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1. Digital
marketing
strategy
guide
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide

2. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Overview
A digital marketing strategy is
the content plan that ensures any
digital marketing efforts are
tailored to your target audience,
in order to maximise return on
investment.
Your audience may be arriving at
your website or online content via
a desktop, a tablet or as is
increasingly common, from a
mobile device. To be fully
accessible, you should consider
optimising your content across
multiple platforms.
700,000Apps have been developed
for iphone and android
(AllThingsD)
@36%
Of marketing
emails were
opened on a
mobile last year
(2012)(Knotice)
If you want to succeed in the
digital space, it is vital you focus
on what you want to
communicate, who you want to
communicate it to and how
you’re going to communicate it.
Our digital marketing strategy
guide is your one-stop-shop for
understanding digital
engagement and helping you to
define a successful digital
strategy for your company.
1in5
minutes spent
online is
attributable to
social media
sites (Comscore)

3. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Our ‘Digital Marketing Strategy
Guide’ will take you through
what we see as the key 5
stages of preparation for your
successful digital strategy.
The digital landscape is
forever shifting. Don’t stand
still as you may just get left
behind.
1//ResearchtheBattlefield
2//Setthegoal
3//Plantheattack
4//Gatheryourweapons
5//Reviewgainsandlosses

4. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Research the
battlefield
No amount of research is too much
research.
To successfully recognise and
understand your target audience, you
must get to know them inside out,
finding out how, when, why and
what material they are accessing
online.
Join blogs and forums where your
target audience hang out and observe
the demographic (age, gender, social
status, income etc).
Look at what your competitors are
doing, chances are, you’re targeting
the same people.
Information is power.
Know your Enemies
Recognising your market competitors
will help you:
- Differentiate yourself in an increasingly
crowded and competitive market
- Understand their strengths and more
importantly, exploit their
weaknesses.
//1
Know your Allies For B2B companies, knowing your
audience may mean looking at your
target company’s business model,
financial situation, size, industry etc.
For B2C companies, you should look
for your target audiences social
characteristics, buying tendencies,
influences etc.

5. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide //1
By defining your target audience demographic (age, gender, social
status, income etc.), understanding their buying decisions and the
way they access your content, you can tailor your marketing material
specifically for them, capitalizing on being able to personalise your
content. This helps define your brand and differentiate yourselves from
the competition.
Get up-close
and personal
£50k+Influencedby
Fashionblogs5and
under
usestabletand
mobiletoaccess
content

6. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
The digital landscape is forever
shifting and if you stand still, you may
just get left behind.
Understand where you are excelling
in the digital marketing landscape,
where you can do better and how
you can adapt for the future. Be
proactive, active and reactive in
your approach. By understanding
these three points, you can set
informed goals for your company to
achieve, improving your marketing
attempts in the long term:
Understand the
battlefield
//1
If you know where you’re excelling in
digital marketing, don’t rest on your
laurels, do it better. If you don’t
someone else will. (PROACTIVE)
If you know where you need to
improve in your digital strategy, focus
on this and excel. (ACTIVE)
Be adaptable and look out for the
latest trends. Being first to market
doesn’t always guarantee success,
but you must know when it’s right for
you and don’t get left behind.
(REACTIVE)

7. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
specific
measurable
attainable
relevant
timely
You can’t measure success unless you’ve set
specific targets and objectives. (Smart Insights)
It’s not good enough to say “we want to increase
social engagement”.
By what channel?
By what quantity?
Over what time frame?
All of your goals must be attainable and
realistic. Consider whether an objective is too
ambitious and if it needs breaking down into
more manageable goals.
Everything you do should be relevant to your
customer behaviour. Decide, do you want to:
Maintain your current customers?
Increase the amount your current
customers purchase from you?
Or, gain new customers?
Set the
objectives:
//2

8. 5000+
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide //2
Set the
objectives:
Good quality market research is essential to help you define your areas
of improvement and set business objectives.
Structuring your areas of improvement to attain business objectives is
where Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) make their first appearance;
these are the factors that are measurable. For example, if you’re
looking to increase engagement, KPI’s might include:
Number of bookmarks
% of time spent on site
Number of Facebook comments
Twitter retweets
Number of email subscriptions
The list goes on.

9. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Plan the attack
By this point you should already be equipt
with a strong knowledge of :
Where you are performing well in digital
marketing and where you’re not.
Who your target audience is
Who your industry competitors are
What others are doing and how they
are doing it
Now it’s time to plan what you’re going to
do...
As mentioned earlier, if you know who
your competitors are, you’ll have some
idea of how to differentiate yourself.
Remember, your brand identity goes a
long way beyond just your logo and
website design. You must consider:
How your brand makes your
customers feel
Brand tone of voice
Company/brand personality
Your services, products, prices,
customer service policy etc.
Brand values & philosophy
//3

10. As mentioned earlier, if you know who your competitors are, you have some idea of how to
differentiate yourself in the crowded marketplace for your industry. However, it is your target
customers that should be the strongest influencing factor on your brand, because:
It is your target customers that your company needs to engage to drive sales
It is your target customers’ demographics and buying habits that will determine who
you are, and therefore what your brand is
Your brand then affects how you communicate/sell to these target customers successfully
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide //3
Wait...
Why do your customers choose
your company above others?(if the answer doesn’t come easily, then you should
reconsider your digital brand identity.)

