Why do you need a digital marketing strategy?
Digital marketing employs what can be a mind-boggling and growing array of platforms and channels to reach consumers, including combining website marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media, e-mail marketing, display advertising, content automation, influencer marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, video marketing, and more. It is often used in combination with traditional marketing channels.
This brings unique challenges: How do you keep up with how to use all of these channels to effectively market your products and services, while still staying focused on running your business? How do you ensure that you are capturing and using your data effectively to learn more about your own customer’s journey? And how do you stay ahead of the competition?
This is where a digital marketing strategy comes in, bringing clear advantages to your marketing efforts and your business success.
It helps focus and identify your goals
Growing your company’s online presence means more than having a goal of adding more followers on Facebook or Instagram. A well-defined digital marketing strategy helps to create an effectively targeted action plan with clearly defined goals and measurements for success.
It gives a roadmap to build your presence in the online marketplace
A digital marketing strategy provides the data driven insights to identify and focus on the channels that will reach your potential customers as well as to quickly learn which channels would be a waste of effort and money. This understanding of your customer’s habits and behaviors helps you to get the basics right and gives you a roadmap with which to build your strategic position in the online marketplace.
It identifies your online market share and value proposition
Online customers do not respond like traditional marketing customers. A digital marketing strategy gives insights into your customers and their behaviors and find out what services and products they actually want. It can bring to light entire market segments that you did not even know about. It identifies and defines the value proposition that makes you stand out online and fit the marketplace that is right for your company’s offerings.
It increases efficiency, synergy, and reach with multichannel marketing
Digital and traditional marketing may seem different, but they are often working to solve many of the same challenges, even when the people involved are working in their own distinct marketing and outreach specialties. Unfortunately, even in small companies this division of labor can lead to duplicate efforts and initiatives as well as mixed communications.
A coordinated digital strategy puts everyone on the same page and aligns their efforts. This can also be dramatically more cost effective, as the digital strategy process identifies the marketing approaches and tools that are not optimized or even wasteful, thereby saving on time, money, and resources.
A multi-channel strategy uses the different marketing channels to solve for different problems and to extend a company’s reach and visibility. This allows you to reduce redundancy and to create a collective effort so as to reach the entire market both efficiently and synergistically.
It enables you to adapt to change and seize opportunities as they arise
Having a strategy in place gives an agile approach and culture that confers a distinct advantage in adapting to the constantly changing market and environment. Besides helping with goal setting, it includes built in check-points and plans for managing resources in response to both analytics data as well as environmental changes and opportunities.
It gives you the insights to test and experiment with new approaches, the measurements and information to eliminate methods that do not work, and the agility to pivot and adjust your strategy to use the methods that work best when they work best and where they work best.
Opportunities can come and go quickly and must be seized in the moment.
Your competitors already have digital marketing strategies
Your competitors are already online and are already working to maximize their presence and take your potential customers. This means that each day that you are not optimizing your own digital strategy and building your online visibility, you are losing your potential customers to your current and future competitors.
In Closing
Building and implementing a digital marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive: begin by identifying what you would like to accomplish and then selecting a few tools and platforms that fit within your current budget. And stay flexible! A good online marketing strategy is agile by design, evolving as you gain insights and enabling you to adapt to a constantly changing marketplace.
Contact us to help develop your digital marketing strategy.
