Top Ten Tips for

Building a Digital Plan

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4Persuade yourself you need one. In a world where, according to McKinsey & Company “57% of B2B purchase evaluation is done without speaking to a human” it’s critical that you make your presence – and capability – known in a social and digital world. If you already have one, is it really good enough? Can it be improved? Is there really sufficient focus on this as a means to driving new pipeline and new business?

Consider your organisation’s value proposition; the thing that you are famous for; your Unique Selling Proposition. Is this really crisp enough? Does it differentiate you from your competition? Look around at your competitors – what are they doing and saying?

Define your target audience: who are you trying to / most likely to attract with your proposition?

Do some background preparation: consider the ideal customer journey based on this target audience:

a. Explore: how do they typically undertake their research into what’s available? This has implications for where and how you show up online

b. Evaluate: how do they tend to evaluate / consider the options that they have found? What’s their decision making criteria? This has implications for how you demonstrate your capability and how you present your overall proposition

c. Purchase: how do they prefer to purchase? This may have implications for the way in which you sell. If some customers are quite happy to buy online – what does this mean for your digital representation? If they want extra help and support as part of the package – how can you deliver this?

d. Expand: what considerations need to be in place for them to expand their purchase – and consider related / complementary purchases. How can you represent additional / complementary products to your existing customer base using digital and social?

e. Renew: if a customer isn’t using a product they are unlikely to renew their subscription – so what things need to be put into place in order to ensure that they are making best use of the product(s) they have already bought?

f. Advocacy: how do you /can you identify strong customer examples that will help with the stages above?

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Preparation

Renew

Purchase

Evaluate

Explore

Expand

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Value

Connect. Wherever you’re directing your audience, make sure you provide a clear and obvious way to interact and submit contact details. Offer customers the opportunity to connect directly with you when they want to: click to chat, click to call, click to email…

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Everything integrated, everything connected. You may already be undertak-ing activity – but losing the impact of it. Digital activities have the greatest impact when operating hand-in-hand with each other i.e. if you’re doing an email campaign, make sure your website homepage reflects the message you want to convey; tie social activities into your efforts to ensure scale is achieved across multiple platforms

If your resources are limited, don’t try to do everything – think about the basics of customer acquisition, on-boarding, retention for a segment of the audience – perhaps small businesses in one particular vertical industry that you have great experience of – and which offers opportu-nity so you can really focus your efforts

Leverage as many free resources as you can in your plan; templates for product pages on your website; social on demand for social media content

Set objectives for your plan so that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achieva-ble, Relevant, Time-bound)

Measure, adjust, retry. Whatever activities you undertake in your plan, you must be able to monitor response rates to see what’s working and what’s not, digital activity doesn’t have to be a one-time activity and you can keep tweaking the campaign to make it really work for you. If you’re sending emails how many opens did you get? Not many – then change the subject header and try again to those who ignored it. Can you tell how many website conversions were as a result of the original email, are people leaving your website at a particular page. If you’re sending tweets, are you using tracking codes to link website traffic back to your social activities. Remember if you not measuring, you can’t figure out what’s working for you to get the best value from your investment.

Optimise

Optimise

Measure,adjust, retry

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