We have two questions for you.
First, does your business use digital marketing? Great!
Next, does your business follow a strategic approach? Why not?
Many businesses are in the exact same boat as you. They take advantage of digital marketing strategies and see results from them. But they don’t have a strategic framework that they follow, and therefore, miss opportunities or suffer from other challenges.
Perhaps you fall somewhere in the middle. It’s commonplace for businesses to create a separate digital marketing plan, but where they struggle is actually integrating this plan into their marketing strategy.
Whether your business lacks a sound strategy, or you’re interested in reviewing which business practices should be included in your review, we’ve taken the time to outline exactly why your business should have a digital strategy.
Let’s get moving!
You can create harmony around the workplace.
Imagine a workspace of zen. People happy and smiling, high-fiving as they walk to the break room…
OK, so maybe a digital strategy won’t have quite that much of an impact, but it can make people a lot happier, more team-oriented and more productive.
No one likes to be left out or the last one to find out about things, but that’s what happens when you don’t have a solid framework for everyone to follow. A digital strategy gives your business the foundation that it needs to get your team working together to achieve specific goals.
While a bit of healthy competition is never a bad idea, you don’t want people within your company working against each other. A written strategy clearly outlines who is responsible for what. This gives everyone a clear and valuable purpose, and prevents people from working on the same things at the same time.
You can preserve your resources.
Do you have an unlimited supply of money? We didn’t think so. Since you are working on limited funds, it’s important that you are smart about where you are allocating your resources. Even if you were to have sufficient resources, why would you want to waste them?
Creating a digital strategy ensures that your budget is going to the right places. You may organize all of your marketing strategies and decide who is responsible for what, how much you want to spend on each one and more. You might even find that some of your tasks can be outsourced to an agency for a much lower cost than what you’re doing in-house.
You can stay on task throughout the year.
At the start of a new year, it’s refreshing to establish new goals and put new practices into action. But if you don’t have a clearly defined strategy to carry you through the months, it’s possible that you’re going to end up stranded in the digital world.
It’s likely that you have a general idea of what you want to do, but without a clear, concise strategy, it’s hard to stay on task. For instance, you might want to get more visitors to your website, but what is “more” to you? Do you plan to pinpoint this number by percentage? Through certain channels?
If you know that you want to increase the number of visitors by 50 percent, or that you want to drive more traffic from LinkedIn, you are telling yourself what you need to do to see success. You can then measure your success using the appropriate metrics.
You can optimize your strategy and keep ahead.
When you take the time to collect and measure your success metrics, you get a better idea of how your campaigns are performing and what you can do to improve them. Continuous improvement is necessary if you want to optimize your strategies and stay ahead of the competition. Not making improvements is like getting stuck in quicksand.
Additionally, the right metrics give you a benchmark. You need to know if you are hitting your goals, and if not, what changes can be made to see progress. Bottom line, without a strategy, you won’t have goals to work on or metrics to collect.
You can learn more about your audience.
Google Analytics is a great tool that tells you a lot about your audience, but do realize that it tells you volumes rather than sentiments. A good digital strategy allows you to dig deeper into who your customers are, what types of pain points they have and what solutions they want to see from you.
There are many ways to collect feedback from your audience, such as by using customer website feedback tools and crowdsourcing feedback tools. You can then use the feedback you collect from people to improve your website. Don’t forget to tie the improvements you do make back to your digital marketing goals!
Creating Your Digital Strategy
Creating a digital strategy does not have to be rocket science. And since it’s not set in stone, you can always make changes based on the current trends and feedback from your audience. In other words, it’s better to have some strategy than none at all!
Start by knowing what you want and how you plan to achieve your goals. Think about the things that have worked for you in the past and which mistakes you want to avoid. As you build out your strategy, you must know who you are talking to. To help with this, develop a target persona that will lead your interactions.
A good strategy also needs to include your budget, your digital channels and your team. Define who/what these are, create your digital strategy and be prepared to follow it but not stick to it. In order to make your strategy successful, you will need to continually refresh your elements based on how your audience is responding.
