DIGIA 101: Molding your perfect digital plan

By Kelsey Hansen


Welcome back soon-to-be DIGIA experts! In my last post, I discussed the basics of digital analytics and insights to give overall background information about said topics. With that knowledge under your belts, it’s time to start planning out a digital strategy for your business.

Creating an effective digital strategy takes time and sometimes patience in order to accomplish your marketing plan. Which brings us to our first step, establishing your digital marketing objectives. Digital objectives can be as broad or specific as you like, but mostly they tend to highlight the purpose of your website. Is your website a place to increase brand awareness? Is it to increase web sales of a product? Determining your digital objectives will help give your digital space a specified direction.

 A great tool that can be used to set up your digital strategy is Kaushik’s Digital Marketing and Measurement Model. It’s a mouthful, so for the sake of my typing fingers we will call it the DMMM. The DMMM is a helpful step by step template to build out your digital plan.

We already discussed step one, which is determining your marketing objectives. The second step is to identify complementing goals for each objective. Goals tend to be qualitative, and the more specific, the better. For example, if your online marketing objective is to increase awareness for your company, a solid goal would be to increase site engagement or web page views by an increased percentage.

Step three is to determine what key performance indicators you will use to see if you are accomplishing the previous two steps. KPI’s are data points that you can research that relate to your goals. In the next post, I will share online tools that you can use to find your KPI’s. Going off of our previous objective and goal, a good KPI would be the number of website visits or the amount click through rates for your site.

The fourth step is to determine your targets. These are numerical values that decide whether or not you are succeeding your goal or failing. This is an important step because it helps you realize if you need to adjust your plan in any way in order to accomplish your goals.  So in our example, setting a target of 150 page views and 200 click through rates for your page would be a target to hit by the end of the month for your site.

Finally, the fifth step is to figure out how you want to segment your data. Digital data can be immensely overwhelming, so focusing your attention on the data that matters and is relevant to your overall strategy is key. For our on going example of increasing awareness, important segments may be site traffic sources or what kind of people you want to attract to your site. Segments help filter out the unnecessary, so that your plan is clean and your analysis is crisp.

Below is a visual representation of the model. In my next post I will share a list of helpful digital analytics tools that can help you navigate the data provided by your site so that you can further expand your knowledge of the madness that is digital insights and analytics.


Photo source: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/#wamm

Comments