Digital communication: how to develop an effective strategy?

Digital communication is a key area of development for increasing a company's reputation and visibility on the Internet. It's essential to develop a well-thought-out strategy, in order to support your actions and measure their impact. Find out more about the key stages in setting up your digital communications strategy.

What is a digital communications strategy?

Deploying a digital communications strategy involves planning and implementing measures to optimize communication actions on digital tools. It mobilizes a number of channels - website, social networks, SEO or emailing - to meet a company's objectives in terms of awareness, traffic, loyalty or conversion.

Why deploy a digital communications strategy?

Developing a digital communications strategy means setting clear objectives and a coherent method for ensuring the relevance and effectiveness of your actions. It is an integral part of the company's overall strategy and responds to fundamental challenges:

• Generate more traffic and win over new prospects to make more sales;
• Get closer to your target audience to monitor changes in their expectations and needs;
• Develop the company's visibility and reputation;
• Improve customer experience and build loyalty.
  
  

Digital communication channels

Depending on its objectives, the company generally uses various tools accessible via smartphones, tablets and PCs to develop its digital communications:

• Social networks ;
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO);
• Search Engine Advertising (SEA);
• Organic reach or SMO for Social Media Optimization;
• Paid reach or SMA for Social Media Advertising;
• E-mailing;
• Websites and blogs.
  
  

Digital signage, an innovative support for digital communication

Digital signage refers as much to digital screens, ultra-attractive, high-impact communication media, as it does to a new distribution channel in its own right.Digital signage is a powerful tool for maximizing your digital communication campaigns, thanks to its immersive power. Always adapted, contextualized and personalized, content is tailored to your objectives. The Cenareo solution can be used to broadcast a wide variety of multimedia content, including videos, photos and social network feeds, boosting the virality of all your communication initiatives. With its dedicateddigital signage content management platform, you can easily manage your campaigns and add a new dimension to your digital communications.

{{cta('a9c3190d-785d-48ac-8685-72490cbafbb5','justifycenter')}}

7 steps to a digital strategy

Today's companies can't do without a solid action plan to develop their reputation on the web. An effective digital communications strategy will not only have a major impact on a company's image, but will also contribute to its development. Discover the 7 steps to follow to deploy a high-ROI digital strategy.

1. Audit of the company and its environment

The starting point of any digital strategy is a diagnosis of the company's environment. It is useful for understanding the context of your business sector, and requires reflection on two levels:

• An internal assessment: study of the company's Internet presence, the measures taken and their repercussions, the company's image and e-reputation;
• An external assessment: study of the competition to compare our own positioning thanks to a benchmark of the methods used by these companies and a watch on best practices.

The more accurately we understand a company's current situation, its strengths and weaknesses, the easier it is to identify opportunities and establish a relevant, effective digital strategy.

2. Target definition and study

Understanding, getting to know and representing your audience is an essential step in adapting your communication to better address them:

• Who is she?
• What are its features?
• Its needs and motivations?
• What media does it use?
• What channels does it mobilize?

All these questions help to guide your marketing strategy, with the aim of prioritizing the targets you want to reach, using the right media at the right time.

3. Setting objectives

Objectives guide the action plan to be drawn up, and help to unite employees around a common, concrete project. They relate to brand awareness, traffic, leads generated and customers converted. It's essential to set coherent, appropriate objectives to optimize your chances of deploying an effective digital communications strategy. To this end, the SMART method is a useful tool for setting objectives:

• Specific ;
• Measurable ;
• Achievable ;
• Realistic ;
• Temporally defined.

4. Choice of communication channels

There are three categories of communication channels that can be used in a digital communication strategy:

• Paid media (LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) ;
• Owned media (media owned by the company, such as its website, blog or its various social networks);
• Earned media (comments and customer reviews on forums and social networks, which we can't control).

The Outbound marketing strategy, which uses TV, press, radio, advertising space and sponsored links, is contrasted with the Inbound marketing strategy, which relies on articles from blog, white papers, podcasts or video content broadcast on company-owned spaces. The Outbound marketing strategy promises very rapid results, but is very costly, whereas the Inbound marketing strategy requires fewer resources. On the other hand, it produces results that take longer to achieve, but last over time.

Target research is the key to making this selection and determining the most appropriate channels to mobilize. But to guarantee sufficient visibility, varying channels is an interesting option for reinforcing the power of your message, thanks in particular to cross-channel communication. Adopting a cross-channel communication strategy means delivering a uniform message, but one that is adapted to the different channels used. All these levers work in synergy and benefit the company's digital strategy, increasing its chances of reaching its core target.

5. Budget allocation

A wide range of more or less costly means can be mobilized for a successful digital communication campaign. SEO allows you to work on your website's search engine optimization (SEO) to increase visibility, improve your brand image and promote your company's voice. Blogging and emailing are other Inbound Marketing solutions, which involve attracting customers with high value-added content. These solutions require a certain investment, but are highly profitable in the long term. However, their cost is much lower than that of Outbound marketing tools, such as the purchase of advertising space. The important thing at this stage is to ensure that you have the necessary resources to achieve your objectives, by determining a budget to allocate to the means to be mobilized.

6. Developing a content strategy

When choosing your communication channels, you need to think about the most appropriate content for each of them. By drawing up an adapted and detailed communication plan for each channel or support, it is possible to organize all content production and distribution. Once again, the choice of form and media for content must be based on the needs, expectations and habits of the target audience. The idea is to produce content that is relevant to them, and consistent with the company's image and positioning. To stand out from the crowd, the key words are quality, personalization and creativity. As part of an Inbound strategy marketing, several types of content can help promote products and services, as well as highlighting your company's values:

• Editorial content: articles from blog or white papers, to position yourself as an expert in your field;
• Audio/video content: podcasts, videos, tutorials, webinars or customer testimonials, to support your brand image and interact with your target audience;
• Graphic content: photos or infographics, to express your creativity and convey a message that's easy to understand.

7. Performance analysis

Thanks to KPIs, it's possible to measure the impact of your actions by campaign and by channel, once your strategy has begun. These key indicators provide invaluable information, particularly for assessing whether results have been achieved or are on the way to being achieved, or for identifying opportunities for improvement. They highlight the profitability of your actions, so you know where to allocate your resources effectively and optimize your digital communications strategy as you go along. There are many Key Performance Indicators, but in general we distinguish :

• Conversion rate ;
• Traffic generated ;
• Click-through rate ;
• SEO ranking ;
• Length of visit ;
• Cost per lead ;
• The commitment generated ;
• Sales trends.

{{cta('f65cc672-4f20-43ff-8c1d-48da86386360','justifycenter')}}

The Cenareo solution, internal or external communication software dedicated to content management for digital signage, is the ally of an effective and innovative cross-channel digital communication strategy. Transform your screens into a new, high-performance channel at service with a customized, high-ROI strategy that offers a unique, total digital experience.