How to Use Digital Credentials to Plan a Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is a necessity for organizations to get found online by their customers and target audience. Digital marketing needs a robust strategy to get it right and maintain momentum. Once a strategy loses focus or isn’t being maintained, organizations can quickly lose the visibility they have gained as competitors take over.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

In its simplest terms, a digital marketing strategy is the granular detail of where and how a target audience is going to be engaged with. For example, a common social media marketing strategy identifies the preferred platform of an organization’s customers and delegates a staff member to continuously post relevant information and engage with followers to promote trust.

A successful digital marketing strategy focuses on authentic marketing. Marketing and advertising that is too strong is often seen as intrusive and aggressive and is demotivating for consumers. The best marketing is natural and encourages the use of positive customer interactions and delivering exceptional customer service to inform potential customers of how the organization performs.

How do digital credentials support a digital marketing strategy?

Digital credentials are delivered to recipients in recognition of:

Experience or knowledge
Learned skills
Association membership
Qualifications
Attendance and participation

When a recipient receives their digital credential, they are encouraged to view the credential page. From here they have the option to share their credential to social media, add to a digital wallet card on a smartphone, embed their credential to an email signature, or add the credential to their LinkedIn profile.

Authentic Marketing

The interaction that happens after a credential has been received isn’t forced but encouraged using clear call to action buttons and informative resources. This is a chance for a recipient to share and celebrate their new ability, talent, or association membership with their peers, friends, and family and often occurs without extra incentive.

Targeted Visibility

Once shared, anyone that engages with the credential is taken to the credential page and this is an opportunity for organizations to promote their courses, training, membership, or relevant qualification. The visitors that view the credential are more likely to be a part of the target audience, particularly views that come from LinkedIn - the self-acclaimed professional social media platform.

Encourage Action

As part of a social media strategy, organizations should encourage social sharing using additional CTA buttons in the delivery email and engage with the recipients that do share their credential. By engaging, even with a simple ‘congratulations’, this increases visibility to other recipients and potential customers.

Establish Authority

Another avenue used to encourage recipients to engage with their digital credential is to create informative resource pages that provide an authoritative source on what the digital credentials are, how they are used, and how they provide value. We recommend creating a central source of information that covers these main points alongside the value and benefits of the courses, training, or membership offered. A comprehensive FAQ also provides another route for driving traffic and encouraging engagement. Include both these links in the delivery email to start driving website traffic from receipt.

In Summary

Marketing is often a challenge for organizations, especially when the aim is to promote trust, build relationships, and ultimately increase online visibility. Digital credential marketing strategies involve authentic marketing that are effective at driving conversions and encouraging engagement.