What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing refers to ‘Achieving marketing goals through applying digital technologies and media’.

An omni-channel digital marketing strategy will integrate technology and media across different marketing activities, organizing according to the campaign objective. Digital technologies and media options for marketing campaigns today offers us different types of marketing technologies which include:

Company websites, Mobile apps, social media company pages, Search Engines, Advertising, Email, automation, and Digital Partnerships with other digital companies. To be truly successful, digital techniques must be integrated with traditional media such as print, TV, and direct mail as part of multichannel marketing communications.

Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? 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 support digital transformation and company growth and engage their audiences effectively online.

In my experience, a common challenge is where to start drawing up your digital marketing plan. For success in Digital marketing efforts, a clearly defined digital marketing strategy is a requirement.

So, what are your next steps to fully optimize your digital marketing strategy?

Our Reach, Act, Convert and Engage planning framework is effective for the customer’s digital experience – ensuring the full customer journey.

Within each technique, there are lots of detailed tactics that are important to success. So, they need to be evaluated and prioritized. For example, dynamic content for email automation, website personalization to programmatic, retargeting, and compelling content for organic search.

10 reasons why you may need a digital channel strategy?

1. Aiming at nothing, you will hit it all the time

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have a 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 and more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain your market share If you’re not devoting enough resources to your digital, or you’re using an 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 digital 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 an omnichannel marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing, and on your blog.

5. Lack knowing your online customers well enough

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. Not integrated (“disintegrated”)

Many Digital activities are done as separate from the overall business marketing plan. Digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels. We recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy, so your digital marketing works hard for you

7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance

Insufficient resources will be devoted to both planning and executing digital marketing. There is likely to be a lack of specific skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. Waste of money and time through duplication

Even if you do have sufficient resources, they may be wasted. That’s why you need to invest in a marketing strategy that works for you and your team, to plan, manage and optimize your digital channels and platforms. Drive the marketing results you need to achieve your business goals, and boost your marketing ROI.

9. Lack of agility to catch up or stay ahead. If you look at the top online brands like Facebook, LinkedIn, Fnb, Google, they’re all dynamic – trying new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

10. Lack of optimizing

Every company with a website will have analytics. Failing to ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them is one of the problems. Once your digital marketing strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to the continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email, and social media marketing.

The most significant cost of digital marketing is time. It can take time to implement strategies and develop results from those strategies. The results, however, are well worth the investment of your time.

Not sure where to begin?

Our marketing will support you and your team to build a winning marketing strategy to reach, convert and retain more customers and accelerate your ROI from digital marketing. Sound good?

Take your next steps to a winning strategy by getting started today.

Get in touch with our strategist