Building The Digital Marketing Strategy From A

In "Building The Digital Marketing Strategy from A-Z Part 1," we together have learned the importance of setting up a complete Marketing strategy. In this article, we will discuss in more detail about the steps to set up strategic goals.

Level of the strategy

The strategy also has several levels and each level serves a certain goal. In general, we have three levels: Corporate Strategy, Business Strategy, Functional/Operational Strategy.

Corporate Strategy: This is the highest level strategy which will decide on the company (or companies) will do what type of business, how their business stance and perspective are, how the financial distribution for the lower business units is (if the corporation has many companies). Due to its nature, corporate strategy tends to value, credo and concepts, rather than specific and details plans as Business and Operational strategy.

Business Strategy: the strategy at a company level to analyze the market factors and provide the way to direct and allocate resources along with how to compete with rivals in the market and the company's financial goals.

Operational Strategy: The strategy at the operational level is usually divided according to the department as Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, Operation, etc. The strategy at this level will go into the building of a detailed plan for activities and development orientation of a specific operational unit.

Within the scope of this article, we will just go into the settings digital marketing strategy, a strategy in Functional/Operational level.

What are the differences between the strategy and the tactics?

Many people still confuse between the strategy and the tactics or do not understand the differences between these two terms.

Simply, the tactics are the smaller plans located inside the strategy that you created in order to achieve predestined strategic goals. The tactics also pursue their own goals and the achievement of these tactics goals, even does not decide, but has a direct impact on achieving the ultimate goal of your strategy.

The strategy is made up of many tactics

For example, you have to build a digital marketing strategy with the goal of achieving sales of USD 1 million per year. Now the plans for the channel such as SEO, SEM, Display, Social, etc. will be the tactics created with their own goals (how much organic traffic SEO has to achieve, what CPA and SEM of CR and Display are, how many engagements and traffic Social has to create, etc.).

Achieving all the tactics goals of each small channels will help you to be closer to achieving the ultimate goal of the strategy outlined above. The failure to achieve any tactics goal does not mean that your strategy will fail but it will certainly make it harder to achieve the common goal. For the moment, the remaining channels will have to try more to support the unsatisfactory channel.

Below are the basic discrepancies between the strategy and the tactics under different angles:

	Strategy	Tactics
Goals	Achieved the strategic goal has a direct impact on the survival and the development of the organization.	Achieved the tactics goal takes effects on a department, a part of the whole.
Role	Performed by individuals who have the right to mobilize the resources of the organization and understand how to use several tactics to achieve goals.	Experts on a given area are capable of using limited resources to implement and achieve certain goals.
Liability	Responsible for the overall development of the organization	Responsible for a specific area assigned.
Time	Long-term, usually do not change.	Short-term, flexible and can be changed according to the market situation.
Results	Create the specific and clear goals for the organization including planning, guidance, direction, and KPI.	Create the clear results using the manpower, tools and time.

Hence, I usually avoid using words like SEO strategy, Social strategy, etc. as for me, those channels are just the tools and the plan to use these channels effectively is called strategy. The Digital marketing strategy is located at a higher level is the distribution channel (will explain more in the Content of the next article).

Besides, the implementing time of something do not help it naturally to turn into the strategy. A plan to develop and socialize a fan page in 2 years is still only the tactics. Similarly for a link building campaign, the onsite optimization lasted 3 years.

WWW.GOOGLEADSENSEADS.COM