Digital Marketing Innovation: 5 Steps to Get from Here to There
Mapping out the process of how to make a strategic change in your digital marketing plan can be a challenge. Here are 5 steps to simplify the process. Tune in.
Digital Marketing Innovation: 5 Steps to Get from Here to There
Hello. Good afternoon, Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps. a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Welcome to the digital marketing podcast video where we talk about digital marketing strategies to help grow your business. I’m so glad it’s Monday. It’s a fresh start, you’ve got Monday perspectives and fresh takes on how to grow your business. Over the weekend, well actually today it was really exciting, because here at the agency we have a new crew of creative digital marketing and public relations coordinators joining us as account coordinators. They signed up for our internship program and this kicks off their semester. I’m always excited when we have new fresh and exciting talent joining us in this creative army that we’re amassing at Digital Opps.
So today, I want to talk about the steps for making digital marketing innovations that brands really need to make right now in order to be relevant in 2019 and 2020. You have to understand contextual creative and digital at scale. It’s really important and the success of your marketing plan depends upon it. So, how can you plan for something that you don’t understand or you don’t see right now? That’s not literally right in front of you? And I think it’s true with any innovation, where there’s a desire to achieve an outcome that currently doesn’t exist.
1. Define Where You Want To Go
It starts, number one with defining where it is that you want to go with your marketing, and making it a very specific definition. So, whether that’s a numbers thing or a quality thing, really helping to define where we want to go, and what that means for our business. It looks like this. And again, so maybe it’s an increase in number of deals or it’s increased number of customers or you have to figure out what the metrics are in order to go there. Or maybe you want to achieve a goal. You want to become the number one hair salon in your market, or maybe you want to be known as the the most prestigious dental agency in your dental office or outpatient therapy practice in your local market or in your region. So whatever that looks like, define what that is specifically.
2. What Does it Look Like When You Get There?
Then step number two, is what will it look like when you get there. Obviously we’ve talked about what the numbers would mean for your business and your organization. You know what that growth would look like, but how would that impact your process? Meaning your internal process, whether it’s how you deliver your goods and services. Or will it impact your processes or procedures in providing those very specific services. Because the one thing that I have learned in nearly thirty plus years of helping businesses grow is that it’s difficult to get there in an instant.
3. The Plan To Get There
Leading us to number three, is it’s very difficult to flip the switch and just automatically go there. It’s very difficult to go from the worst to first. It takes very specific maneuvering and very specific planning. If I decide “hey, I’m gonna run a 30-mile marathon”, I may have all of the the know-how, I mean know how to do it, but the actual practical application, no. And the actual execution of that means I have to have some things. I have to have stamina, I have to have my body trained to handle the endurance, there’s all kinds of different ramifications and preparations that have to be done in order to run a 30-mile marathon. And just because I want to do it and I decide I’m gonna do it tomorrow, doesn’t mean that I’m gonna step outside my door and take off and run for 30 miles. It just doesn’t work, especially if I’m just used to running to the mailbox. So yes, you absolutely have to think about what are the incremental steps in order for me to get there? Now again, we’re talking about this in the context of your digital marketing plan and execution.
4. Apply Empathy to Your Data
Number four is to apply empathy with your data and with your target audience information. This is a huge piece that as marketers, we often overlook. We often look at the numbers and we assign them a value, 1 to 10 or 100, whatever that value number is. And we often don’t look at that data with empathy. What I mean by that is, empathy is really a collision of perspective and attitude. If you understand the attitude of your target audience and you understand the perspective of which they look through -how they view your products and service and their attitude, and how they think and feel about your attitude, when those two things collide that’s empathy. You’re literally putting yourself in their shoes and looking at and walking through how they experience your product.
5. Deploy a Creative to Match
So when you can apply empathy to the data and into your target audience information, then you can do step number five. Which is how to deploy creative to match? That understanding the insight, understanding that you will gain through deploying empathy towards your client database or through your target audience. And then think about okay, how are we gonna roll this out? Platform by platform because you can’t just have the plan and say boom. We’re gonna do it on Facebook or boom we’re gonna do it on YouTube. You need to understand that your target audience is going to consume content the way they want to consume it. So you may have someone who doesn’t watch a lot of videos but listens to a lot of podcast. Or you may have the reverse, you may have someone that watches a lot of video doesn’t listen to any podcast. So number one is, if we were to reverse engineered who they are, what’s important to them, how they think and feel about your business product or services. And then how they view that product and service. So you have to have both lens, the emotional and the intelligence component and once you’ve got that then you’re able to really put together contextual creative mapped to those specific behaviors and interests. In how your target audience views and will respond to your messaging as you place it in front of them, whether it’s a video, a podcast or a written format.
And the other thing is, people, once they get it and they really start to grasp, “Okay. I got it, I understand. This is what we need to do. How are we gonna do all these things at once?” Well, don’t. If you absolutely can’t, which you actually can, but if for whatever reason you can’t. Don’t be paralyzed by “oh my gosh, how are we gonna do this?” Take a bite. Take bite-sized chunks out of the elephant that you want to bite where I eat, which is making this change of we’ve been putting out this the single piece of content. It’s not been working. We’re not seeing any change so we’re not seeing any results.
So we need to make a change. Now we’re ready to roll this out and we’re gonna roll it out, in what are we best at? So you find a person and an organization that’s the best. Whether they have the best voice or they come across the camera really great, you’ll find that person that really connects with your consumer or the sort of industry represents and roll it out. And start with that because I guarantee you, if you’ll start now in incremental, separate channels and stages, you’ll be able to build on that and you’ll be able to see some successes over the next 12 months. And really move your business towards digital marketing innovation through these five steps that we talked about .
Guys, thank you so much for joining today. I hope you have a great Monday. My name is Michael Winn, I’m the Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates, and we’ll see you tomorrow.