Digital Communication Strategy: where to Start and why It’s Essential

The goal of this article is to provide support for a digital communication strategy tailored to your needs. If you’re wondering where to start building an effective online presence, know that the answer isn’t “open an Instagram profile” or “create a showcase website.”

The right answer to this question is: start with a solid digital communication strategy.

At the foundation of every online marketing action is a solid and well-structured digital communication strategy. But what’s the first concrete step? Let’s analyze the fundamental steps together.

1. Choose your objectives

Every communication activity must respond to a clear objective. Based on your needs, it’s essential to have clarity about the focus and objectives you want to achieve through digital communication. Do you want to:

• Increase your visibility?
• Generate qualified leads?
• Increase sales?
• Improve your reputation?

Without a well-defined objective, every effort risks being scattered. Defining the objective allows you to understand what to do, how to do it, and how to measure results.

The Measurability of the Objective

A key characteristic of the digital communication strategy objective is that it must be measurable. Indeed, our goal should not be based on abstract or uncontrollable ideas, but rather be constantly monitored through comparison with other realities or objective data that allow me to measure my improvements and aspirations.

For example, if I want to have more visibility than my competitors, I can use my website’s Google ranking, compared to competitors, with the goal of understanding better the key keywords and becoming aware of my starting point and, following an SEO strategy, where I’ve reached.

SMART Objective and its Characteristics

When discussing objectives, it’s mandatory to mention the concept of SMART objectives, as this is very important in today’s typical consumer’s messy middle, whether in B2B or B2C contexts. The SMART objective is based on 5 fundamental characteristics:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

2. Break down objectives in the communication funnel

Once you’ve clarified the objective of the digital communication strategy, ask yourself in which phase of the funnel your audience is.

What is a Funnel?

The communication funnel is a strategic model that describes the journey a person takes from first contact with a brand until becoming a customer or active supporter.

It’s used in marketing, business communication, and sales to guide and structure messages in a coherent and effective way throughout the various phases of audience engagement.

The funnel is divided into 4 fundamental phases, which correspond to 4 different states in the audience’s journey in a digital or non-digital marketing action. Here are the steps.

Awareness

In this initial phase, the objective is to make the brand known to the audience. It’s about creating familiarity with the brand’s name, messages, values, and style. The audience doesn’t know the brand yet, so the main objective is to let them know who we are.

Consideration (Consideration)

Once consumers are aware of the brand, they enter the consideration phase, where they evaluate if the products or services offered meet their needs.

In this phase, it’s important to provide detailed information and content that highlights the benefits and distinctive features of the products, helping consumers make informed decisions.

Conversion

The conversion phase is when the consumer decides to make a purchase or take a desired action. Strategies in this phase include targeted offers, effective call-to-actions, and a smooth purchasing experience to facilitate consumer decision-making.

Loyalty

After the purchase, the goal is to keep the customer engaged and satisfied, transforming them into a brand advocate. Activities in this phase include loyalty programs, personalized communications, and excellent customer service to encourage repeat purchases and promote positive word-of-mouth.

How to Check the Effectiveness of Actions During Different Phases?

Each phase requires different content, tones, and channels different. The strategy only works if every piece of the puzzle is in the right place. To check if the actions implemented for the different stages of the funnel are effective, you can analyze numerous KPIs that obviously change depending on the phase:

• Awareness: brand lift, reach, impressions, branded keywords.
• Consideration: engagement rate, bounce rate, time on page, CTR, CPC.
• Conversion: CAC or CPL, sales, leads, conversion rate.
• Retention: CLV, NPS, customer retention rate.

A good digital communication strategy is like a well-designed boat: even if small, it can handle big waves if it has a solid rudder.

3. Define your specific target audience, you don’t need to communicate to everyone

Often people say: “My audience is everyone“

Spoiler: if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.

Defining a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a realistic representation of your ideal customer, based on real data and market research, integrated with informed assumptions about behaviors, motivations, goals, challenges, and decision-making processes.

