10
reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy in 2018
Using a digital marketing plan to support digital
transformation
Where do you start if you want to develop a digital
marketing strategy? It's a common challenge since many businesses know how
vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining
customers. Yet they don't have an integrated plan to grow and engage their
audiences effectively, so they are suffering from the 10 problems I highlight
later in this article and they are losing out to competitors.
The
challenges of creating a digital marketing strategy?
In my experience, a common challenge is where to start
drawing up your digital marketing plan. I think there is a fear that a massive
report is required, but we believe that lean planning works best. Your plan
doesn't need to be a huge report, a strategy can best be summarized in two or
three sides of A4 in a table linking digital marketing strategies to SMART
objectives within RACE. We recommend
creating a lean digital plan based on 90-day planning to implement your digital
plan rapidly to gain traction. You can learn more in our free download.
Another challenge is the sheer scope and scale of digital
marketing. There are so many great digital marketing techniques ranging from
search, social and email marketing to improving the digital experience of your
website. Our article, What is digital marketing? shows how by using our RACE
planning framework you can define a more manageable number of digital marketing
activities which cover the full customer journey. Within each digital marketing
technique there are lots of detailed tactics that are important to success, so
they need to be evaluated and prioritised, for example from dynamic content for
email automation, website personalization to programmatic, retargeting and
skyscraper content for organic search.
A recommended approach
for developing a digital strategy
10 reasons why you
may need a digital channel strategy?
1. You're
directionless
I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don't
have clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of
gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And
if you don't have goals with SMART digital marketing objectives
you likely don't put enough resources to reach the goals and you don't evaluate
through analytics whether you're achieving those goals.
2. You won't know your online audience or market
share
Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you
haven"t researched this. Perhaps,
more importantly, you won't understand your online marketplace: the dynamics
will be different to traditional channels with different types of customer
profile and behaviour, competitors, propositions and options for marketing
communications. See online marketplace methodology post. There are great tools
available from the main digital platforms where we can find out the level of
customer demand, we recommend doing a search gap analysis using Google's
Keyword planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to
attract them to your site, or see how many people interested in products or
services or sector you could reach through Facebook IQ.
3. Existing and
start-up competitors will gain market share
If you're not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you're
using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your
competitors will eat your digital lunch!
4. You don't have a
powerful online value proposition
A clearly defined online customer value proposition tailored to your different
target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service
encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.
Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key to this for many
organisations since content is what engages your audiences through different
channels like search, social, email marketing and on your blog.
It's often said that digital is the "most measurable medium
ever". But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of
visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other
forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then
address them.
6. You're not
integrated ("disintegrated")
It's all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in
silos whether that's a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate
digital agency. It's easier that way to package digital marketing into a
convenient chunk. But of course, it's less effective. Everyone agrees that
digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response
channels. We always recommend developing an integrated digital marketing
strategy and once digital transformation is complete digital marketing
activities will be part of your marketing plan and part of business as usual.
7. Digital doesn't
have enough people/budget given its importance
Insufficient resource will be devoted to both planning and executing
e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing
skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats
effectively.
8. You're wasting
money and time through duplication
Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly
the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing
organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for
performing similar online marketing tasks.
9. You're not agile
enough to catch up or stay ahead
If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco,
Zappos, they're all dynamic - trialing new approaches to gain or keep their
online audiences.
10 You're not
optimizing
Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers
don't ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them.
Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to
continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user
experience, email and social media marketing. So that's our top 10 problems
that can be avoided with a well thought-through strategy.
So, the good news is that there are powerful reasons for creating a
digital strategy and transforming your marketing which you can use to persuade
your colleagues and clients. There is also now a lot of experience from how
other businesses have successfully integrated digital marketing into their
activities as explained in the example digital plans, templates and best
practices in our digital marketing strategy toolkit.
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