Digital Marketing Strategy
A Digital marketing strategy is a document that involves a brand’s plan for achieving particular marketing goals over a stipulated period. This document consists of the brand’s GOALS within the time frame, targeted audience, content pillars, resources needed, and personnel needed to achieve these stated objectives.
A Digital Marketing Strategy is essential to the growth and achievement of a brand’s marketing objectives as it is a pillar on which its campaigns and steps are hinged. To this end, a brand without a strategy might well be on its way to defeat in the ever-competitive market.
Top Digital Marketing Trends to Shape Your Brand’s Strategy in 2024
In creating a brand strategy, it is usually advised that brands should do due diligence by setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals. It is also recommended that brands should carry out proper audience research to identify their audience. We also emphasize on not making these 8 mistakes while running a brand online.
However, the following insights on audience behavior become important to formulating a Digital Marketing strategy as they might significantly improve your brand’s chances of achieving its objectives. These insights include the following.
Social media does not house most of your target audience
The survey by the Neely research index found email usage at 82.7% and text messaging at 79.4%. These figures are significantly higher than social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook at 66% followed by Instagram at 37% respectively. This means that your marketing strategy should go beyond the Bermuda triangle of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For your strategy to be more effective, it must cater to users on other channels like Email and Text messaging platforms. A booby trap most brands fall into is assuming that digital marketing is the same as Social media marketing. The latter is but a subset of the former. Sometimes a brand’s inability to connect to its target audience might boil down to a simple inability to spread their eggs across digital marketing baskets.
A significant number of your audience ignore ads and brand content on social media
A survey by Kantar TNS’ Connected Life study found that 26% to 57% of people ignored ads and posts by brands on socials. As reported by PR Week, this finding strongly highlights a growing disillusionment people now have with brand social media post patterns they assume “follow them around” trying to coerce them into making purchases.
What this means for a brand such as yours is that you have to de-brand your content. Eliminate all your content elements that show signs of your brand. I guess that did not go well, I will rephrase. The response from the above study is a strong indication that people smell brand posts from a mile away and run as fast as they can from them. To avoid such in your marketing strategy, we recommend LO-FI content. This form of content is mostly pictures and short-form videos with little to no editing. What most internet folks call “Do it yourself” content. Its nature and imperfection eliminate the professional “scent” and make it more attractive to an audience who are increasingly repulsed by professional brand content.
Fewer adults now use social media than other Digital Marketing channels
The Neely Social Media Index found that 5.8% fewer US adults use YouTube in 2024 than they did in March 2023. The same index also found that 2.9% fewer adults also used X (Twitter) and LinkedIn between the time frame. This points to the worrisome trend that your target audience are giving less priority to social media.
This reinforces the earlier recommendation to seek alternative channels. This finding proves that efficiently targeting and meeting your audience in 2024 involves investing in personalized channels with little saturation. Your strategy should also cater for the customer who wants to take time off social media, who decides to go take mental breaks away from the buzz of social media too. All-inclusive, that is the word for it!
Less and less social media users on major platforms learned anything useful on the internet in recent times
A Substack survey found that the percentage of TikTok and LinkedIn users who reported learning something useful or important dropped 66 and 46%, respectively within September- October 2023.
Rather than see this insight as a challenge, we recommend you see it as an opportunity. In order to gain visibility and go viral. Most brands now go on the lookout for trends and jump on them. There is nothing wrong with jumping on trends, except that jumping on one too many trends might make a brand lose its brand identity to the ongoing tsunami of social media trends.
In other to positively differ from this negative practice and contribute meaningfully to your audience’s online experience, your brand strategy should hinge on informative and educative content pillars. Creating such content builds authority and nothing beats a brand that is the go-to for genuine, informative updates.
Video content is King in Digital Marketing
A survey by Sprout social found above 87% of marketers indicating that video content translated better into meaningful action among their audience than other content forms.
Videos should always be in the mix. Want to tell your audience about a new product? Video. Trying to teach them how to use your app? Video. Want to engage them? Video!
However, while videos should prominently feature, they should not be the only ingredient in your content mix. An info-graph here, a picture there, a text thread here and the broth will rightly be ready.
CONCLUSION
Your Digital Marketing strategy should revolve around SMART online goals, religious audience research, audience engagement, campaign formulation, adjustments and iteration. Your strategy should take cognizance of audience behavioral insights such as the importance of other Digital marketing channels outside social media, growing resistance to professional content, the need for all inclusion, the proliferation of bland content online as well as the importance of video content to brand content success.
