Assignment: Milestone Guidelines

Overview: The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, and companies must be nimble and able to develop, evaluate, and change their digital marketing strategies in a short amount of time. Traditional marketing allowed marketers to create brand messaging and control how it was shared with an audience. But now more than ever, control over what is said about a brand or product has been put into the hands of consumers. The internet, social media, and mobile platforms have given rise to the voice of customers, and marketers have had to adapt.

Prompt: For this assignment, you will examine the social media platforms used by the brand you selected. You will discuss how these platforms are used to support the brand's digital marketing strategy. Before recommending changes to a brand's digital presence, it is important to review and analyze its current state. This will help inform changes and improvements in the new media campaign.

Note: The ethical considerations section of critical element II has been intentionally omitted from this milestone. That section must be addressed when submitting the complete final project in Module Five.

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:

II. Social Media Platforms: In this section, you will examine the social media platforms used by the brand you selected. You will discuss how these platforms are used to support the brand's digital marketing strategy.

A. Identify the social media platforms the brand uses and explain how they align to the brand's target market.

B. Describe how the brand uses each social media platform. Consider what the brand's social media posts consist of or look like.

C. Describe how the brand must modify posts in order to accommodate the differing functionalities of social media platforms. In other words, how does a brand need to change a post between various social media platforms in order to communicate the same message?

III. Evaluating Digital Marketing Campaigns: Before recommending changes to a brand's digital presence, you should review and analyze its current state.

This analysis will help inform changes and improvements in the new media campaign.

A. Strengths

1. Determine which digital platforms would be most effective for the brand to use. Consider the overall brand, messaging strategy, and other marketing activities. Be sure to cite examples.

2. Describe what the brand is doing well on digital media. Support your response with examples.

B. Weaknesses

1. Identify a platform that the brand is currently using for marketing and could be improved or utilized more effectively. Support your response with examples.

2. Determine what the brand could improve on regarding its digital activity. Support your response with examples.

3. Describe how the brand could use research to better focus its digital activity.