Overview

In the era where social media has become one of the most influential things that shape and underline people’s behavior and decision-making, as a digital marketing intern and a student who is down for any digital marketing-related stuff, I can tell that social media can play such a crucial role towards people’s perception, interest, and interaction that impact not only individuals but also the whole society.

However, we are not going to discuss social media and ads from the user perspective because most of us might already know that particular aspect, instead, we are going to talk about business or marketer point of view because if we want to talk about digital strategy, we better off take a close look on industry perspective to really get a glimpse of how to plan your own strategy and make it comes into life.

Imagine a moment when the company received lots of conversions and new leads and the sell rates went so high due to their well-thought-out advertisement, but who would have thought that before they actually get to that point, it requires so many strategies and approaches to plan and execute whether content, storytelling, keyword generation, target group, and so on. Plus, no one strategy fits all the campaigns; however, you have to optimize and change the way you perform depending on each campaign’s goal or objective.

Ads Planning

Speaking of planning ads projects and making them come into life, we must know not only the campaign’s goal or objective but also we must carefully consider every detail from the content itself all the way to delivering process that will set us apart from other counterparts in the same market in order to make it stick in the customer’s mind and stole their attention from the competitors.

Besides that, ad optimization tools such as Facebook ads and other similar platforms can be your best friend in targeting the right group of audience by setting demographic segments or even keywords that will work best in the domain of your ad.

Importantly, our budget is something that we cannot neglect as it will shape how we set the size of the audience and who we want to reach. If you want to target a wide range of audiences but only have a limited budget, your performance won’t have the best outcome and vice versa. So, everything needs to be well-planned and well-considered before you fully perform your ads.

YouTube as a Tool

If your main goal is to just raise brand awareness, not conversion, video projects such as YouTube videos can be one of the best choices to do so. But the thing is, again, the content itself needs to be unique, interesting and appealing so the audience will come to you and know about your brand’s existence.

That’s why in this era most companies are now using Influencers or celebrities to help promote their brand. To give you some context, I’ll point out an example from my current company where they use an artist as a protagonist in their YouTube video series aiming to reach a wide range of audiences and boost brand visibility. They hired a Thai star as a protagonist in their YouTube video project, and it works best in case of gaining more visibility and brand awareness as all of his fans came to watch the videos. This is a perfect way for any company that wants to gain more brand awareness to consider using YouTube as one of their go-to strategies.

Celebrity and Influencer

In the case of using celebrities, it is not always the best choice as it might come at a cost. As people nowadays tend to realize that many companies are hiring those artists just to promote products or services for the company’s interest, the audience tends to rely more on micro-influencer or people with true expertise in a particular field as these people are creating content based on their pure interest and passion. It is a food for thought for many companies to double-check and consider things before hiring anyone to be a part of their campaign. If you want to gain credibility from the audience, now you know that famous stars are not your answer.

The Importance of Content and Storytelling

As we mentioned about content earlier, it is time to discuss a little bit on how to ace your ads based on the content and make them become successful. The heart of it is relatability as people like something that reflects or relates to their own life or problem.

Imagine you saw one online campaign that came out of nowhere and has zero connection that links with you as a person, you wouldn’t be interested in it, right? That’s why you want to draw some connections with the audience just to make them feel being heard of or understood, so they will engage or act upon your ads (Call-to-Action or CTA).

Also, a good ads campaign can be such a powerful tool to force some changes to happen as well. By all means, you can voice out your stance by using the advertisement and make a whole society realize more about the underlined problem you are trying to promote or raise awareness about.

One good example to help me explain more is an advertisement campaign from DOVE that reflects Thai education rules that forced the student to cut their hair. The campaign is called “Let Her Grow” telling Thai society to let go of the old guidance that makes no sense and, deep down, hurts the kid and limits the way they want to show themselves.

Surprisingly, this campaign did make so many schools in Thailand stop dictating their students with the outdated hair and outfit rule and allow them to act upon their beauty of choice. This is an example of how good content and storytelling advertisements can change society and positively affect people’s lives.

Not to mention about the content inside, it should be conducted in a positive way with no inappropriate content being added on to because, otherwise, it will give you the opposite outcome which will damage your company or organization as a whole.

Everything Needs to be MEASURABLE!

Last but not least, after all those things that we have discussed, we must make sure that everything we do is measurable as it is a key to tell you whether the campaign or everything that you’ve done is successful or not. It is one of the most important things that every digital marketer needs to follow to check up with what they have done, so they can improve and fix along with doing the campaign. It is important to make sure that you always check everything along the way, especially the objective just in case something doesn’t work, so you will be able to tackle it on time before things just don’t turn out the way they should have.

Conclusion

With all being said, digital strategy is considered very useful and worth knowing not only for the digital marketer but every communication practitioner as well. Digital strategy with the advantage of technology will enhance your performance, make your work easier, and can benefit or improve the society as a whole, but at the same time, you must be mindful about your content, storytelling, and strategy as it will navigate you to the success of failure.