Define an effective digital communication strategy

Digital Communication Strategy: Definition

What exactly is a digital communication strategy?

A digital communication strategy is a thoughtful approach designed for the web. It's the implementation of a comprehensive set of communication actions that help you achieve specific goals using digital and online tools.

Unlike print communication, which relies on tools like brochures or flyers, digital communication leverages various channels such as website creation, social media usage, SEO, content marketing, and more.

However, you can't just cherry-pick a few random tactics and call it an effective communication strategy. It needs to be carefully planned upfront, and you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your business.

This allows you to define precise objectives and develop a method that aligns with your company's overall strategy. Common goals include: building brand awareness, driving traffic, retaining customers, or converting prospects.

Creating a Twitter page or redesigning your website doesn't constitute a digital communication strategy on its own. These actions only make sense if they're part of a well-thought-out plan.

Why you need multi-channel and cross-channel approaches for your digital strategy

Among the fundamental aspects of a strong digital communication strategy, we have cross-channel and multi-channel approaches. You need to distribute your messages across multiple channels so they have enough visibility to make an impact.

Once your message is ready and your target audience is identified, you can deliver it through:

• A blog article

• A video

• Your newsletter

By combining multiple channels, you'll have a better chance of reaching your target audience and getting positive returns on your efforts. But these different communication channels need to work together seamlessly.

This is where cross-channel strategy comes in. By tracking your prospects across your different communication channels and delivering messages tailored to each channel, these channels can complement rather than compete with each other.

You'll attract prospects more easily, and they'll be more satisfied because they can contact and discover you through any channel. This way, you:

Develop your audience and become VISIBLE | Improve your message and ATTRACT prospects | Organize the journey and boost PRODUCTIVITY

Why is it important to establish a digital communication strategy?

You wouldn't go to war without a reliable, solid weapon, right? Same thing here! You can't go prospect hunting without a well-built, relevant digital communication strategy!

Think of it as your guiding thread—it helps you stay focused and forces you to align your actions with each other. You and your team can reference it to stay on track in the right direction.

But remember, these digital channels and communication approaches must respond to clearly defined objectives that are integrated into your company's overall goals and aligned with your positioning. To get started on the right foot and set objectives that will guide you, I recommend using OKRs—we explain everything in this article!

Of course, to achieve these objectives, implementing relevant actions, well-designed tools, and resources is necessary. All of this requires a certain budget and determining which individuals, internal or external, will be in charge of the project.

By successfully determining each of these points, you ensure your project's success and avoid the risks of scattered efforts or poor communication. Obviously, don't forget to define your key performance indicators!

Steps and Examples for Implementing a Digital Communication Strategy

Step 1: Situation Analysis

Every strategic approach begins with analyzing both the internal and external environment of the company. This also applies to implementing a digital communication strategy!

Like a doctor, the goal is to diagnose what's working and what isn't. To achieve this, you need to master your company's context and gather available data about your industry.

It's a two-part process:

• Internal phase: Aims to audit what already exists. You need to look at what's been done, what the repercussions were, and how your image and e-reputation are doing.

• External phase: Everything not directly related to your company but that could impact it. For example, you could conduct a competitive benchmark to observe best practices.

Your competitors are very likely already present on the web (but if they're not, that's a goldmine for you).

Attention! Don't copy-paste your competitors' digital communication strategies. You can draw inspiration from them, but you need to differentiate yourself!

Step 2: Study Your Target Audience Carefully

The second key step in implementing your digital communication strategy is studying your target audience. Without knowledge about your target, it's impossible to implement a worthy strategy!

To build your strategy, it's necessary—imperative—to develop your buyer persona. A seemingly simple tool that allows you to represent, fictitiously, your potential buyers with their characteristics.

You need to know who they are. Determine their demographic data, social characteristics, etc. But also, what are their needs and motivations? For this, you can use the jobs-to-be-done method.

You'll then be better equipped to orient your digital communication strategy in the desired direction and adapt it to your audience, by selecting appropriate social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.).

Your digital communication strategy isn't meant to address everyone, but a well-identified target. The goal isn't to reach as many people as possible (grave mistake) because speaking to everyone means reaching no one.

Step 3: Build and Set Your Strategy Objectives

Your strategy needs clearly defined objectives to function and not go in all directions. They must be aligned and support your company's general objectives. No need to overdo it—be efficient and get to the essentials.

To help you, you can rely on the SMART method. This method helps identify the objectives best suited to your situation and thus have an effective strategy by measuring results at each stage of your project.

Your objectives should therefore be:

• Specific: clearly defined

• Measurable: so you can track and quantify your progress

• Achievable: having the necessary resources

• Relevant: is your objective pertinent?

• Time-bound: defined within a timeframe

This is an important phase of your strategy because your objectives will directly influence the actions you implement.

Today, it's essential to undergo digital transformation for your business. It's a real opportunity to effectively reach your target and increase your revenue. So think it through carefully!

Step 4: Choose Your Communication Channels

The mistake you absolutely must not make is considering the Internet as one medium. It's not—it's a multitude of media. Among them, we find media called:

• "Paid": paid media like LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.

• "Owned": media owned by the company like the website or social networks

• "Earned": customer reviews found on forums, reports, social networks, etc., that you cannot control

Among these media categories, we find outbound marketing and inbound marketing techniques. Outbound marketing may require a certain budget, while inbound marketing is much less expensive.

Through relevant content that's well-referenced and adapted to your target, you can easily attract new prospects without having to chase them down. You'll also improve your image while positioning yourself as an expert in your field.

Among these communication channels, we find:

Social Networks

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok... these social media platforms are incredible springboards for your strategy, as long as they're carefully selected.

