Digital Communication Planning

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Digital communications planning is the process of outlining how a digital campaign should be implemented to achieve its goals. It involves defining your objectives, target audience, strategy, and tactics for sharing information through traditional websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and other digital channels. 

Communications planning involves five key elements. These relate to your campaign’s: 

•      Mission
•      Money
•      Message
•      Media
•      Measurement

Mission

Setting your campaign’s mission is critical and it needs to be clearly articulated at an early stage. Ask yourself: What are you trying to achieve with your campaign? 

You may have sales goals, where you’re trying to sell a certain amount of product in a certain time. But equally, your campaign could be about building brand awareness, and that’s a very different objective. Whatever your mission is, define it clearly. You can’t proceed with your communications planning until you have a well-written and clearly articulated mission.

Money

It’s also essential that you determine your campaign’s budget and any financial constraints that you’re operating under. 

To help you do this, ask yourself questions like:

•      How much do you need to budget for this campaign? 
•      What do you need to do? 
•      Where are you in the product life cycle? 
•      How often do you want to advertise? 
•      What is the competition doing at the moment? 
•      Is this a good time to spend your marketing dollars? 
•      Are there already a lot of brands using that channel? 
•      Is it worth spending a lot of money on a channel that’s cluttered?

Message 

Developing a succinct message is key to the success of any communications plan. A successful message will:

•      Resonate with your target audiences. 
•      Motivate them to take the intended actions. 
•      Encourage them to seek further information about the product or company. 
•      Increase brand awareness. 

The message must be tailored to the target audience and compiled in a way that’s easy for them to digest. When you choose a message, make sure that you can relay it effectively and that your intended meaning is clear.

Media

Once you have decided on your message, you need to decide on the channels that are best suited to reaching the intended audience, while also facilitating your marketing objective. For this, use your audience research to create the list of channels that your target audience uses. Most people use multiple channels, and they use them for different reasons. So, you don’t want to select every channel that your audience uses in your strategy. Instead, refine your list and choose the channels that can help you to meet your objectives. For example, search is good for sales objectives, Instagram is good for awareness objectives, and so on.

Once you’ve chosen the channels for your strategy, it’s essential to ensure that the medium you are going to use to communicate your message, and the message itself, is appropriate to each channel. For example, you may want to adopt a professional tone on LinkedIn or use a fun video for TikTok. Every channel will have its own specific formatting and other requirements.

You also need to consider which channels will drive performance in relation to the audience. To do this, you can think about factors like:

•      Reach: the number of unique viewers seeing the ad
•      Frequency: the number of times each unique viewer sees the ad, and
•      Impact: the total number of times the ad has been displayed, regardless of repeat viewers  

Measurement

To determine ROI and campaign performance, marketers need to know how effective their message has been on the various media channels used in their campaigns. They can work this out by comparing performance metrics to their original objectives and KPIs. 

With this data, digital marketers can measure how people have consumed their message and the impact it has had across channels. They can see the impact on sales, brand awareness, or brand perception, depending on the objective. Bear in mind that each objective will have a different suite of metrics and KPIs, so it’s essential to measure your strategy and objective using the most appropriate metrics. Otherwise, you run the risk of overstating or understating the actual performance.