Digital Marketing
5 billion internet users worldwide
66 million internet users in the UK
How are you taking advantage of the opportunity?
As of 2024, there were 5.35 billion internet users worldwide, of which, 66 million internet users were in the UK.
Those are mind-blowing figures. Whether you are a public sector, business-to-business or business-to-consumer organisation, managing and developing your digital presence is core to reaching potentially substantial online audiences.
But early-stage businesses often have few resources for marketing, so it's vital that you build a digital marketing strategy that can help you focus your efforts. What do you want from your investment in marketing? Which channels are your audience on? What's the best way to engage them?
I’ve had the pleasure of working with companies that have strong digital presence, and those whose digital presence is more embryonic. Whichever you are, I can help you build a strategy, develop an action plan and deliver on your tactics.
What's your strategy?
Don't have one? You're likely wasting money
Strategy development
All companies need a marketing strategy - it's essential for success.
Put simply, a marketing strategy ensures that you are using your time, money and other resources in the best way to reach your goals. No idea where to start or what a strategy even looks like?
I can help you build a strategy that works for your business and can flex as you grow.
What's in a marketing strategy?
- Company objectives, mission, vision, values
- Target audiences and personas
- An understanding of the competitive landscape and where your company fits
- A plan of activity, across multiple channels
- Timescales
Regardless of size, there are some key strategy basics:
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You need a marketing strategy with goals to work towards that are aligned with your strategic business goals.
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The digital world is constantly evolving – your plans should too - pick a timescale that works for you, but ensure you regularly check your plans still meet the needs of your business and build in flexibility in case things need to change.
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You need to have an understanding of your digital capabilities and limitations.
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Where is your audience? What channels work best for them? Go to them rather than expecting them to come to you. I can help you develop marketing personas to help guide your decision-making.
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Measure performance, analyse the good and the bad, learn from it and iterate with improvements. Sometimes you'll fail and that's ok, so long as you learn from the experience and apply those learnings next time.
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Data is great, but truly informed decisions are ones which are built on a combination of direct feedback from your audience in addition to the data.
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Mapping out the customer experience is important, try your customer journeys for yourself and look at things through their eyes.
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Coordinate channels for a seamless and consistent customer experience.
Why are strategies important?
How do you know your activity is having the right impact? A strategy helps you define your direction, your goals, how you'll measure your ROI and what success looks like for you.
People don't trust businesses they don't know. With a strategy behind you, consistency in your digital presence across your channels, consistency in your brand story and your empathy for your customer's pain points you'll be seen as authentic and trustworthy with your audience.
What channels do your audiences use to communicate? What pain points do they have that your product or service can solve? A strategy helps you build a picture of your ideal customer, and target your activity to communicate with them in the most effective way, on the platforms that work best for them.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of spending money on tactics without a plan, but what effect do they have on your audience? And how do they impact your ROI? With a strategy, you have a clear plan and can see which tactics, on which channels will give you the best chance to attain your goals.
A marketing strategy gives you the guidelines as a brand to work to. With consistency, your brand will become more familiar with your target audience and by keeping your content and approach relevant, your customers and prospects will remain engaged.
Hearing from customers that they just don't have the time? Relevancy creates time and attention.
Integrated digital marketing campaigns
Once you have developed your strategy you can start building campaigns of activity to help you reach your goals. But what is a campaign? A campaign is a plan which pulls together a focused set of marketing activities to reach a specific goal. As a business, you may have multiple campaigns running at any one time to help you reach different goals such as attracting new customers, launching a new product or service, or building your brand.
Integrated marketing campaigns use carefully coordinated messaging across multiple channels. The advantages of this are that with a clear, consistent message on multiple channels, you can build better recall, recognition and trust with your audience. Integrated marketing also ensures that you have brand consistency regardless of where your audience would connect with it. Content can also easily be repurposed (where appropriate) across different channels.
Either when starting out, or when trying to grow as a business, focusing your activity using Integrated marketing campaigns helps to create a longer-lasting impact on your audience.
I can help you plan and identify your goals, decide on channels, create adaptable marketing assets and messaging, and launch, measure, and iterate your campaign.
Website management
For most brands, their website is much more than a digital calling card. It’s a chance to talk about challenges, solutions, features, benefits and more.