11. COMPETITORS
SOCIAL
MEDIA
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Gather your
weapons
You've done your research. You know
who you are and what you do as a
company. Now you have to spread the
word to your target audience.
This means integrating your digital
brand across ALL marketing channels,
social media outlets and platforms
appropriate and available to you - i.e.
consider optimising your site for
mobile/tablet to reach more
consumers.
The final piece of your digital marketing
strategy jigsaw is to decide which
analytic services you are going to use in
order to monitor your performance and
KPI’s (Econsultancy).
//4
700,000Apps have been developed
for iphone and android
(AllThingsD)
@36%
Of marketing
emails were
opened on a
mobile last year
(2012)(Knotice)
43%
of marketers are
tipping mobile
optimisation as
pivotal in digital
marketing for
2013 (Econsultancy)

12. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
The infinite galaxy of social media
can be a scary one. With such an
abundance of social channels
available worldwide, you need to
select carefully the most
appropriate ones for your
company. No one-size-fits-all, so
don’t try and take on more than
you can manage by creating social
profiles that aren’t relevant to your
own target audience.
(i.e. If your target market is 13 year
old boys interested in action figures,
you’re probably not going to find
them on Linked In!)
There’s no
One-size-fits-all There are over
social media channels
worldwide
//4

13. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide //5
It is important to review your gains and
losses regularly to ensure you’re on track
to reach your goals.
With increasing access now to free
services such as Google Analytics, it’s
never been so easy to measure your
progress online.
This can be a time consuming process if
done daily so you may wish to out source
this part of your Digital Marketing Strategy
to a specialist third party, which can often
result in more detailed, accurate and
frequent measurements.
Either way, analytics and KPI recordings
out sourced or carried out in-house, you
should then apply and review your findings
against your original business objectives.
Review gains
and losses
Findings
Have I achieved my
objective?
No Yes
Great! Now, how can we
do even better going
forward?
Back to the drawing
board! Where did we go
wrong? How can we fix
it?

14. CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
Can’t ‘talk the talk’?
Then you’ll have
to ‘walk the walk’.
Getting your Digital Marketing Strategy
right is vital to staying ahead in one very
crowded and competitive game. If you’re
not responsive to digital trends and easily
accessible to your customers, you can
guarantee someone else will be there to
steal the limelight.
Like it or not, digital engagement is the
way forward and many household names
have struggled to adapt to this new way
of thinking. With each leading brand falling
from the high street, there’s an online
alternative ready to take it’s place and
wipe the tears of it’s newly inherited
customer base.
Jessops
Continued to struggle with competition from
online rivals and the prevalence of smart
phones now equipt with camera technology.
(The Independant)
Comet
Didn’t move with the times. It was caught out
by lower priced online rivals and didn’t have
the pulling power in-store to lure customers.
(Channel Register)

15. Blockbuster
Initially came unstuck due to Netfilx - postal and
online DVD rentals - eating into it’s customer
base (Business Week). The online rental
market is becoming increasingly crowded with
rival services and the popularity of streaming
films over the internet is booming. (BBC)
HMV
“Could have been successful enough to have
taken on Amazon, had it gone online 10 to
15 years ago” (Design Week). However, you
cannot bypass the fact that “no
bricks-and-mortar record store group has
successfully resisted the onslaught of digital
music downloads” (Robert Plummer, BBC)
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
In the case of these last two retailers, Econsultancy sums it up by noting that the companies and those in
charge of them, failed to recognise and act on the increasing importance of online and how that
would affect their business. In truth, this statement probably applies to all other struggling retailers as well.
Turning a blind
eye

16. Have you got
a digital
marketing
strategy in
place?
CLOUDSPOTTING
digital marketing strategy guide
@Leedswebagency
/cloudspottingagency
/cloudspotting
www.cloudspotting.co.uk

17. References
http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy-guide/
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/61834-10-interesting-digital-marketing-stats-we-ve-seen-this-week-30
http://www.knotice.com/reports/Knotice_Mobile_Email_Opens_Report_FirstHalf2012.pdf
http://allthingsd.com/20121030/google-matches-apple-with-700000-mobile-apps/
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/4887-35-social-media-kpis-to-help-measure-engagement
http://www.designweek.co.uk/analysis/where-did-go-wrong-for-hmv?/3035854.article
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-04/dish-s-ergen-scraps-blockbuster-plans-after-wireless-delays
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21047652
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/another-british-high-street-name-goes-into-administration-as-camera-retailer-je
ssops-closes-down-8448503.html
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2012/11/22/comet_pacey/
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/61903-the-high-street-needs-to-innovate-or-die?utm_medium=feeds&utm_source=blog