In other words, it’s a detailed profile that describes who your typical customer is, what they’re looking for, how they make decisions, and why they should choose you over others. Identifying the buyer persona helps to:

• Personalize communication and marketing.
• Develop content, products, and services that are more relevant.
• Better segment the audience and define targeted strategies.
• Improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, email marketing, funnels, and sales.

The Importance of Target Analysis

The study and target analysis are fundamental and start with basic questions that truly help you understand who you want to communicate with and to. You can’t communicate and appeal to everyone, but you can appeal to the right people for you.

Ask yourself:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What motivates them, what holds them back?
• Where do they get information, what content engages them?
  

Only then can you create effective messages, choose the right channels, and achieve real results.

What Elements Can be Used to Build the Audience?

• SEO: through keyword research, search intent analysis, and competitor analysis
• Google Ads: Using Google PMax for example with a similar audience to those who have visited competitors, or through remarketing to lists of existing leads or customers, or those who have requested information but haven’t purchased.
• Meta Ads: to intercept a broad audience, heavily guided by creativity, advantage+ with broad spectrum interests, or using lookalike audiences based on those who have interacted with specific video posts.
• LinkedIn Ads: identifying upfront who the buyer persona is within the company (role and type of industry, what they do, decision-making power within the company) and then using this info to target based on specific industry sectors for your solution (reaching only the desired people).

4. Choose the right channels based on target audience, not trends

• Are you a B2B company? LinkedIn and LinkedIn Ads campaigns help you connect with decision-makers and industry professionals.
• Do you have a high-search-volume product? Working well on SEO and blog articles brings qualified organic traffic over time, without having to constantly invest in advertising.
• Want quick results for a specific product or service? Google Ads intercepts those already searching for your solution.
• Do you have visual content or want to strengthen brand awareness? Meta campaigns (Facebook and Instagram) can help you increase visibility and engagement.
• Want to drive traffic to your site and enhance your technical content? The website, if well-designed and updated, is your solid foundation, the arrival (and departure) point of your entire strategy.

Channel selection should be based on your target audience, your business objectives, and available resources. Not trends. Not because “everyone else is doing it.”

Some Case Scenarios Based on Channels

When creating your digital communication strategy, you need to understand that being everywhere is pointless. Being in the right place at the right time makes the difference.

You don’t need to chase every available channel: you need to choose the right ones for you.

5. Consistency and perseverance are the foundation of growth

The digital communication strategy comes to life through content.

Whether it’s articles, social media posts, videos, newsletters, or advertising campaigns, every piece of content is a crucial part of the journey that guides your audience from discovery to loyalty.

To be truly effective, every piece of content must:

• Have a clear objective: inform, evoke emotion, inspire, convert… every piece of communication must serve a specific purpose within the funnel.
• Address a real need of your audience: identifying doubts, desires, problems, and aspirations of the target is the only way to remain relevant.
• Respect your brand’s tone of voice: stylistic and value consistency strengthens brand identity and builds trust over time.

It’s not just about publishing content, but about communicating with intention, day after day, with consistency and direction. It is through perseverance that authority is built. It is through consistency that attention, listening, and ultimately trust are earned.

6. Monitor, measure, improve

A digital strategy is not a static document. It is a living organism, which is tested, measured, and adapted. Everything starts with the KPIs mentioned at the beginning of the article. Those clear objectives you set at the start are the guiding light even at the end, because they allow you to analyze the results clearly and understand if an activity has truly made an impact.

Look at the data:

• Which content generates more interactions or inquiries?
• Which channels bring in qualified leads?
• Where can you improve the conversion rate?

Did you launch a LinkedIn campaign for lead generation as we did for the Mascherpa company? Then you want to know how many contacts you generated, at what cost per lead, and if those contacts were on target.

Did you work on the SEO optimization of your professional site, as in the case of the project with Fiskars? Then you will be interested in the increase in organic visits, the positioning of strategic keywords, and how much traffic has turned into actual inquiries.

Every insight you gather is an additional building block to optimize future actions, improve performance, and make increasingly informed choices.

Do You Want to Create a Tailored Digital Communication Strategy?

This is our job: helping professionals and companies design concrete digital strategies based on real objectives, precise targets, and high-impact content.

If you want to understand how to set up yours, write to me.

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