Digital communication plan: 5 tips for better online communication

Today, digital media are indispensable. Your sales targets and all your stakeholders use smartphones, tablets and computers on a daily basis to search for information, order online or have fun. A presence on the Internet is quite simply essential if you want to establish your reputation, generate sales or develop your business.

Why implement a digital communications strategy?

The entire population is likely to use digital media on a regular basis, whatever their sector of activity, geographical area, age or socio-professional category. A digital presence enables you to reach your prospects, sales targets and other stakeholders. An effective digital communications plan also integrates other issues that are just as crucial to your development.

An extensive, uninterrupted presence

A digital communications strategy allows you to deploy a broad and continuous presence among your various targets: 

• Extended presence: you can reach an audience with no particular geographical constraints, and keep contact in touch with targets hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
• Continuous presence: your digital media are permanently accessible, day and night. Unlike traditional media, your message is accessible 24/7.

Greater interactivity and targeting

Digital media offer constant interactivity between your brand and all your targets and regular contacts. This ability to provide or exchange information has many advantages: 

• You can answer your prospects' questions, remove buying disincentives and steer them towards products or services that meet their exact needs.
• You can facilitate access to information designed to improve the consumer experience, for example by creating a FAQ on how to use a product, developing a virtual advisor with artificial intelligence, or making assembly instructions and user manuals available.
• You can respond to your customers' opinions or comments, improve their satisfaction levels and strengthen the close ties that bind you to them.

Your communication plan can incorporate fine-tuning : you segment your targets and offer them content tailored to their needs, interests or current context.

Precise measurement of performance

You can accurately measure the performance of your digital communications strategy thanks to the analysis and tracking tools at your disposal. For example, you can find out exactly how many people have visited your website, downloaded your application, or subscribed to your social network accounts.

Numerous key indicators performance (KPI or Key Performance Indicators) allow you to instantly measure the performance of your communication plan: 

• audience captured by support (site, application, social networks, etc.),
• conversions or success rates at each stage of the conversion journey,
• user behavior,
• etc.
  
  

1. Clarify your strategy and positioning

Are you convinced of the importance of a digital communications plan? First, you need to clarify your overall strategy and objectives, and define the role your digital communications plan should play in your overall communications and marketing actions.

Take stock of your business sector

You can use a SWOT analysis to clarify your strategy: 

• Strengths: you list your company's strengths. These may include your quality/price ratio, brand awareness, consumer confidence, control of production costs, etc. 

• Weaknesses: you take an objective look at your company's weaknesses in relation to your competitors. Your main weaknesses may be low brand awareness, insufficient quality, or difficulties in production or supply to cope with rising demand.
• Opportunities: you analyze the opportunities offered by your environment. Opportunities can include innovation, favorable economic conditions, new outlets or changes in legislation.
• Threats : you list the threats that may, conversely, weigh on your environment, and think about solutions to circumvent them or evolve to transform them into opportunities. A change in regulations, the appearance of substitute products or solutions, or the opening up of the market to new players may call into question your current business model.
  
  

The Red Bull example

SWOT analysis helps you to better understand how your company positions itself in its brand territory, and provides you with valuable data for defining the most appropriate approach. 

For example, Red Bull was born in a competitive and concentrated market, polarized around major brands such as Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. The brand was built around a differentiating positioning, with strong values such as transgression and extreme sports. It has developed in a niche market, energy drinks, and has become the leader in this segment.

Red Bull's digital communications plan takes these specific features into account, and showcases the many athletes sponsored by the brand: you can access a wealth of video content on social networks, and even complete films dedicated to thrill sports on a dedicated online platform and mobile application.

2. Define your objectives and translate them into functionalities

A successful digital communications plan requires in-depth consideration of your targets and objectives.

Primary and secondary objectives

A digital communications strategy has several objectives: 

• Selling online : this is the main objective of any e-commerce site;
• Collecting leads: leads are qualified requests for quotes or information, which lead to a contact remote or physical sale;
• Getting appointments and reservations : hair salon and restaurant chains make getting appointments and reservations one of their top priorities;
• Win new registrations: a marketplace like Blablacar needs to recruit new drivers as much as convince passengers to look for rides; 
• Encourage people to go to the store: precise information on opening hours, on-site services or stock levels, or free click-and-collect delivery, can encourage people to go to the store;
• Develop your brand awareness: every company wants to raise its profile within its brand territory, and can leverage its digital presence to achieve this goal;
• etc.
  
  

Your digital communication strategy can also target other secondary objectives:

• Recruiting candidates: sectors with a shortage of candidates can communicate online about their recruitment campaigns;

• Find franchisees: companies 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 for their shareholders or the trade press;

• Addressing specific stakeholders : companies operating in sensitive sectors can communicate online about their CSR actions, thereby reassuring associations, groups, local residents or simply the general public.
  
  

A site usually has several objectives. The Ikea.com site, for example, offers : 

• E-commerce functionalities, with home delivery or in-store collection, to develop online sales;
• Real-time information on stock levels in each store, to encourage customers to make physical visits;
• Practical advice to guide web users' choices, enhance the customer experience and boost brand awareness;
• A dedicated after-sales service area to simplify returns.
  
