Digital Marketing Strategy: Five Reasons Why You Need One

Many businesses ask the same question as to where they should start when developing a digital marketing strategy. The ever-growing competition, globalisation and the internet provide customers with more products, easier and faster than ever. There are so many great digital marketing techniques such as search, social, email marketing and marketing automation. How do some companies still not have an integrated plan to acquire and retain customers?

Getting your digital marketing strategy just right can be challenging but it’s worth the effort. Don’t lose out to the competition by thinking your business doesn’t need a sound digital marketing strategy. You’ll see that a little bit of effort is well worth it in the end!

Reasons Why Your Business Needs A Digital Marketing Strategy

Regardless of product or service offering, here are just five reasons why your business needs an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Provide Clear Business Goals/Objectives

Companies without a digital marketing strategy generally don’t have a clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online. Not surprisingly, this also extends to some companies even WITH clear goals or objectives. It’s super important to have a strategy for gaining new customers or building lasting relationships with existing ones. If you take one thing away from this, consider digital marketing goals with SMART objectives. You need to provide sufficient resources to reach the goals and evaluate ROI through analytics.

Identify Better With Your Target Audience

Getting more web visitors is always challenging but a good digital marketing strategy will most certainly help. To understand your audience, market research is vital but the dynamics will be different compared to traditional channels. You’ll face different types of customer profiles and behaviour, digital savvy competitors, propositions and marketing communication options.

We recommend a number of tactics and techniques including SEO, social media, Paid Search Campaigns (PPC) and traditional offline advertising. Do a search gap analysis with Google’s Keyword planner to see how you are attracting searchers to your site. You can also use Facebook IQ to see how many people might be interested in products or services within a specific sector.

As good as Google Analytics may be, it doesn’t measure visitor sentiment (what they think of your business). Include other community feedback tools in your digital marketing strategy to get the most out of your data. Either use tools such as GetSatisfaction and UserVoice or add a feedback form on your website. Remember to add form fields for a star-rating, NPS (Net Promoter Score) or Customer Satisfaction score. You can even add feedback categories like “complaint”, “compliment” or “suggestion” and include an option for an open comment.

Remain Relevant, Agile And Integrated

When you think of the world’s top digital brands like Google, Amazon or Dell, they’re all dynamic. Regardless of industry trends, they remain relevant and agile by continuously adapting their approach to lead generation and lead nurturing. They don’t play catch-up, they set the trend more often than not.

Being agile plays well with having an integrated, holistic approach to marketing. Most modern marketers will agree that digital marketing works best when integrated with traditional channels. It focuses on the importance of a consistent, seamless and multi-dimensional brand experience. A well-executed integrated digital marketing strategy will quickly form part of your everyday activities and yield the desired results.

Optimised Budgets

Insufficient resources are often allocated to planning and executing online marketing which results in no digital marketing specialists on staff. Lack of online marketing expertise and a poor strategy will make it difficult to effectively respond to competitive threats. It’s not uncommon for bigger companies to waste money on digital marketing if the teams and strategies are not integrated and unified. This is particularly the case where different departments purchase different tools or use different agencies to perform similar marketing tasks.

Keep things in-house where possible and ensure an open line of communication between all departments. An integrated digital marketing strategy can help keep activities within budget and more controlled.

Improved Data And Analytics

It’s safe to assume that every business with a website will have analytics in some shape or form. A common problem is that many senior managers don’t ensure that their teams review or act on important analytics. In some cases, they don’t even get the basics right and this can be detrimental to any marketing effort. By implementing a good strategy, continuous improvement of key aspects is possible. This includes search marketing, site user experience, email marketing, marketing automation and social media data.

Whichever way we look at it, companies need to know their customers, identify and understand their needs while also looking at their competitors. There are a number of ways to drive more traffic but one of the most important things to remember is that content is always king. You can have the biggest marketing budget and most experienced team but without good content and strategy, traffic is the least of your concerns.

Integrated marketing helps optimise spend, online or offline. It also helps you work out the right approach that will yield the most desired results. If you’re ready to take the next step to develop your winning strategy, get in touch through our website or find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.