Digital media are essential today. Your commercial targets and all of your stakeholders use smartphones, tablets and computers on a daily basis to search for information, order online or have fun. An internet presence is simply essential to establish your reputation, generate turnover or develop your business.
Why implement a digital communication strategy?
The entire population is likely to use digital media regularly, regardless of the sector of activity, geographic area, age or socio-professional category. A digital presence allows you to reach your prospects, business targets, and other stakeholders. An effective digital communication plan also includes other challenges, which are just as crucial for your development.
An extensive and continuous presence
A digital communication strategy allows you to deploy a broad and continuous presence among your various targets:
- An extensive presence: you can reach an audience without specific geographic constraints, and keep in touch with targets located several hundred or thousands of kilometers away.
- A continuous presence: your digital media are accessible at all times, day and night. Unlike traditional media, your message is available 24/7.
Increased interactivity and targeting
Digital media offer constant interactivity between your brand and all of your usual targets and interlocutors. This ability to provide or exchange information has numerous advantages:
- You can answer questions from your prospects, remove the obstacles to buying and guide them towards products or services that precisely meet their expectations.
- You can facilitate access to information designed to improve the consumer experience, for example by creating an FAQ on the use of a product, by developing a virtual advisor with artificial intelligence, or by providing assembly instructions and user manuals.
- You can answer to the opinions or comments of your consumers, improve their satisfaction rate and strengthen the close relationship that unites you with them.
Your communication plan can incorporate fine targeting : you segment your targets and offer them content adapted to their needs, their interests or the current context.
A fine measure of performance
You can accurately measure the performance of your digital communication strategy thanks to analysis and tracking tools at your disposal. For example, you can know exactly how many users visited your website, downloaded your application, or subscribed to your social media accounts.
Numerous key performance indicators (KPIs or Key Performance Indicators) allow you to instantly measure the performance of your communication plan:
- audience captured by medium (site, application, social networks, etc.),
- conversions or success rates at each stage of the conversion journey,
- behavior of Internet users,
- etc.
1. Clarify your strategy and positioning
Are you convinced of the importance of a digital communication plan? First of all, you must Clarify your overall strategy and goals, and define the role that your digital communication plan should play in your overall communication and marketing actions.
Take stock of your sector of activity
You can rely on a SWOT analysis to clarify your strategy:
- Strengths: you list the strengths of your business. It can be about the quality/price ratio, the reputation of your brand, the trust that your consumers have in you, the control of your production costs, etc.
- Weaknesses: you make an objective point about the weaknesses of your company compared to your competitors. Too low a reputation, insufficient quality, or a difficulty in production or supply to cope with an increase in demand may be your main weaknesses.
- Opportunities: you analyze the opportunities offered by your environment. Innovation, a favorable economic situation, new opportunities, and changes in legislation can be among the opportunities.
- Threats : you list the threats that can, on the other hand, weigh on your environment, and think about solutions to avoid them or evolve to transform them into opportunities. Changes in regulations, the appearance of alternative products or solutions, or the opening of the market to new players can call into question your current economic model.
The example of Red Bull
SWOT analysis helps you better understand how your company is positioned on its brand territory, and provides you with valuable data to define the most appropriate approach.
For example, Red Bull was born on a competitive and concentrated market, polarized around major brands such as Coca-Cola or Pepsi Cola. The brand was built around a differentiating positioning, with strong values such as transgression and extreme sports. It developed on a niche market, energy drinks, and became a leader in this segment.
Red Bull's digital communication plan takes these specificities into account, and features the many athletes sponsored by the brand: you can access a lot of video content on social networks, and even to full movies dedicated to thrill sports on a dedicated online platform and mobile application.
2. Define your goals and translate them into functionalities
Any successful digital communication plan requires a thorough reflection on your targets and goals.
Main and secondary objectives
A digital communication strategy actually pursues several objectives:
- Selling online : this is the main objective of any e-commerce site;
- Collect leads : leads are requests for quotes or qualified information, which lead to remote or physical commercial contact;
- Get appointments or reservations : chains of hairdressing salons or restaurants place obtaining appointments and reservations among their priority objectives;
- Win new registrations : a marketplace like Blablacar must as much recruit new drivers as it must convince passengers to look for trips;
- Encourage in-store trips : precise information on schedules, the services offered on site or the status of stocks, or free click and collect delivery can encourage travel;
- Develop your reputation : any company wants to strengthen its reputation within its brand territory, and can rely on its digital presence to achieve this objective;
- etc.
Other secondary objectives may be targeted by your digital communication strategy:
- Recruiting candidates: sectors whose recruitment is under pressure can communicate online about their recruitment campaigns;
- Find franchisees: businesses whose development is based on franchising can integrate this objective into their digital communication plan;
- Informing current and potential shareholders: listed companies generally include information intended for their shareholders or the specialized press;
- Addressing specific stakeholders : companies operating in sensitive sectors can communicate online about their CSR actions, and thus reassure associations, groups, residents, or simply citizens.
A site usually pursues several goals.. For example, the site Ikea.com offers:
- E-commerce features, with home delivery or in-store pickup, to develop online sales;
- Real-time stock information in each store, to encourage the physical movement of customers;
- Practical advice to guide the choice of Internet users, enrich the customer experience and gain notoriety;
- A space dedicated to after-sales service to simplify the return of items.
