Why A Digital Marketing Strategy Is Important
Everyone knows that digital marketing is important if you want your business to succeed. Depending on size, most businesses spend between 5 and 14% of their total revenue on digital marketing. It can improve your reach, help you target your customer outreach, boost engagement, and enhance the effectiveness of your non-digital marketing.
Most business owners use digital marketing, but not everyone has a digital marketing strategy. Without a comprehensive plan, it’s hard to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts or adjust them to be more effective. But 47% of businesses that use digital marketing do so without a strategy. Want to gain a competitive edge? Don’t make the same mistake! Let’s explore a few key benefits of having a digital marketing strategy.
Understand Your Market Share
If you don’t thoroughly understand your current market share, you’ll never be able to grow it. You need to attract and retain more customers and do it more effectively than your competition. As part of your digital marketing strategy, you’ll need to conduct a thorough competitor analysis to understand your role in your industry. This will help you create measurable, achievable goals to expand your segment of the market share.
If your plan is to maintain your current share of the market, that share is likely to shrink over time. Your competitors will constantly be looking for ways to expand their market share, so you also need a strategy that’s all about growth. A digital marketing strategy helps you think one step ahead, so you’re not stuck trying to regain ground that your competitors managed to take.
2. Coordinate Your Digital and Non-Digital Marketing Strategies
Without a comprehensive strategy, your digital and non-digital marketing approaches won’t be optimally aligned. Many of the best marketing strategies use both types of marketing to enhance the other. For example, your non-digital outreach can attract customers to engage with your online campaign. Promoting hashtags in offline media can be a great way to drive traffic to your social media channels. Likewise, your digital campaigns can drive customer engagement with your storefronts or your products in offline settings.
A digital marketing strategy will help to ensure that your brand image and message are consistent between your digital and non-digital channels. A consistent tone and emphasis will help ensure your customers have a coherent experience with your brand, whether online or offline.
3. Avoid Wasting Money And Effort
If you don’t have a digital marketing strategy, it can be hard to know whether your digital efforts are actually making a difference in your bottom line. Are your ads actually reaching your target audience? Are customers going to respond well to your latest campaign idea? Are you running the best content for each platform where you have a presence? Are you lacking a presence on a platform that would benefit your brand? Are your competitors about to steal the spotlight? A good marketing team can help you answer these questions before you waste effort and payroll on an ineffective campaign.
4. Get To Know Your Digital Customers
You might understand how your customers interact with your brand when they’re offline. However, customer behavior patterns can change drastically in digital settings. You need to get to know who your customers are when they’re online, not just when they’re interacting with you face to face.
One simple way to measure whether your digital marketing appeals to customers is by tracking click counts. These show you the number of times customers click on an ad, a web page, and more. However, without a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, you won’t have a plan for gathering more in-depth data on your customers and their engagement patterns. For one thing, you need a mechanism for gathering customer feedback, and you’ll need to revisit how this mechanism is working periodically. You’ll also need a plan for applying customer feedback to your marketing choices.
For an effective digital campaign, you’ll also need to assess customer engagement using more than just click counts. Tracking metrics like page visit frequency, average time spent on pages, churn rate, bounce rate, and more can help you tailor your marketing plan more effectively. A digital marketing plan will define which metrics you need to track and how you’ll use those metrics to shape your future campaigns.
5. Allocate the proper resources to digital channels
Digital marketing tends to have a high return on investment compared to other marketing channels. In other words, it’s easier to offset the cost of acquiring each customer using digital marketing than traditional marketing. However, it’s also important not to underfund your digital marketing efforts. How do you know whether you’re spending enough on digital marketing? The analytics involved in creating a digital marketing strategy can help you answer that question.
6. Increase Your Flexibility In A Changing Market
If you have a successful digital marketing campaign right now, congratulations! However, over the next few months, you might see its appeal start to fade. When this happens, you need to identify the reasons and pivot accordingly quickly. What your competitors do, how the economy is doing, and even what’s happening in culture and the news can affect how customers respond to your digital marketing. You will need to revisit and revise your marketing campaign–the only question is how soon. Having a solid digital marketing strategy ensures that you have a plan for change already in place.
7. How Do I Form A Digital Marketing Strategy?
To get your digital marketing strategy off the ground, you can start by creating a few key components:
Customer personas
Concrete business goals
A thorough analysis of your current campaign’s effectiveness
A content creation schedule
However, the analytics and planning involved in creating an effective strategy can be time-consuming and challenging. Getting a professional marketing team involved is often a must. If you need a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your business, get in touch with Personalized Creative today! We can create a personalized strategy designed with your unique goals, challenges, and vision in mind.