Why You Need a Digital Marketing Playbook

Everyone needs a guide to success. The same goes with digital marketers, especially as more strategies come their way.

What about you? Something must have drawn you to the idea of a digital marketing playbook. This article will help you understand what it is and explain why you need a playbook.

Hopefully, after you've read the article, you will have enough confidence in the idea of a playbook and how to follow one.

What Is a Digital Marketing Playbook?

A marketing playbook comes with the best practices, communications, and optimization techniques needed to ensure your company maximizes its return-on-investment (ROI) possibilities. If prepared and followed correctly, you may be able to achieve your goals.

As a comprehensive guide, it will provide a business with steps to manage its investment. Usually, there is a set period in which the plans are to be applied. For example, 12 to 18 months is often a recommended range of time.

Where Did It Get Its Name?

Both the name and the concept of a digital marketing playbook come from sports. A playbook sounds like something used as a guide by athletes, such as in baseball and football. The team, led by a coach, comes up with attack and defense techniques to help them win against opposing teams.

In marketing, you have opposition, too. Even if you believe you're way ahead in the digital marketing game, you will realize that competition can still be stiff.

Whether or not you want to focus on what the competition is doing, you must admit that a team needs some coordination to work efficiently together. If you have a larger team, you must have a clear approach to tackling your business problems and goals.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Digital Marketing Playbook?

A digital marketing playbook is a great way to have a marketing team work together. For the specific benefits, here are some of them:

1. To Maintain Consistency across Markets

If you have a large team, it isn't easy to talk to each member daily. When we say talk here, it means being able to work on strategies, otherwise known as gameplay.

Handling and managing a business can be challenging that way. Even if you are willing to talk to each member and personalize the communication, some team members may not be in the same branch of the business as you. This arrangement happens when your company has expanded because of a large market or the result of success.

A digital marketing playlist can help you maintain consistency even if communication has to be pared down to the most essentials. You can focus on dealing with the department or team leaders to save time. They will implement what you have already put together in the playbook.

2. To See Insights for Making Better Decisions

With your playbook, you can combine insights from econometric modeling, web analytics, and the like. Then, whatever you apply, your decisions are based on what you glean from them.

So, a digital marketing playbook also serves as a way to improve business decisions. Since it puts together all the strategies the team employs, it is easier to see which parts work and which need a little tweaking or even an overhaul to do better with ROI next time.

With a system in place, each team member should be able to access the results, and each department should be able to come together and develop similar insights as the rest of the company.

3. To Be More Time-Efficient

Because the playbook works for all the departments in the company, it helps make things more time-efficient. The leadership does not need to go over the strategy with each member. Instead, everyone gets a copy of the playbook.

While each member may not have the same access to information, the whole team may still have the same access to the available rule book, strategies, and campaigns.

Because the playbook provides a means to be more time-efficient, the different teams can use their energy and resources to implement the plan. So, there will be less time wasted doing nothing. With action already applied, the teams can wait on results. The results can provide even more insights into improving their marketing campaigns.

What Should an Excellent Digital Marketing Playbook Show You?

Not all digital marketing playbooks are equal. Some are better planned and nourished by proper research.

The best playbooks make the most of their characteristics. It helps you achieve more in less time and properly utilize resources, including human ones.

An excellent digital marketing playbook comes with the following:

Investment Priorities

Because all your vital information is in one place, each member can quickly recognize the investment the company should prioritize.

A playbook reminds everyone of the company’s marketing objectives. While it seems like everyone should know what the goals are, sometimes the flow of life and daily transactions can have people losing sight of what is supposedly paramount to the company.

With the mission, vision, and objectives easily accessible, the playbook spurs everyone to focus on best practices that can help achieve the most vital objectives.

Effective Communication Practices

The playbook helps orchestrate better communication practices. It is quick, efficient, and consistent, saving you from having to attend several meetings. Therefore, it would be best if the playbook had the best communication practices.

Yes, you still need to know whom to contact for every event. It is also helpful for newer team members to know whom to consult in various scenarios. This way, they won’t be fumbling in the dark and wasting time figuring out if a failed sale should be reported immediately or not.

Audience Media Use

The playbook should also contain the communication channels the company will use. Each team member should know what to handle and how to handle it.

The information should be consistent even if one person deals with emails and another answers phone calls. However, handling each situation should best befit whatever medium is used.

