Where to start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It remains a common challenge, as many companies know how important digital and mobile channels are today to acquiring and retaining customers. However, they do not have an integrated plan for growth and effectively engage their audience. If your business doesn’t have a plan, you’ll have problems that we’ll highlight in this article and lose to digitally smarter competitors.
A report by Smart Insights, the Digital Marketing Department, shows that nearly half of marketers have active digital marketing plans, but have no specific strategy at all.
The other half is divided between those with a stand-alone digital strategy (17%) and those who have integrated it into a more general marketing plan (34%). That’s how it should be, for the more advanced marketers, for whom digital marketing has become “business as usual.”
It is worth noting that many companies that do not yet have a written strategy use digital media and get results, but with an integrated digital marketing plan, digital media such as regular and paid search, ad redirection and social media marketing work better together and can be supported by other activities such as marketing automation or improved conversion of the website.
The most important reasons you need a digital marketing strategy
1- The written strategy gives you guidance and focus
Companies that haven’t written their approach may have a general sense of what they want to do online and what their tactics are, but they’re unlikely to have identified some core elements correctly.
For example, they may know that they want to get more visits to their website, but can they limit the number of visits? They may want to earn more customers, but can they determine the percentage, or through any channels?
Without specific goals based on creating conversion-based predictions, it’s hard to know exactly what you need to do online, and later measure how successful you are.
Creating a written strategy forces companies to address these critical questions, as well as formulate a strong online value presentation, accurately identify the target audience, and carefully consider all other building blocks of an effective digital program.
Another challenge with digital marketing is that there are many activities you can work on, which may spread yourself very little, or miss major activities. The strategy helps you choose to focus on priority strategic initiatives.
2- Marketing strategy makes everyone aware of the vision and objectives required
Ensuring that there is broad support for your digital activity within your company can be difficult, and it’s much easier to get this if you have a written plan that explains what you’re aiming to achieve and how it fits the company’s other marketing priorities and gives you a way to measure whether it works. Suddenly you have a digital program that can be promoted and defended, rather than just “something that each other has in common.”
Moreover, it ensures there is a vision and a way in which everyone should register. Without a written strategy, each manager is free to present his or her goals and priorities to online activity, and often the result is that everyone works for cross purposes without realizing it at all.
3- You’ll have better resources
If you’re working without a strategy, it’s hard to determine the budget your digital program needs in advance to succeed and what kind of skills your team needs to implement.
Sure, you can apply for more funding and hire employees whenever needed, but you’ll always be at the back. Surely the competitor will be more efficient – and easier to apply successfully – unless you are able to submit a long-term budget and staff plan?
Clear strategy reduces losses and wastes resources
Even if you have enough resources, they may be wasted without a strategy to use them efficiently, let’s take targeting as an example. Many large companies will invest in agency-paid media for exploration and retargeting, but sometimes they don’t put enough controls on media spending, so they can get the most “pay-for-money,” small businesses are often smarter because they reduce digital media waste by identifying media exceptions, for example:
- Age groups that may not be suitable for your product, for example young versus older
Geographical areas such as non-core markets
- Negative keywords and brand in Google Ads
- Increase spending at some periods of the day and reduce spending in other periods, for example B2B spent in the evening
- Select impressions and re-target the cookie set to increase your effective access
- Include or exclude former or non-buyer buyers and use similar targeting or in the market to make the budget go further
Another case of waste you also see in larger companies is where different parts of the marketing organization buy different tools or programs or use different agencies to perform similar online marketing tasks. The written strategy, in this case, is about better organization, so there is a common set of visions and marketing technology to support life cycle marketing.
- A clear strategy will help you improve and always stay ahead
Each company will have a website and each site has many analyses, but many managers do not guarantee that their team is working to save time or have time to review and act on those statistics and analyses.
The integrated strategy will build the test in your program, ensuring that continuous improvement can be made.
The strategy will also help you improve. A good strategy will measure your activity against competitors to show where you are behind the curve and clearly identify the goals you need to achieve online, allowing you to measure what works and what doesn’t, and make the necessary changes. Again, regular reviews will be included in the system, as long as you have a document to refer to.
Writing a strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. Start with one or two pages describing your goals, tactics, and key performance indicators. All you need to get started is a simple table that reconciles these elements for each part of the marketing path.
This activity alone will make a huge difference to your online performance, and you can create a more comprehensive documents later. To help keep your strategy flexible and on track, we propose a 90-day planning approach, where the digital strategy is not just a report that is created annually and then ignored. Instead, it is reviewed every 90 days for results from the fourth quarter and priority initiatives are identified for the next quarter to help maintain focus.
