Digital advertising can use various channels and formats, including social media, video streaming sites like YouTube, search engine sites like Google and display ads (banners).   

  
Before you start to develop your digital advertising strategy, it’s good to understand if digital advertising is the best option. We recommend you read: How do I get started with digital advertising?  

  
 This guide will provide you with all you need to create a digital advertising strategy.  


     

Creating a strong digital advertising strategy  

There are five key components to consider when creating a digital advertising strategy, which will help you to have the best impact before beginning your activity: 

  

1: Set your objectives     

   

Here it is important to remember that EIT Food is working to make the food system more sustainable, healthy and trusted, and all objectives should reflect this.  

   

Your objectives should be supported by measurable KPIs that can be included in performance reports. See some examples below:  

  

Example objectives  

Example KPIs  

Increase awareness  

  • Reach   

  • Impressions    

  • Ad recall lift rate   

  • ThruPlay   

  • CPM  

Engage  

  • Clicks   

  • CTR   

  • Cost per click   

  • Engagements   

  • Cost per engagement   

  • Sessions   

  • Page views  

Conversion  

  • Conversions   


  • To track these, you’ll need a publishing     strategy that incorporates UTM tracking and Google Analytics.   

Lead generation   

  • Sign ups  

  • Form completions  


  • To track these, you’ll need a publishing strategy that incorporates UTM tracking and Google Analytics.   

  
   

2: Define your target audiences    
   
Whether paid or organic activity, all EIT Food social media communications should be created with a specific audience in mind. To create your audience personas, ask the following questions:   


  • What job titles do they hold?  
  • Which sectors do they work in?  
  • What are their behaviours and interests?   
  • What social media channels do they use?  
  • What other media do they consume?   
  • What food-related challenges concern them?   
  • What is their age range, location, education level?   
  • What other brands would they ordinarily interact with?   

   

Your audiences will help you to start building the campaigns, using the native filtering options on each channel to refine and optimise your audiences based on the goals for the activity. You can also research what is the audience targeting across the platform you’re interested in creating the digital advertising strategy. 

   

3: Consider which channels to activate   

   
When creating your digital advertising strategy, it is important to consider the mix of channels you will want to activate. It’s a good idea to not spread your activity across too many channels as this will dilute the impact.   

   

When deciding which channels to use, think about the following: 

 

  • Which channels does your target audience use?  
  • How cost effective is each channel?   
  • How much budget will you need to activate a channel?   
  • What ROI (Return on Investment) are you expecting to achieve for each channel?  

      

    4: Set a budget and create a forecast   

      
    One of the biggest benefits of digital advertising is the ability to create estimates and forecasts. Some native advertising platforms provide valuable data that will help with this and provide more accurate budgeting. 

      

    • Facebook Business Manager – this tool provides estimated daily results that you can multiply into a forecast.  

    • YouTube Reach Planner  – as part of the Google network, you can find estimated reach of ads using Reach Planner that connects with the AdWords ecosystem.   

    • Google Keyword Forecasts – Google also helps you predict the success of your AdWords and display network campaigns using live keyword data.   

    • LinkedIn Campaign Manager – provides estimates from audience size, impressions, spend and number of clicks.  

    • (Twitter) X Business – this tool does not provide as much detail as the other platforms and is generally hard to forecast activity if there’s no previous campaigns you could use as a base line.    

       

    5: Measure and evaluate performance    
        

    For you to prove the impact of paid digital activities, all actions must have a clear plan for measurement that can be tracked.   

         

    Our data dashboard integrates all EIT Food digital advertising results, allowing you to easily view and measure your campaign performance. Read more about how to use the EIT Food data dashboard.  
       
    If you’re going to be advertising on EIT Food's core channels, please consider the following 2 important actions to make sure the data is visible in the dashboard:  


       

    Advertising run outside of EIT Food’s core channels (e.g. in an agency’s business manager) will be difficult to track in the dashboard.   

       

Please note: any paid campaigns run on EIT Food social media channels do not count towards project KPIs as this would be double counting.   


This article was last reviewed in December 2023 and will be reviewed again in December 2024. 

If you have feedback on this article, do let us know. You can drop us a note via our contact form.