From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

How to outline your online marketing presence

From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

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How to outline your online marketing presence

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- Content sits at the core of your digital marketing strategy. Your entire online presence is built around your website, maps listings, mentions on blogs, in social media channels, through ads and emails, and well, that's all content. But organizing and planning for the content you need can get overwhelming fast. So what you want is a blueprint of the different places where you'll be distributing content. I like to use a hub and spokes model to simplify. Now much like a bicycle wheel, this model has a hub in the middle, the most essential part, and spokes that extend out and support the wheel. So at the core of your digital marketing strategy is your owned media. It's the content that you own and host on your platforms. Blogs are great in digital marketing, they represent a cheap and easy way to control the conversation. And you can write about your company and your team, product launches, industry developments, events you're hosting, and so on. You control the style of your writing and you can focus on the areas that you believe will appeal to your target audience. That content in your hub is entirely under your control. You create it, you can edit it, and you manage it. That whole conversation in short is something that you own, but that message needs to get distributed. So you select your spokes and the spokes represent the digital channels you'll use to distribute that message. You'll want to select the platforms that you can actively use. Ask yourself where your target audience hangs out and the channels that they're interacting with. Also, be sure to check where your competitors are active. Say for example, several of your spokes are social media. While you can manage your business accounts within social media, you're going to have less control over the audience that interacts with you. Social networks encourage engagement and conversation, but what you lose in control, you'll gain in amplification and reach of your message. Now it can feel like the more spokes, the better, but remember, every spoke needs management. If you don't have the resources, it's better to stick with just a few spokes and maintain those rather than setting up your presence in many platforms and losing control over the conversation or looking as if you're no longer active. As you think through your digital marketing strategy, consider using a simple hub and spokes blueprint for your initial model.

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