You don't need to use them all. Just choose the ones that best suit your target by referring to your buyer persona, which should already be ready to go if you've followed the previous steps!

You'll also need to adapt your content to the different characteristics of each social network and their audiences. This is a channel you absolutely shouldn't neglect, which is why it's important to work on your SMM strategy! You can find brand ambassadors, even influencers for your business there!

Influencer marketing is booming! If you want to learn more about B2B influence, we recommend reading this article.

Organic and Paid Search

SEO is an essential aspect of your digital communication strategy. Internet users must be able to find you on the first page of their search engine results. To achieve killer SEO, there are two approaches:

• Paid search or SEA (search engine advertising) is paid advertising on search engines. It's a bidding system on keywords that allows you to position yourself in "promotional spaces" (example: display advertising).

• Organic search or SEO (search engine optimization) encompasses all actions to improve your "natural" or organic ranking on search engines. You'll need to work on your website optimization, content strategy, and your website's authority.

Organic and Paid Reach

Reach corresponds to the number of people a publication will reach. Like SEO or SEA, we have both paid and organic components:

• Social Media Optimization (SMO) represents actions to take on social networks to create and build a community around your business. The objective? Generate traffic and opportunities.

• Social Media Advertising (SMA), also called social ads, corresponds to advertising distributed via social networks (LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads...). With SMA, you can increase your reach, touch a broader audience, and even create retargeting campaigns!

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still an interesting channel to leverage today. With a solid email address database, you could distribute your content effectively and develop lasting relationships with your clients and prospects.

You could then set up your own newsletter, which would allow you to deliver interesting information to your network without spamming your recipients!

The idea isn't to have communication with a commercial objective, but rather to nurture your clients and prospects with your content. For this, you need a good CRM tool to classify your database and know what maturity level your recipients are at.

Websites and Blogs

Finally, websites, and particularly blogs, will allow you to publish content, improve your SEO, and therefore generate traffic. Of course, your content must be useful to internet users to retain them.

You'll then position yourself as an expert in your field of activity, thanks to your blog, which will further amplify your visibility if you manage to develop a thoughtful and coherent strategy.

Don't forget to adapt your articles into different formats, which will allow you to distribute your content across other communication channels and generate more visibility around your business.

Keep in mind that these channels require time and good upfront planning. To make your task easier, you can use marketing automation to optimize your work and results!

Press Relations

Sometimes forgotten, but press relations remain a good communication channel in 2024. Press releases are an excellent way to capitalize on all your communication actions and will allow you to gain more visibility thanks to the media coverage obtained.

Step 5: Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Once your communication channels are selected, it's time to develop your content strategy. You'll need to implement an action plan to create and distribute media content and thus develop your digital communication strategy.

You have plenty of options regarding content type:

• Text content: blog articles, white papers, case studies

• Graphic content: infographics, GIFs, or memes

• Audio content: podcasts notably

• Video content: tutorials, webinars, customer testimonials, etc.

The question is: how do you choose the content? Your thinking should be done in connection with your communication targets: What are their needs? What do they consume? On which platforms? You must provide them with relevant, creative, and coherent content.

The more you differentiate yourself, the more your content will be shared, followed, and commented on. The watchwords: quality and personalization!

Be careful though! This is work that's done upfront, not on the fly. You'll need to design a plan to harmonize your online presence so you're not caught off guard and especially to bring your potential clients to maturity.

If you want to know more about how to proceed, we recommend reading this article: Content Strategy: The Guide.

The choice of your communication channels and content should be accompanied by an adapted communication plan that allows you to schedule and plan your actions, tools, media, topics, deadlines, responsible individuals, and different solutions based on your initial objectives.

This plan will allow you to properly organize your distributions and content production to better manage your long-term communication campaigns. No time or money wasted! The objective here is to be as efficient and relevant as possible.

What Are the Other Actions in a Digital Communication Strategy?

Choose your resources and define your budget

Your digital communication strategy is starting to take shape. But do you have access to the necessary resources to see your project through? Will you call on an external provider to support you in your approach? Regardless of your choices, you must determine the budget you want to allocate to implement your strategy.

Indeed, implementing a digital communication strategy represents a significant cost! It's therefore essential to build a budget to have a vision of the means you have available to achieve your objectives and deploy your strategy.

The digital world is full of possibilities, solutions, and tools of all kinds, but the price for some won't be the same as for others. This is therefore an important point to consider when developing your digital communication strategy.

Some actions will require a higher financial investment. But if you're ready to be patient and work conscientiously on your strategy, nothing prevents you from favoring inbound marketing tactics, which are less expensive.

Measure your strategy's performance

Every strategy must be measurable. Fortunately, you have a multitude of solutions available that allow you to measure the impact of your actions, positive or negative. This is where KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) come into play!

Common key performance indicators include:

• Generated traffic

• Conversion rate achieved

• Click-through rate

• Visit duration

• Cost per lead

• Sales evolution

• etc.

Above all, once your strategy is launched, don't wait to analyze the results. They'll give you access to tons of essential information to adjust and improve your digital communication strategy.

Analyze your strategy's evolution for your business

A communication strategy constantly adapts to changes and your brand image. As your strategy and actions deploy, you'll have more information to improve your performance and achieve your objectives.

So never stop analyzing your results! They're what will tell you if you're on the right track or not. You'll increase your chances of success this way. Especially since the digital universe is subject to changes.

Consider your strategy as a virtuous circle that consists of:

• Create and plan

• Distribute and test

• Measure using your KPIs

• Improve

You'll then guarantee your company's visibility while differentiating yourself and attracting new leads. All that's left is to start over!