Features associated with your goals
Have you defined your goals? You must ensure that your digital communication plan includes the functionalities that allow you to meet your goals:
- Selling online : your site must in particular offer a shopping cart functionality, a purchase button, stock management, payment methods, delivery solutions;
- Collect leads: you must offer a contact form for collecting quote requests;
- Make an appointment : your technical solution must access the agenda of each location to propose the available slots, and integrate a form for making appointments;
- etc.
Are you creating a website or an application? You can list your goals and mention the associated functionalities in your specifications.
3. Explain your main and secondary targets
To develop your digital communication plan, you can also specify all of your targets.
Strategic or tactical targets
Your prospects and customers are generally your strategic targets, in BtoB as well as in BtoC. But have you thought about the other stakeholders that your digital communication plan can reach?
For example, restaurant chains can address several targets in their digital communication strategy:
- The consumers remain the main target of these businesses, with differences depending on marketing positioning (families, couples, seniors, low or high incomes, lovers of world cuisine, etc.);
- Franchise candidates can be targeted by the communication strategy, as they are the key to network development;
- Job candidates, on a market in tension, are often the subject of dedicated communication actions;
- Other more tactical targets can be considered as potential suppliers, in an effort to secure or optimize supplies.
Create personas to refine your strategy
In marketing, the persona is a fictional person who brings together the characteristics of a segment targeted by your digital communication plan.
This real robot portrait helps you better understand your users, and identify their mechanisms of action more precisely. At its launch, Snapchat got the wrong target: the application was aimed at adults aged 20 to 30, but was initially very successful with teenagers who saw it as a solution for chatting discreetly with their loved ones during school hours. The construction of a persona helped them understand why activity peaks occur during the day, when users are at school, and not in the evening. The application has been able to evolve to meet the expectations of its natural target.
Distinguish buyers and users
Sometimes the buyers are not the consumers:
- A chain of toy stores is aimed at children, but the majority of purchases are made by adults;
- A tele-assistance company is aimed at seniors and dependent people, but the decision is often made by the relatives or children of the users of these solutions.
You must take this into account in your digital communication plan, by adapting advertising targeting to these prescribers, for example: do not only target people aged 65 and over to sell remote assistance, and add arguments to convince those around you!
4. List the media adapted to its communication
Based on the list of your objectives, the expected functionalities and the list of your targets, you can define the list of supports integrated into your digital communication plan.
Rely on proprietary digital media
Proprietary media offer you great freedom of action, and remain valuable assets in your communication strategy.
The website continues to be an absolutely essential media. It is easily accessible by everyone, and you have total freedom of communication as long as you respect the regulations in force (in particular the RGPD).
The mobile application allows you to sustainably engage your audience, and to interact with them thanks to notifications. It also offers great freedom of action.
Create accounts to interact on social networks
Social media are used by a very large audience, young or old. While some social networks have specialized in a particular theme, or have a BtoB positioning, others remain more general.
You have to identify social networks that are used by your target. For example, the company Stannah, a specialist in electric stairlifts, does not necessarily have an interest in investing in the social network TikTok: in 2023, 72% of users of this social network are under 24!
5. Size your communication plan to fit your financial resources
You are nearing the final stage of your digital communication plan, and you want to deploy your strategy soon. We invite you to take a comprehensive look at the costs of your various actions and to prioritize them when your resources are limited.
Write comprehensive specifications
In order to accurately determine the costs of your future communication plan, you must integrate all the functionalities and expected actions into your specifications. For example, are you considering the creation or redesign of a website? You must include the cost of natural referencing, which is essential to stand out on search engines.
Write exhaustive specifications will also avoid unpleasant surprises. For example, are you planning to go international in a year? You must specify this in your specifications, so that the web agency can choose a technical architecture that easily evolves into a multilingual or multi-regional site.
Prioritize your actions to gain efficiency
Your ambitions are huge, but your resources are limited. You will have to focus on strategic levers, even if it means giving up or delaying certain actions. For example, it is useless to create a blog with 15 categories, if you cannot produce more than one or two articles per month. Creating a mobile application is expensive, and may not be a priority: you can first focus on setting up an e-commerce store and promoting it (SEO, Google Ads, advertising on social networks, etc.).
Integrate a performance measurement plan
Performance measurement is essential for continuously optimizing your digital communication strategy, and deploying any corrective measures. Specialized agencies can assist you in determining your key performance indicators, and put in place technical solutions to ensure real-time monitoring of each of your actions.
You can also internalize performance measurement, relying on internal company expertise and the tools made available to you by web players such as Google.
Bonus. Reconcile physical and digital communication with dynamic signage
Digital signage builds a bridge between physical and digital communication. You can broadcast content streams on screens in your stores, restaurants, establishments or places where the public is welcomed. The multimedia supports created as part of your digital communication are seen by your prospects and customers thanks to strategically positioned screens.
Digital signage has many points in common with digital communication:
- Strong automation of communication actions;
- High-impact multimedia elements (videos, infographics, images...);
- A high degree of personalization, depending on the weather or the audience present at a given moment in time in a given location thanks to facial detection;
- The creation of dedicated commercial operations;
- etc.
What if we discussed your project and your challenges? Our experts assist you in collecting your needs, and offer you adapted solutions
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