  

Features to match your objectives

Have you defined your objectives? You need to make sure that your digital communications plan includes the features you need to meet your objectives: 

• Sell online: your site must offer a shopping cart function, a buy button, inventory management, payment methods and delivery solutions;
• Collecting leads: you need to offer a contact form for collecting quote requests;
• Make an appointment: your technical solution must access the diary of each site to propose available slots, and integrate a form for making appointments;
• etc.

Are you creating a website or application? You can list your objectives and the associated functionalities in your specifications.

3. Explain your primary and secondary targets

To draw up your digital communication plan, you can also specify all your targets.

Strategic or tactical targets

Your prospects and customers are generally your strategic targets, whether in B2B or B2C. But have you thought about the other stakeholders your digital communications plan can reach? 

Restaurant chains, for example, can address several targets in their digital communications strategy: 

• Consumers remain the main target for these companies, with differences depending on their positioning marketing (families, couples, senior citizens, low or high income earners, lovers of world cuisine, etc.);
• Franchise applicants can be targeted by the communication strategy, as they are the key to the network's development; 
• Job applicants, in a tight market, are often the focus of dedicated communication campaigns;
• Other, more tactical targets include potential suppliers, with a view to securing or optimizing supplies.

Create personas to refine your strategy

In marketing, the persona is a fictitious person who brings together the characteristics of a segment targeted by your digital communication plan.

This veritable robot portrait helps you to better understand your users, and identify more precisely their mechanisms of action. When Snapchat was launched, it had the wrong target: the app was aimed at adults aged 20 to 30, but was initially a huge success with teenagers, who saw it as a way of discreetly chatting with their friends and family during school hours. Building a persona helped them understand why peak activity occurred during the day, when users were at school, and not in the evening. The application was then able to evolve to meet the expectations of its natural target.

Distinguish between buyers and users

Sometimes buyers are not consumers: 

• A chain of toy stores caters to children, but most purchases are made by adults;
• A teleassistance company is designed for seniors and dependent people, but the decision often rests with the relatives or children of the users of these solutions.

You need to take this into account in your digital communications plan, for example, by adapting your advertising targeting to these prescribers: don't just target the 65+ age group when selling telecare, and add arguments to convince the people around you! 

4. List the media best suited to your communication

Armed with a list of your objectives, expected functionalities and targets, you can define the list of media to be integrated into your digital communications plan.

Rely on proprietary digital media

Proprietary media give you great freedom of action, and remain a valuable asset in your communications strategy. 

The website continues to be an indispensable medium. It's easily accessible to everyone, and you have total freedom of communication as long as you comply with current regulations (in particular RGPD).

The mobile app enables you to engage your audience over the long term, and interact with them through notifications. It also offers great freedom of action.

Create accounts to interact on social networks

Social media are used by a very wide audience, young and old alike. While some social networks specialize in a particular theme, or have a BtoB positioning, others are more generalist. 

You need to identify which social networks are used by your target audience. For example, Stannah, a company specializing in electric stairlifts, doesn't necessarily have an interest in investing in the TikTok social network: in 2023, 72% of users of this social network will be under the age of 24!

5. Match your communication plan to your financial resources

You're approaching the final stage of your digital communications plan, and want to roll out your strategy soon. We invite you to take stock of the costs of your various actions, and to prioritize them when your resources are limited.

Draw up comprehensive specifications

In order to accurately determine the costs of your future communications plan, you need to include all the expected functionalities and actions in your specifications. For example, are you planning to create or redesign a website? You'll need to factor in the cost of natural referencing, which is essential if you want to stand out on search engines. 

Writing comprehensive specifications will also help you avoid unpleasant surprises. Are you planning to go international in a year's time, for example? You need to specify this in your specifications, so that the web agency can choose a technical architecture that will easily evolve into a multilingual or multi-regional site.

Prioritize your actions for greater efficiency

Your ambitions are immense, but your resources are limited. You need to focus on strategic levers, even if it means giving up or postponing certain actions. For example, there's no point in creating a blog with 15 categories, if you can't produce more than one or two articles a month. The creation of a mobile application is costly, and may not be a priority: you may want to concentrate first on setting up an e-commerce store and promoting it (SEO, Google Ads, advertising on social networks, etc.).

Integrate a measurement plan for performance

Measuring performance is essential to the ongoing optimization of your digital communications strategy, and to the deployment of corrective measures where necessary. Specialized agencies can help you determine your key performance indicators, and implement technical solutions to ensure real-time monitoring of each of your actions. 

You can also bring performance measurement in-house, using in-house expertise and tools provided by web players like Google.

Bonus. Reconcile physical and digital communication with digital signage

Digital signage bridges the gap between physical and digital communication. You can broadcast content streams on screens in your stores, restaurants, establishments or public reception areas. Your prospects and customers can see the multimedia media you create as part of your digital communication, thanks to strategically positioned screens.

Digital signage has much in common with digital communication:

• Highly automated communication actions;
• High-impact multimedia elements (videos, infographics, images, etc.);
• A high degree of personalization, based on the weather or the audience present at a given time in a given place, thanks to facial detection;
• The creation of dedicated sales operations;
• etc.
  
  

Let's talk about your project and the challenges you face. Our experts will work with you to identify your needs and propose solutions tailored to your specific requirements.

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