If you were to ask me how the WhereNext digital marketing team operates, I would probably describe us as a family, first and foremost. We create a good vibe in the office; we have fun and like to mess around with one another. No-one is spared a bit of light-hearted ribbing in our team’s WhatsApp group chat. But there’s more to a highly-tuned digital marketing team than just fun and games. So here are some tips on how to create a successful digital marketing strategy.

Clear Task Assignments and Regular Communication

When we brainstorm a new project, we assign tasks to every member of the team, right at the start. When we schedule our organic content for social media, we decide which team member will create the captions, who will make the video or photo, and who will upload it to our social media. Because we often work on global campaigns, deployed in multiple languages, many deliverables depend on timely teamwork. We divvy-up tasks on a granular level to ensure everyone always knows what they need to do and when they need to do it.

Regular communication and course correction are the core tactics for our digital marketing team. We convene two weekly meetings in which we review our weekly progress, discuss adjustments to our long term strategy, and put to a calendar media deployments for the upcoming weeks. The frequency of these meetings allows our team to be incredibly responsive to changes that we observe in our social media interactions and website traffic. We can then subtly alter our digital marketing strategy in response to these changes. The ability to rapidly and precisely adjust course is essential, and even though we can’t meet in person at the moment, we continue to hold these twice-weekly meetings as dear.

Defining Our Audience and What We Want to Say

Are You Talkin’ to Me?

Whom we want to speak to is as important as what we want to say. Building a 10,000+ social media following with great content and ad buys may get us a broad audience and leverage to attract even more followers. Still, we need to understand how many followers in our entire audience are critical to our business’s growth. Who of those followers are our most likely clients, partners, evangelists, purchasers of our services, and key decision-makers or industry influencers? We need to be speaking to those followers, and we may have a different message for each.

Say What?

What we say is delivered in many forms. Every page, every image, every video, every email, every caption, and every tag needs to consider our short term objectives—like a weekly keyword strategy—and long term goals—like promoting one of our regional agency’s service offerings. Our emails may target existing clients and industry decision-makers, while our social media posts may target industry peers who’ve become our evangelists. We also want what we say to be relevant to the times. We want to deliver headlines, images, and content that will inspire people to read more, look more, and spend more time with our content. More than just viral content—we make cute penguin videos—our content needs to inform audience members that they can contact us, that we are fun, that we are busy making great stuff, and that we are passionate about our craft.

Goals, Keyword Tracking, and Tools

As part of our storytelling agency’s digital marketing strategy, we set goals, diligently track the keywords which bring us relevant traffic, and we use the best tools appropriate to our tasks.

Set Concrete Goals

Step One of our keyword strategy is to set concrete goals. For instance, one of our early goals for 2019/20 was to be on the first page of Google when people search for a production company in Colombia. We can then break the goals into smaller, time-based objectives; for example, let’s acquire fifty new followers per week.

Establish Relevant Keyword Strategy

Step Two, we establish what keywords would drive traffic to our website and, more importantly, if those keywords are genuinely relevant to our business and audience members who may be searching for our services. There’s no sense in targeting easy-to-dominate search terms that have no relevance to our product. We track keywords and rate the ranking difficulty of the keyword versus global or regional search volumes. We seek out the sweet spot: terms that may be overlooked by our competitors, but which are still highly relevant, and ultimately achievable.

Find and Use Best-In-Class Tools

Step Three, we tailor and deploy our content for people searching for our chosen terms, and we continually analyze the results. We use Hubspot to map our blog content to our landing pages, to deploy posts, and track social media channel activity. We use Mangools to track keywords. Exploiting these tools’ capabilities, marketing automation, and keyword optimization are vital to our success.

Quality Video, Photographic, and Written Content

Make Our Audience Feel Something

At WhereNext, our storytelling agency’s mission is to make our audiences #feelsomething. Delivering beautiful and emotionally moving content is the foundation of our marketing strategy. All the right keywords and hashtags become meaningless if our content is emotionally uninspiring or not profoundly relevant to our audience members’ interests.

Make and Celebrate Art

Our digital marketing strategy for the Dictador Art Masters campaign is an excellent example of this. Rather than merely creating an Instagram gallery of nothing but street art photos, we created a dynamic feed of short videos, animations, GIFs, and carrousels that celebrated the artists and caught the attention of street art fans around the world.

Make It World Class

We ask ourselves, “is this world-class content; is it National Geographic-worthy, or Patagonia-worthy, or Favorite-content-producer-worthy?” We challenge WhereNext’s videographers, editors, and artists to deliver content that stirs the hearts and imaginations of our audience. We aspire to be great, not merely good or average.

A/B Testing and Optimization

A/B testing is the necessary grunt work of digital marketing. Our digital marketing team always runs deep A/B testing for all of our campaigns. It’s the key to reducing follower acquisition costs, better targeting, and increasing follower acquisition rates.

For example, when we were taking steps to grow our Instagram audience, we sponsored content to improve our reach. But we wanted to achieve the lowest cost per followers possible, so we began to test. We went into great detail on these tests: we tested different colors, with/without text, video length, carrousels vs. single images, and more. We tested as many variables as we could. With all of that information, we managed to reach a cost-per-follower of just US$0.11. That allowed us to optimize our budget and invest in the best performing ads. This testing helped us reach our goal of 10,000 followers in a shorter time at a much lower cost.

Responsive Content Production and Knowing Our Tools

WhereNext’s Secret Sauce

Our secret sauce is being able to responsively tailor our content, based on the data revealed in our testing and our bi-weekly analysis. Our marketing team works directly with our in-house video editing, graphic design, and post-production team members. We can quickly generate fresh or modified archival content and more quickly reach our goals.

What Keeps Us on Top

Each of us has invested time in learning how to use the tools we rely on every day. For example, Hubspot offers excellent “Academy” training videos on every type of SEO, inbound marketing, and CRM strategy imaginable. We encourage our marketing team members to take these courses to understand better the tools we use. The benefit of this cross-training is that in a pinch, anyone can step outside their specialty area and fill in for the others. Ultimately, more of us know the tools and techniques that make us money.

Talk to Us

We hope this has given you a little insight into our storytelling agency’s digital marketing team’s philosophy and tactics. Contact us to learn more about how to create a dynamic media campaign that maximizes your impact in the digital marketplace.