The Future Of Digital Marketing – Reaching Customers

Terence Sathyanarayan

October 11, 2021

All, Digital strategy, Digital Transformation

Why Is A Digital Marketing Strategy Important For A Business?

If you’re not working on integrating digital marketing tactics into your company’s overall marketing strategy, there’s a good chance you’ll be left behind, according to Ryan Deiss CEO of DigitalMarketer

If you don’t have a digital marketing strategy at the moment, you miss the chance to reach more consumers through an effective approach and build stronger connections with your current customers. You could write a whole blog post about all the ways digital marketing can positively improve your brand awareness, but the reasons described below should be enough to at least pique your interest. Although many companies are aware of the amount of business generated by existing traditional marketing strategies. This makes them shy away from it. Developing an effective digital marketing strategy for your business requires a significant initial investment, which is why it is so important.

What is the mix?

What many companies are not aware of, however, is that a digital strategy is not limited to advertising on your website and can quickly lead to exponential digital engagement. A truly effective digital strategy will include a variety of online engagement methods, including social media, email marketing, social networking, and other forms of engagement that enhance a digital experience.

By integrating a diverse mix of digital marketing platforms into your strategy, you enable your business to reach a wider audience, which can lead to more revenue. For this reason, a digital strategy in combination with the previously discussed analysis to measure success and execution can be extremely effective in increasing your market share and achieving a stronger ROI. Carefully curated digital strategies are indispensable to improve the company’s online connection to the market, the target audience and help you achieve your overall online presence by knowing which channels could generate the most revenue.
By developing a coherent digital strategy and a clear marketing plan that targets a specific audience, you can reach out to those who prefer to connect with you and reach them more effectively through multiple online services. Some may prefer Google Search, while others spend more time on Facebook, where you can address them with native ads built directly into your feed.

What should you pay?

Indeed, digital marketing budgets continue to grow, and, according to eMarketer, digital advertising spending in the US has dwarfed television advertising spending for the first time, and the gap is expected to only widen. Nevertheless, too many companies make the mistake of spending too much money on digital advertising and too little on developing a business-oriented digital marketing strategy. If your organization spends even a penny reworking a website, developing an app, or launching a paid-per-click campaign, stop and ask yourself what the goal of your digital strategy is.

If you can’t articulate these digital business strategy goals clearly, the right full service digital automation agency can help you define them for you. Use a high-level digital marketing plan template to outline your annual marketing strategy and identify your top priorities. Costs could range from the type of CRM, marketing automation, sales funnels, lead generators, search engine marketing, social media content distribution, loyalty platforms etc. Depending on the size of the inhouse marketing team and the integration of this solution into an existing system like ‘Salesforce’ could determine the budgets that you would need. This could range from USD 1,000 for entrepreneurs to USD 100,000 for large enterprises if they opt of PPC (Pay per click) campaigns which is dictated by the ‘Advertisement spend’ a company has allocated.

Understanding what needs to be achieved from the marketing budget is critical to the selection of the platform.
So some industries ‘Customer Acquisition Costs’ (CAC) will justify the large spend needed for gaining digital authority.

Strategy Approach

When reviewing your existing digital marketing channels and assets to determine what you should incorporate into your digital channel strategy, it is helpful to look at the bigger picture first. This will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed and confused, and if there are no overarching digital marketing goals, there is no way to measure the success of the strategy without the right digital marketing tools. Reporting Dashboard from Active Campaign or Infusionsoft Keap brings all your marketing and sales data into one place so you can quickly determine which strategies need to be improved in the future for better targeting. Having an integrated CRM with a clearly articulated Sales funnel to ensure that digital assets created actually move contacts from the top of the funnel to the bottom by converting them to loyal customers.

If you are one of the many companies that do not have a digital strategy or want to change that strategy, now is the time to come up with a digital plan to move forward.

Set up a separate digital marketing plan in which you define the transformation you want to undertake. Once you have approval for this plan, create a new integrated digital plan with a clear strategy that will be part of your overall marketing plans. Then make a list of the investments and changes you need for your digital marketing to suit the best strategy.

Use the below journey map to help guide your plan. We have been using the same that has brought measurable change for our clients.

Digital strategy

First, we recommend you start with a separate strategic digital marketing plan that defines transformation, makes the case for investment and change in your defined marketing strategy, and supports people, processes, structure, and governance.
After initial changes, which typically take more time in larger organizations, you can create an integrated digital plan that is part of your overall marketing plan. The ultimate goal should be for digital systems to be fully aligned and – as usual – become part of the business. This provides an improved approach to reach target customers by enhancing their user experience.

Secondly, the digital world is integrated into your marketing strategy and does not justify separate planning for each tactic. This is a great opportunity to reach an agreement and buy – by identifying opportunities and problems and showing a way forward by setting goals and specific strategies for the digital world, including how digital marketing can be integrated with other business activities.

In this article, we looked at the details that need to be covered in your digital marketing plan and what activities should be included in it. To summarize,
• The external customer journey is as important as the internal stakeholders.
• Without attracting contacts, building lists, nurturing potential leads and converting customers in a disciplined approach, business growth could be drastically impacted.
• Prioritizing the Digital implementation approach based on measurable objectives are suggested initially.
• Having a Marketing and Sales Automation approach integrated into all digital channels relevant to your business and industry have proven to increase growth organically by at least 3x annually.

If you don’t have a strategy, or perhaps want to review your current Go To Market strategy, get in touch with us, we can help you define your digital marketing blueprint which can be used as a guide towards a results driven implementation with clear objectives of conversion.