory requirement, and your users expect a better mobile presence. You can either develop a separate mobile website for your company or use responsive design so your website is easily accessible on desktops, smartphones and tablets.

d. Global presence : When you target global customers the two critical pieces to consider are site architecture and language translation. First, you have to select the right architecture for your international site. It is highly advisable to have a separate country specific top level domain (TLD) to host the international site while .com can serve the US customers. TLD allows you to capture maximum search rankings on international search engines and creates a virtual separation between country-specific digital marketing efforts.

Global TLDs can create some web manageability issues, and in this case subdomain or subdirectory is preferable.

The last step of the web strategy is to recruit a solid language translation company to translate web content in local languages.

Those are some of the critical components of a digital marketing strategy. We hope this has been helpful. Do you know of any other ways to sharpen a digital content strategy in 2013? Comment below.

Build your social market value – The theme of the presentation was how to build social marketing value by enabling the sales team socially. This entails training sales team to participate in social conversations with prospects and customers, building credibility and being transparent.

Social media plays an important role in the demand generation funnel adding credibility to the sales process. Social may or may not directly drive conversions in your organization, but it certainly helps connect the dots within your marketing channels. Think of social as a bridge between your marketing campaigns and sales conversion process. A bridge that helps drives qualified leads and loyal customers.

Department Participation – Before using social there was a level of disconnect in our organization between sales and marketing. Marketing generated leads and transferred to the sales team who converted these to customers. Both teams operated in silos like a relay race. Then we created social programs and social training for sales people. The training and programs helped us align our approach more like a three-legged race.

Social Integration – We use social cross functionally across all three phases of the demand funnel. We use Facebook and LinkedIn ads at the awareness stage to fill the top of the funnel. We have content marketing programs in the consideration phase and powerful presentations on Slideshare for decision making phase.

SharePoint Tuesday is a great example of one of our popular cross-functional social initiatives. SP Tuesday is a monthly live Q&A program. In this live session, prospects and customers can ask their most pressing questions directly to the Rackspace-employed SharePoint MVPs (most valuable professionals).

What are the three internal resources in your organization that you can build a social program around it?

Sales Training – Our seven-step training program covers the basic from setting up profiles all the way up to using LinkedIn and other social tools for relationship building. We train sales people to connect with prospects and participate in conversations.

Professional Recommendations – One other tool that we use at Rackspace are the LinkedIn recommendations. A recent survey by LinkedIn confirmed “reviews from your professional network” being the most trusted form of recommendation.

We took this information to heart and collected 500-plus recommendations from prestigious brands such as JP Morgan Chase, IBM, Amazon, eBay and several others. We worked with LinkedIn to remove the internal employee recommendations so it does not skew the results.

Social Media is a process – Social media is a process, and we have learned this from our experience. Our initial approach lacked strategy. We were expecting results too quickly without detailed process and planning. As a result, we were forced to go back to the drawing board.

Finally, we took a holistic approach and built our social team. We developed social programs and training for sales people. These programs and integration of social across the demand funnel has allowed us to become successful in our social projects.

A recent survey revealed that nearly two in five Americans (39 percent) spend more time socializing online than face-to-face. There is an increasing need for companies to engage with consumers via social media, which demands an understanding of the (dys)functions of media that allows a brand to break the silos of push marketing and build bridges using integration marketing.

Social marketing allows brands to connect other marketing channels and streamline the approach. By following what I call the five functions of social media, companies can ensure that they are effectively and efficiently reaching consumers. These elements are:

1) Listen: Prior to the launch of social networks, the only way that companies could receive feedback regarding a product, service or initiative was through proactive outreach. Sure, some consumers would write companies letters or call them to let them know what they thought of a product, but to receive wide-scale feedback, companies circulated surveys or some other organized initiative to garner consumer response.

Today with social media networks, it is much easier for companies to receive the feedback they need for their brands, products and services. Social networks thrive with conversations. It’s important that brands listen in on these conversations to get an idea of what consumers need and want. An easy way to do this is to use and follow hashtags of the brand and other industry competitors, products and related keywords to search for what consumers are discussing.

Fig. 2 – Monitoring social media using #hastags

It is also recommended for brands and companies to identify industry influencers and listen to their followers. There are several useful tools in market that can help track these influencers and monitor social conversations. For the most effective social monitoring, it’s wise to employ tools to ensure you are capturing all the conversations in your space. Monitoring tools often provide an analysis of conversations, including tone, sentiment and overall impressions.

2) Analyze: Monitoring social conversations, whether through monitoring tools or manually, will require detailed analysis. As every social network is structured differently, the measurement techniques are different for each network.

Foursquare, for instance, is measured by the number of check-ins while Twitter is measured by the number of re-tweets. It’s important to analyze this data to ensure you are identifying key patterns, personas and profiles. This process will help you identify what your fans like to hear on social networks, which can help you to further structure your social marketing activities to be the most effective.

For instance, people are more interested in questions that are asked about their personal lives related to the product rather than historical facts. Understanding this will allow you to develop an editorial calendar of effective messages that resonate with your fans and consumers.

Further analysis can be done by classifying the conversations in various buckets i.e. product, support or recommendations/reviews. Classification of conversation will allow quicker escalation of the conversations to the respective departments within the organization.

Fig. 3 – Classification and Escalation of Social Conversations

3) Engage: A thorough analysis will be an asset to helping you engage with consumers. It can help you develop the content for your social marketing strategy and also help you establish timing and frequency.

