Why should you have Digital Marketing Strategy to your Business?
Do you have ongoing digital marketing activities? Planning a digital marketing strategy helps to set its foundation.
Your digital marketing activity may fall short of your expectations if you don’t outline a specific digital marketing plan as part of your strategy, you can also fail to achieve your business goals.
Without having a specific digital marketing strategy, you don’t have a clearly defined goal in order to drive your business growth online.
It is important to make a plan of your objectives on how you are going to go about achieving them, and how you will analyse and optimise your marketing in the future.
Parts of a digital marketing strategy
The first step in getting the most effective online marketing activities is planning a digital marketing strategy.
It should define any transformations required in order to achieve your marketing objectives. A digital marketing strategy should make a case for investment in your digital marketing activities, and how to get the best ROI.
Indicate your objectives
These could be
- Improve brand recognition
- Increase leads
- Increase sales
- Market to new target audiences
- Improve online presence
- Grow your market share
The budget
You should plan a budget that allows you to reach your goals. Many business owners that have big goals, fails to invest the right budget in digital marketing. It’s important to assess the most important goals, and how much you will allocate to this.
Map a path
What are your plans for reaching your goals?
Consolidation
What are your ideas on merging digital marketing into your broad marketing strategy and business goals?
Competitor analysis
How does your marketing activity compare to competitors? Is your online presence poor in comparison? Does your website need improvement in order to compete?
Target audience
Outline your target audience, by demographics, interests, psychographic characteristics and so on.
Segment them
Create a persona of a person you can keep in mind when marketing. Who is your ideal customer? What appeals to them? Where can you find them online? What marketing channels or tactics would be most effective to this individual?
Decide on marketing channels
Which will work best based on your target audience? Social media? Search? PPC? Email marketing? Do they frequent particular websites, groups, or otherwise?
The Benefits of a Digital Marketing Strategy
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Give your digital marketing direction
Once you choose to create a strategy, you can outline clear strategic goals you want to achieve.
Whatever these goals may be, whenever you are marketing online you or your team can keep these in mind. Whether it’s getting customers, building relationships, and so on – your goals should be clearly recognized and be part of any digital marketing activity that goes on.
You can also find out any weaknesses you may have. In particular, do you have the support to reach your goals? And how are you going to analyse the success of your digital marketing activities? How will this direct what you do in the future?
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Outline value proposition
When it comes to marketing your product or service online, you’re forced to be competing with other competitors.
So how exactly are you going to distinguish your product or service?
This is where your strategy can really help you dig deep into what makes you different, and how you can attract to your target audience. What can you do to inspire customers to engage with your brand over competitors, and raise your sales?
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Determine your target audience
Determining your target audience can be difficult for business owners when it comes to digital marketing. And knowing how to target and market to your target audience is vital.
So do you know where to find your key target audience, and how you can appeal to them? What kind of collateral appeals to them? Do they want a written content or visual content? Maybe videos are popular with them?
But thankfully, digital marketing is very, very measurable, which is why many business owners find it effective and useful in honing who they market to.
However, Google Analytics is often not enough in order to analyse your audience. You could aim to get feedback from your key target audience in order to best serve other customers in the future. Perhaps a survey, a quiz, or otherwise. This can help you optimise your future campaigns.
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Blend your digital marketing
A clear strategy helps to blend your digital marketing activities with other areas of your business.
Digital marketing can often become secluded from the rest of your business, while one or a few members of your team may slave away on a PC with online marketing activities. Or perhaps they do it sporadically and don’t realise how important it is to the attention of your brand online. Maybe the rest of your team doesn’t know what you or your digital marketing team are actually doing online?
This should not be the case, as it needs to be blended into wider business goals. A strategy helps you do this. You can help assure campaigns are aligned with other media, marketing campaigns, or other response channels you may have.
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Give the right budget
A business owner can easily discharge digital marketing as an unnecessary part of their business when their business is doing fine but some business owners are fine with doing “fine”. Digital marketing can always be better and the first step is designating a practical budget to it.
Think about how often a website is the first impression a customer may have a brand. How frequently have you heard of a business, brand or product, Googled it, landed on a website, and judged it there and then? No doubt potential customers are doing the same with your brand.
What about the marketing activities that get someone to go to your website? Even then, if the brand impression is poor, they won’t even be making it onto your website.
A strategy should outline where you have an inadequate resource to achieve your goals, as well as any skills you may not have internally. Outsourcing could be the way forward.
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Upgrade ROI and don’t waste your money
Getting ROI from your marketing campaigns is essential, in order to avoid wasted resource.
Assign the right budgets to the right areas of marketing, whether it’s channels or campaigns, that align with your goals.
An integrated approach to digital marketing works best, and generates the best ROI. This is why a strategy can help, to ensure you are integrating everything together, and that your campaigns align. Less wasted time and money.
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Ongoing optimisation
When are you going to set aside time in order to review and act on your analysis? Your strategy should include when you will do this.
A digital marketing strategy helps you to continually improve key aspects of your digital marketing, and see exactly where are you getting results.
You should also be able to see how can you improve problem areas, and when to focus on the channels that work.
Many businesses still do digital marketing activities without a strategy. There’s no doubt that digital marketing can still be used effectively, but a strategy is always a good idea.
There is a case for the fact that without a strategy, you may be missing out on critical opportunities in order to gain better results or to improve your targeting. It could be that your digital marketing campaigns could be better optimised, but you never find out because your marketing plan isn’t clearly defined.
One of the main parts of marketing that involve multiple people is strategies. Each individual may have a different idea of the end goal or other differences that can arise. A digital marketing plan can outline opportunities and problems, and how to handle them. People may act differently.
Generally, the important thing is that you are doing digital marketing. However, if you’re already marketing but you don’t have a plan, it’s always valuable to think on how you can enhance your digital marketing efforts. And the first step in doing so is to take a step back, formulate a strategy, create a marketing plan, and reassess your next steps.
Looking for an agency that can help you in your marketing strategy? Contact Top4 Marketing, an award-winning digital marketing and technology services agency providing solutions to the largest and upcoming brands across all industries and government in Australia and across APAC.
