Digital Marketing Strategy

Whether your marketing strategy is highly detailed or only a series of ideas, you should start by assessing where you are now, then compare your current position and where you would want to be at some specific time a few short years down the road.

You also need to consider the various digital marketing channels. So ensure that you have an SEO strategy in place, a paid advertising campaign, a plan for social media, an email marketing plan (including autoresponder messages ready for potential customers) and also how you plan to service those customers and handle their queries once they start interacting with you.

Digital Marketing Strategy Approaches

It is quite common for businesses to perform digital marketing without a properly structured marketing strategy in place. Those who do have a strategy, often don't align it with the overall business objectives.

1. Your Business Lacks Direction

A lack of any digital strategy is indicative of a similar lack of understanding as to where your business should be heading and what it should be achieving. It may be that there is a lack of goals in general.

This is by no means confined to small businesses; it can be observed in large organisations as well. Many businesses we speak to are not sure how to use digital marketing to win new customers or how to extract more meaningful relationships from existing customers.

2. Your Competitors Gain Market Share

If your company does not engage with the marketplace through online channels, then you cannot be surprised when other competitors in your sector or niche win new customers that were there for the taking.

When you have identified which online channels your prospective customers are using (by analysing your historical customer base) you need to take action and engage with those people. To do nothing, simply allows other competitors to take what could have been yours.

3. Make Sure You Know Your Potential Online Market

If you haven’t performed research to evaluate your marketplace (or your potential marketplace) then the chances are that you will underestimate its size. Without proper research, you will also not understand how this market operates, how its dynamics differ from other markets, and what you will need to do in order to gain a competitive advantage.

There are useful free resources available to evaluate your online marketplace and to gauge the potential customer demand. Keyword research is crucial in discovering what people are searching for on search engines. Google’s own Keyword Planner (https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/tools/keyword-planner/) is a useful tool for this. You can also use Facebook IQ (https://www.facebook.com/business/insights) to dig deeper into your sector.

4. Do You Know Your Online Customers Well Enough?

Evaluate, Test and Measure - three items we recommend you perform regularly.

There are free tools available for evaluating the volume of visitors your website receives. Google Analytics (https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/) is really useful for this, however, it has its limits as most people only use it to determine the number of visitors, their demographics and the digital channel source.

These tools do not tell you about what people are thinking, they cannot determine the sentiment of the website visitors at that moment in time. You need to use more insightful tools to ask your visitors (and customers) more probing questions so that you can gain a deeper understanding of your potential customers - this will enable your website, email messaging or social media posts to address any emotional barriers.

5. You Don't Know the Value of Your Customers

Do you know the value of each of your customers, or the potential value of your customers? Do you know their lifetime value?

If you are able to target both new and existing customers, then the value of each customer will become a "lifetime value" instead of being based on just one purchase. For example, when you first win a customer, they may purchase a product or service from you at £999. At this point, their value to you is only £999. Whereas, if you provide excellent customer service and they become repeat customers, say buying products at £500, then another at £1,199, their lifetime value increases to £2,698.

There are many ways of keeping your customers loyal so that they become lifetime customers. The best of these is content marketing. An effective and consistent content marketing strategy that you share across different digital channels will engage your customers, keeping them loyal to your brand.

6. Make Sure That Your Business is Fully Integrated

In any business, there is always a danger of marketing activities taking place in different departments without those departments speaking and properly integrating with each other.

We live in an age of gurus and specialists, so it is not surprising that this exists. But it is not the healthiest way for any business, large or small, to proceed.

Digital marketing works best when it is properly integrated within the existing marketing framework, and the more seamless it is, the better the results. Make sure that you have an integrated digital marketing plan in place that everyone "buys into" so that it will become part of your overall everyday marketing strategy.

7. The Danger of Duplication of Effort and Resources

This tends to happen in larger companies where the same things are done by people in different departments. It creates "overlaps" of duties and tasks which ultimately results in a waste of time, money and effort.

Always ensure that the digital marketing tasks that have to be completed are done only once, with one set of tools, so that results can be measured and improved - this will ensure that other people are not wasting time or money by repeating the same tasks.

8. Not Enough Resources Have Been Allocated to Your Digital Team

It is quite often the case that companies do not allocate sufficient money or resources to digital marketing teams. The owners often see digital marketing teams as a cost, rather than an investment.

You should ensure that you have sufficient qualified personnel spearheading your digital campaigns. Do not underestimate the necessity of having a well-resourced and well-funded digital team.

9. You Let the Competition Beat You By Not Optimizing and Playing to Your Strengths

All the successful tech-based companies have marked out their path by playing to their strengths and optimizing whenever the opportunity has arisen. That is how Google, Amazon and Dell consistently thrive and fare much better than their competitors. They simply find a way of being better in the marketplace. In doing so, they define themselves and become better at retaining their customers for longer.

Make sure that you know how to read the analytics data which is available through tools such as Google Analytics and then act on it. Reviewing the data should become at least a weekly task so that you can see trends emerging, as well as being able to spot problems happening before they become insurmountable.

There are tools available which allow you to spy on your competitor's online performance, you should adopt these too. Discover where you are stronger than your competitors and play on this to win more customers.

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