5 Questions to Ask Before Setting a Digital Media Strategy

If your marketing plan doesn’t include some level of digital media, you could be missing out on a powerful way of connecting with consumers. But before you get started, it’s important to pump the breaks by considering these key questions.

What are your goals?
Goals can vary from client to client, but they often fall into two categories: sales or engagement.

Engagement is a good start for challenger brands. For your ad, you might introduce your brand proposition, then ask users to sign up for your newsletter, like your Facebook page, or share the content. The difference between engagement and impressions is that engagement is proof that the user interacted with your ad and accepted your call to action.

Once you’ve established a level of brand awareness, you might be ready to boost sales. Promotions or offers can give your target audience a compelling reason to act now. It can also support your lead generation.

Who are you targeting?
A big advantage of digital media is that you can perform a highly targeted ad campaign. De-identified information available through digital can help you refine your target based on their behavior, interest and online. Your target audience will also determine the type of creative and messaging that you employ.

How will you measure?
Now that you know who you are targeting and what you want them to do, it’s time to consider measurement. Translate your goal into measureable KPIs.

For engagement goals, you can look for a spike in social media metrics, click-throughs, or successful completion of the call-to-action.

Sales goals can be more complex depending on your sales cycle and operations, but there’s always some way to measure. If, for example, you can’t neatly track sales, you can look at overall sales lift, year-over-year comparisons or the monthly average. You can also examine use of a promotional code, the number of searches in your website’s location finder, or the number of phone calls.

What’s your budget?
Because digital allows precise targeting of your audience, your budget is used very efficiently, which matters a lot to challenger brands. Knowing your budget will help your digital team examine the vast variety of media channels available. It will help you pinpoint those opportunities that are going to have the most impact for your brand, whether it’s buying direct from the publisher or remnant ads, which are ads that are unsold and discounted by the media company.

Will you optimize?
Digital ads are pretty amazing because they allow you to monitor their effectiveness and make real-time updates. Not getting the results you were hoping for in the first weeks of the campaign? No problem. Digital advertising allows you to pivot mid-campaign to maximize the effectiveness. You can tweak the targeting, change a media channel, or even enhance the creative.

If there’s one thing challenger brands know best, it’s working smarter, not harder. That makes digital media a great choice; it’s cost effective, impactful, and ready to move the needle.