I see the role of a Digital Strategist/Planner being split into 4 distinct areas which can be described using the campaign process. The first part of a strategists role involves creating and presenting pitches and planning for the early stages of an account/campaign. The planner is instrumental in gathering the consumer insight using as much Quant and Qual as they find necessary. These tools and teqniques are used to accurately analyse the target market and produce a map of how a user would use the digital world to interact with a brand or product. The planners key role in this process would be to gather the brand/consumer insights and deep dive to gather more detail so that the client can have a clearer view on how they should present the project to market. These ideas will then be put through the brainstorming / creative process and used to create a ‘big idea’ based on the client brief. The ‘big idea’ is then taken to the creative department and the initial creative concepts are formed. Once the creative concepts are formed and an objective argument had been drafted for each, the planner will support the Account Directors in creating a pitch Presentation, Setting KPI’s and then together with a Strategy Director and the Account Directors will present the pitch.
The second part of a planners role is to monitor and advise on the on-going progress of a campaign and what needs to be done in order to achieve KPI’s. This can involve on-going analysis and recommendation of changes and additional spend required to reach KPI’s. Throughout this stage The Planner / Strategist would support Account Directors in understanding and presenting results to clients and more importantly in representing the voice of the consumer. This enables the planner to advise the client on how the consumer wants to interact with the digital world within the selected strategies.
The third part of a planners role is to produce and present the digital campaign de-briefing to both clients and Account Directors. The Planner now puts a Strategist hat back on and summarise the campaign elements producing reports and charts so that their client fully understands what was done and how the KPI’s were achieved. These learning’s will then be presented as an on-going account plan and a road map of how to move forward into the next campaign. When the planner takes a new brief for an existing client they will always refer back to these reports and use the learning’s in any kick off meeting to gather a better insight into the consumer and the marketplace.
The fourth and by no means final part of a digital planner/strategist role is to raise the knowledge of specialist areas within their agency and produce training and reference materials for both 1 to 1 and group training sessions in the most prevalent areas of the Digital space that clients and account directors would want to use.
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Look at linking as a giant networking event for websites
We have all heard that in order to build successful and natural search engine results websites need good incoming links. With the number of sites growing and links constantly being created all over the web what about non page rank links and strategies that can create traffic without the big G, Y! and B getting involved.
Link building can be used in two ways. The first and most noted is to acquire incoming links so that search engines rank your site higher. The second method is to post links and get involved with relevant communities who will talk about your website and send you traffic.
These can both be seen as a giant networking event. If you go to a party and sound interesting everyone will want to talk to you. If you are the desperate sales man looking to score a lead out of every conversation you may end up hanging out by the bar on your own for most of the night.
Treating Link Building as networking is a good way to acquire great quality links that will also send natural traffic to your site AND be immune from future Google slaps when the algorithms change.
Here are a few ways you can get great quality links and by being interesting your can amplify the responses quite easily:
1. Press Releases: Press releases are a very important ingredient to any online marketing campaign. Links embedded into the press release can generate very useful links for your website from other industry related sites. If it is a really newsworthy topic and other websites pick up the information it will be even more beneficial in generating new pathways to your website.
2. Articles: Articles used to have a bit more weight to them but they are still very important. The right types of articles could very easily get picked up on other industry leading websites leading to very good links and a steady stream of highly targeted website traffic.
3. Profiles: Website profiles usually only give you one link but that one link is a very important link. Whether it is from Facebook or LinkedIn the links let the search engines know that you are serious about growing your business in many different areas online.
4. Forums: Most forums are very old so the links you could get from them will help your business in a great way. Not to mention the traffic you could generate from being active in a forum is sometimes very surprising. Many of the older forums have a great deal of activity and if it’s a forum dedicated towards your industry than you should be there regardless.
5. Local Profiles: Don’t think because you want to take your business international that listing yourself in the local places and directories isn’t important. The links will let the search engines know that you have a physical address connected with your business helping grow your trust factor.
6. Blog Comments: Leaving intelligent related comments behind on your targeted industry blogs is very helpful. Many of the links appear in Google webmaster tools all while driving highly relevant traffic to your website.
7. Industry Associations: Local online and offline industry associations are a great way to build trust with your website visitors. Often many times association memberships include the opportunity to have profiles and links to your website. This not only helps with link building but builds highly relevant visitors to your website.
8. Directories. Industry directories (similar to what you call Industry Associations) are more beneficial than general directories because they are more relevant and are still crawled by bots.
9. RSS Feeds. These are an excellent way to quickly post a large number of backlinks across the internet.
10. Social Media sites. You mentioned social media profiles, but even more important are posts on social media sites (especially Facebook and Twitter). This is because Google and Bing have both established relationships with these sites and posts on these sites show up at the top of search results VERY quickly (often within 30 minutes). The downside is they fall off relatively quickly as the search engines are always looking for the most recent posts, but they can help build links to your other links.
11. Relevant websites. Getting custom backlinks from other websites can be difficult, but it is worth the effort to target high PR websites and try to get backlinks from them (even if they are reciprocal).
12. Videos. With most video sites, you can include a description with backlinks when you post the video. As a result, posting videos on the top 30 media websites is an excellent method of generating lots of backlinks to your site relatively quickly.
The best links are those that are rarest and most difficult to get. It takes a very minimal amount of thought to get featured in your local press. Run a charity event. Organise an unusual competition for local people. Start a programme for local employees. In short local news and being helpful will generate positive PR and make you stand out. Anything that gets you in to the local newspaper and thus in their online website is good. Keep an archive of interesting stories to give you ideas.
The same goes for all things on the list. Putting a story on an articles site is not totally worthless but nobody reads those sites apart from people looking to ‘submit’ articles. Your article needs to be published by a more popular and credible site. This can only be done if they search you out.
And remember make it interesting, get involved in the conversation and respond to others social media questions. If you position yourself as an expert in a particular area you will soon start to generate a traffic swarm that will be unstoppable!
Onur