Insights generated should also include which communication channels various consumers prefer and why. These insights will give you an idea of whether each medium the company uses is worth the time, effort, and possible budget.

Goal Setting and Evaluation

Whether your company is using a playbook or not, a marketing plan should always come with set objectives and means of evaluation.

With the digital marketing playbook, you should be able to evaluate each channel with the use of relevant KPIs.

Integration of Media Channels and Activities

An excellent playbook includes a means to maximize marketing campaign impacts through media channels.

However, using media channels is not enough. Your company should use the channels consistently. Your different channels should also mesh together instead of competing against each other. Most of all, there should be logic in choosing your channels.

For example, it does not make sense to use a channel your target audience does not frequent. Here, we again see the importance of research. Having an excellent digital marketing playbook does not cancel the need for research. Research is required on every aspect of your campaign.

What Can a Digital Marketing Playbook Do for Your Brand?

One of the best benefits of a digital marketing playbook is that you can use the time saved to focus on developing your brand. The consistency promoted by the playbook can also make your brand clearer to your audience.

Here are what the digital marketing playbook can do for your brand:

The Brand's Essence

Before you make plans, research, or go digital, you should first understand your brand. Why did you create your products and services? What are they for, and what do they intend to accomplish? Who are they targeting?

If you cannot answer the questions above, then chances are you need to go back to the drawing board. A brand without a clear purpose won’t be able to connect to an audience.

The marketing playbook will help you regroup so your actions are always done with your brand in mind. Even new members will be updated on what words, visuals, colors, and other details to use whenever they are working on a campaign task.

Web Presence

It will help if you had your online presence felt; a landing page on your website will help potential customers discover more about you.

Suppose your professionally made website is floating around somewhere on the web without anyone finding it. In that case, it does not make sense to have it at all. A well-designed website should be easy to find and able to inform people more about you and encourage them to use your products and services.

A website should also come with the brand that you have initiated. Your web developers and managers will use the playbook to present a web presence that conforms to your brand.

Social Media

Most, if not all, companies use social media to introduce and promote their brands. Depending on their target audience, they use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and the like.

Social media marketing can be overwhelming. However, a team can help ease the pressure. Members, however, should stay true to their brand, promoting it without making a dent in the polished veneer you have started with.

Because of the digital marketing playbook, you don’t have to worry about your product being misrepresented elsewhere by your team members.

Social media marketing requires much strategizing and content planning. Signing up and designing your pages are just the beginning. Your web managers will have to continue churning out trend-worthy posts.

Of course, you and your team should go back to your objectives. Is being an active part of social media the public image you are trying to project? Are your posts relevant to your target audience and the chosen medium?

Online Advertising

Online advertising now provides a quicker, less expensive, and less complicated method of putting your brand out.

Instead of paying for TV ads or billboards, you can reach a larger audience through digital means via the World Wide Web.

Again, consistency and understanding of your brand are crucial to success. However, you should also consider what forms of online advertising you should use your marketing budget on.  

Remember that all your online ads should be part of your digital marketing playbook. They should belong to your best practices section.

What Best Practices Should Make It to Your Digital Marketing Playbook?

Whatever you do with your digital marketing strategies, choose the ones that work best for you and your company.

You don’t have to do everything. You utilize the techniques that are best for your company. Suppose your campaigns are well-planned, relevant, deliberate, and updated. In that case, you don’t have to worry about your competitors' actions.

Because your results differ from other companies, your playbook should be personalized to consider what works for you. This way, your team knows what to utilize and why you are using those strategies in the first place.

Conclusion

A digital marketing playbook collects all one needs to know about a company. Backed by research, its content encompasses goals and plans. It also includes strategies that have already been proven to work.

You and your team members may not play sports, but you must all work together. You may not be able to huddle physically very often because of time and geographic concerns, but the playbook unites you. It provides each member, old or new, guidance on what should be done and how.

Using a marketing playbook for your digital campaigns is simply consistent with modern marketing changes. These days, people are more results-oriented, and the pace is pretty fast.

So, is a digital marketing playbook beneficial? Yes, it is. It creates a consistent and cohesive approach that can be used by all team members, even if they are spread out to do their respective assignments. It keeps the brand in check and shows you that there are some practices the company can keep even though new trends may arise. Not every trendy and fresh strategy will work for you, but you can try a few and see.

If you need more information about what digital marketing playbooks can do for you, go to Get Quicker Leads.

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