Engagement within your social circles can be built by leveraging our three pillars of social media engagement strategy. Campaign, content and connections are the essential elements for social engagement. For instance, if you find that your fans are more technical, make sure you provide them with technical content.

For networks with high engagement, it is important to maintain the engagement through frequent campaigns and contests. Either way, the key to developing an effective social marketing strategy is to make sure your updates are frequent and relevant. Unlike traditional media, frequency is an integral part of social media.

Social media has evolved to become a system where we can communicate our thoughts as we think them. Due to this, consumers are used to getting frequent updates and expect it, from both their friends and from brands and companies that they follow. Furthermore, it’s important to give consumers a reason to follow your brand. They want to learn something new about your brand, so give them what they want.

4) Influence: As you engage more consumers with your brand, you create more influencers. Through continuous interactions, your consumers can become passionate and experts about your brand and your company. They are more likely to speak to their friends and others if they are happy with the interaction that they have had with you.

Today, we know that creating a strong team of influencers is important because they are going to be the ones that spread the word about your brand and company through word-of-mouth. This is important as 54 percent of all purchase decisions are driven by word of mouth.

Both internal and external influencers can be a huge asset to the growth of your brand on social networks.

Google+ ripples is a great tool to identify influencers within your and your competitors’ networks. Ripples can be used to find the users with most viral updates. Once these users are identified you can manually reach out and ask them to blog or participate in your network.

Fig. 4 – Google+ ripples to identify influencers

5) Measure: Social marketing does not end with posting content and campaigns on social networks. The most important component of social media is measurement. Measurement lets you understand the success of these elements of the social marketing campaign. It allows you to see how much you engaged with consumers, and even measure how many consumers you were able to convert to influencers.

Measurement can also include the quality of conversations that you’ve had with consumers, such as the type of positive feedback that you received as well as how many consumers noted that they were brought to your brand by a friend. These elements are just as important as the quantitative aspects of measurement.

Some other measurement areas are –

• % Increase positive brand reference
• % Increase the social interactions
• Growth in organic search visits

These function of social marketing is what makes social a great part of overall marketing strategy. Never before have they been able to so actively influence companies and brands.

Facebook and Google+ are both key social media networks that help companies build relationships with their customers, while measuring these relationships. Unlike other marketing strategies that are hard to measure, social media engagement can easily be measured through followers, likes, page views and comments.

There are three critical components of a solid social engagement strategy. Let’s dive into each one in this blog post.

1. Campaigns

Campaigns are essential to engage key audiences and build relationships with consumers. Marketing campaigns tend to encompass several different strategies, such as advertising, public relations and social media. By building an effective integrated campaign, companies can ensure that they are connecting with their key audiences.

When companies think of a campaign, they think of something in which they need to invest a lot of money to make a big splash. However, small campaigns can be just as successful. It is recommended that businesses have at least one monthly campaign in order to propel their brand forward. Through social media, it’s easy for companies to leverage a campaign this often. For instance, promoting a product through a Facebook campaign can be as easy as hosting a product giveaway or featuring the brand as the “product of the week” with facts, questions and trivia for fans.

Campaigns are important to motivate users within your social network and keep them engaged. By creating small-scale campaigns on a frequent basis, you are able to keep your consumers interested and connected. Furthermore, these campaigns can be augmented on a broader scale through SEO, media outreach and media buys on other social networks.

2. Content

Content is another key element of social media engagement. Social media visitors look for good and useful information. Twitter, for instance, is known for driving the most content and helping consumers stay up-to-date on key information related to their interests. This is important for businesses as they pursue social media engagement strategies.

Content can be as simple as sharing a short blog post, or as in-depth as developing a white paper about a specific topic. Either way, by sharing on a social media network, you are connecting with your consumers and helping them learn more about you. Additionally, content gives consumers an opportunity to engage with you and share their views. By engaging in a two-way conversation with your fans, you are enhancing your brand profile and giving them another opportunity to fall in love with your brand.

To keep your content flow, businesses can streamline it through a social content publishing calendar. This can be established in line with specific campaigns you want to pursue through social media networks. If your campaign includes a contest on Facebook, you can then include tweets and micro-blogs on Tumblr to promote the campaign through other networks and digital mediums. This helps to integrate the campaign to maximize its effect and reach.

3. Connection

Perhaps the most important in social media engagement, connections are essential to build your brand through social media networks. Influencers are the most important as they will drive organic growth on your social media networks and continue to build engagement among the followers.

For instance, if you brand is about technology then your best bet is to get authoritative tech bloggers to blog on your website. Popular tech bloggers often have large followings, so if they like a particular product or service, it will help drive a fanbase to that brand. It’s smart to identify influencers in your network to create allies that will help build your connections.

Influencers are similar to key audiences that are identified before engaging in a marketing strategy. When identifying influencers, it’s important to think about what you want to gain from building a relationship with them and how you can engage with them to make the relationship beneficial for the influencer. By considering both factors, you can build a mutually beneficial relationship that will help drive more connections to your social media networks while helping build the influencer’s reputation within the industry and on the web.

Social media engagement is the future of marketing. For businesses, it’s important to connect with customers through social media to propel brand engagement. Measuring the number of followers, comments, shares and likes are some of the key metrics to gauge how well you engage with consumers. By following the three pillars of social media engagement, businesses can clear the clutter and find a path forward in building their reputations through social channels.