How an online strategy can help you
Online strategy is not a panacea. If your business is on the verge of bankruptcy and “you urgently need to raise sales,” then the strategy is unlikely to be able to radically change the situation. But if you are planning stable and long-term growth, then an online strategy will help you:
IT IS CORRECT TO GET PRIORITIES AND REDUCE RISKS
The strategy helps to get rid of uncertainty and confusion when you scale or look for new channels to attract customers, when launching new products, and entering new markets. The strategy will help you easily check if the tools that are becoming fashionable are meeting your goals and objectives, or if they are a waste of time and money.
REDUCE NON-EFFICIENT COSTS
The strategy development process itself will help to put things in order in the marketing and sales departments through an inventory of advertising channels and tasks.
With an inventory of advertising channels, you will be able to estimate how much money and resources are spent on each channel and what kind of return they give. Already at this stage, it will become clear which channels are not generating income. They are turned off, and budgets are redistributed to more profitable channels or temporarily put into reserve.
Sometimes advertising inventory alone pays for strategy development because it saves you money right away.
TO SIMPLIFY THE SEARCH FOR EXECUTORS AND WORK WITH THEM
Once you have a goal and a plan, it becomes much easier to set goals and track results. You do not need to understand in detail how each tool works, due to which you can even reduce the cost of work by hiring less experienced performers because you do not need to rely on their conscientiousness and professionalism. All they have to do is follow the plan clearly. And you - to monitor the indicators. If something goes wrong, you will immediately see it and be able to correct the work.
TO SYNCHRONIZE THE VISION AND NOT LOSE THE PURPOSE FROM SIGHT
When a lot of people work with Internet marketing - specialists and company leaders, as well as external contractors - it becomes difficult to work in one direction. Circumstances change, new people appear, and a common understanding of purpose and approach is lost.
This reduces the speed and efficiency of work. If there is a strategy, each interested participant can turn to it at any time and check his vision and plans with it. And new employees and contractors will not pester with questions about the business and target audience, but will only clarify specific details.
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The main stages of working with an online strategy
1.PREPARATION
The preparation phase is very important. This is where we lay the foundation for further decisions. When preparing, we need to understand more about marketing than on the Internet, so this stage is often neglected and immediately begins to look for the magic formula of " explosive sales ".
In fact, there is nothing difficult about marketing.
To do everything right, we need to answer several questions about the business, product, audience, and competitors:
What and when we want to get (with numbers), what we have now (with numbers), what is happening in the market, who are our competitors and how they attract customers, who are the target audience, and what problem does our product solve (what opportunity does it provide), does the buyer know about this problem/opportunity, why it is important for him, does he know about the solution that you offer, why he should choose exactly your decision why he should buy from you and why he can trust you.
2. DEVELOPMENT
The goal of this stage is to choose a strategy and build a plan for achieving the goal, based on the data of the preparation stage, taking into account the opportunities and risks.
We start by developing hypotheses. First, we describe the ways people come to buy your solution: where they go, what they watch, where you can meet with them, what to offer and how to get interested, what questions they will ask in the process, what they will pay attention to, how much it will cost you and what result can be expected.
Understanding the purchase path (each segment will have its own), we decide where we will look for potential customers and what to do with them next. These will be our hypotheses.
A good hypothesis leaves no questions, it can be formulated in one sentence: "We will do A for B to happen because C". If your hypothesis does not answer these questions, then it is too abstract and will interfere with your work. Think carefully about the execution to get rid of the abstraction.
An example of a hypothesis: we will shoot 10 videos of the construction process of popular houses with customer reviews and post them on the website and YouTube channel so that buyers can see what they are paying for and make more calls, because, according to them, the video is credible.
There can be many hypotheses. Of these, we choose those that meet the deadlines, budget and provide a strategic advantage over competitors. We take these hypotheses as the basis of the strategy.
When the strategy is ready, we draw up a list of tasks for its implementation, assign responsible persons, set deadlines and target indicators (KPI), and set up analytics. It is better to break the deadlines by week - it is easier to follow the plan and make adjustments.
Then we put all the documents in order so that it is convenient to use them.
3. REALIZATION
If you have responsibly approached the development of the strategy, then you should have no problems with implementation. The only thing you have to remember is that the hypotheses need to be tested. To do this, they should be tested and, if necessary, adjusted.
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