I can help you:
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Develop marketing strategies and website improvement plans.
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Understand how to manage website hosting and support companies.
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Research and analyse website analytics and visitor feedback, converting findings into an easy-to-digest narrative for others to understand, and implementing learnings from the insight.
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Analyse your competitor's websites.
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Manage the creation of new pages on your site, or updates to existing pages - whatever your CMS.
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Improve the accessibility of your website and content.
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Journey map your customer experience and understand what your site looks like for someone new.
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Build engagement plans for members-only websites and intranets.
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Archive websites with national or international web archiving sites.
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Manage customer community websites.
Data and analysis
Does looking at digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics make you feel like you are trying to read tea leaves?
I can help you understand the data available to you, including vanity metrics and more realistic metrics, build an easy-to-understand picture of what your contacts are doing across your digital channels, and advise on where to focus your efforts.
Social Media management
Social media can be a very successful tool to engage with your audiences, but it’s something that changes all the time, so you need to be able to adapt in real time.
I can help you:
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Build a strategy, and plan themes and milestones – regularity and consistency are important for success.
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Coordinate content updates across channels – the posting of content relevant to the specific audience, at the most appropriate time to maximise engagement, on the best channels.
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Set up a standard, and be on the lookout for reactive content updates, reposting, commenting and sharing.
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Analyse successful and not-successful content, tailor your content and iterate for maximum engagement.
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Understand what your competitor's social media looks like, what works for them, and what doesn't.
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Enable your sales teams to social sell.
Emails and newsletters
Emails remain one of the highest engagement ways to communicate with your audience. From day-to-day correspondence, exclusive offers and invites, to newsletters to keep you abreast of regular updates.
I can help you:
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Create targeted emails as part of integrated marketing campaigns.
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Segment your audiences.
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Create ad-hoc emails in the house style and tone for internal and external audiences.
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Build a strategy and detailed plan of automated email journeys mapped to the buyer journey.
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With strategies to reduce spam and non-engaged recipients.
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Create and curate regular newsletters for a variety of audiences including the general public, key stakeholders, customers, prospects and staff.
Content creation and curation
In 1996 Bill Gates wrote an essay titled ‘Content is king’ and this is still very much true today.
Companies are always looking to be top of mind when people have questions and are looking for an answer. Regularly creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and often educational content for your target audience is vital to building your digital presence.
I can help you:
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Create an inventory of your existing content, and identify what's missing.
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Review the analytic data and provide insight – surveys, research and analysis.
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Set goals – what is the desired outcome of the content? What’s the priority?
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Analyse your competitors – what works for your competitors? Why? What can we learn from this?
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Research and deep dive into the subject.
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Use clear, jargon-free language and translate technical language and themes into easy-to-digest content.
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Manage the stakeholder review process.
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Own working with design and video production teams.
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Test and tailor content for different audiences and mediums.
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Curate content – collecting and selecting relevant content from other sources that will help amplify your brand.
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Publish and market the content – working across website, social media, email marketing, PR and events to share your content and maximise engagement.
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Build engagement – partnering with teams who share the content to understand how well it meets the need, and analysis of content engagement statistics.
Content formats: Video, podcasts, short and long-form website content, promotional material for print or digital use (including eBooks and event promotion), infographics, blog posts, news articles, press releases, guides and training materials, email newsletters, and case studies.
Below are two video examples for Crossrail. The first is one video from a series on the architecture and design of the new railway, each video including an interview with a key speaker. The second video is a standalone video celebrating the different organisations which worked together to build the new railway, with multiple speakers. I was responsible for the entire process from ideation all the way through to publishing and promotion.
Also included below is the London's Newest Railway promotional booklet - this was used in both print and digital versions as the key asset used to promote the new railway in the run-up to launch. Again, my responsibility was for the entire process from ideation through to publishing and promotion.
Digital content
library management
I have worked for organisations where content is stored in disparate files, and I have worked for organisations that have single locations for content. For any organisation, it’s important that you have a digital library housing your content – from your eBooks to your images and video. Having everything in one place helps you and your teams be efficient and enables them to react quickly.
I can help you:
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Evaluate and sign up for a digital library provider.
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Manage your day-to-day tasks such as user admin, approval of content.
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Curate your best-performing content.
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Share new and best-performing content with multiple teams for awareness.