3 Compelling Reasons Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

3 Reasons Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy from Digital Gold HQ

December 6, 2015

A digital marketing strategy isn’t just for the big brands with even bigger budgets. A simple yet concise digital marketing strategy for a small business can make a huge difference to their end of year results.

A digital marketing strategy is a must for any business that actively wants to grow and sustain itself in the long run, from the smallest owner-managed business to the biggest multinationals. And I’m not talking about huge, weighty documents that take an eternity to write and that nobody reads anyway. No, I’m talking about a simple document that clearly sets out how you intend to compete effectively online.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Yet somehow, many businesses continue to push ahead with their growth plans with no clearly-defined online strategy. They might plod through the year tentatively experimenting will multiple on- and offline campaigns, and may well achieve some results, but that doesn’t mean those results wouldn’t be better with a written strategy document, or at least a digital component of a wider marketing strategy.

There are a number of compelling advantages to having a clearly-defined and properly-developed digital marketing strategy, and these include the following:

1. Digital Marketing Strategies Give Direction

There is a difference between having a general idea of what you want to achieve, and targeting specific goals and using defined metrics to measure success. Saying “we want to get more visitors on our website” is one thing, but how many do you want to get and in what timeframe? Saying you want more sales is a good start, but how do you want to achieve that? By improving your site’s conversion rates, driving more traffic, or both?

A digital marketing strategy will help you form clearer aims, specific ideas of what you want to achieve, predefined timeframe in which you want to achieve these results, and a clearer, more focussed strategy on how to get there.

2. Clear Strategies Aid Better Internal Coordination

A defined digital marketing strategy will ensure that your online marketing activities are carefully coordinated on several levels. It will clearly identify the relationship and connections between different strands of your marketing efforts – such as blogging, social media, SEO, PPC and email marketing – and provide clear and specific steps that can be taken to ensure they work effectively together.

At the same time, it ensures that the individuals involved with marketing your business online are all pursuing exactly the same set of goals, and they all know exactly the role they play in achieving those goals with no conflict and minimal duplication of time, cost or effort.

3. A Written Plan Helps you Optimise

Better-coordinated digital marketing activities will operate more efficiently, almost by definition. With duplication minimised and inadvertent conflicts between different strands of your marketing efforts eliminated, your resources (money and manpower included) will be used more efficiently and therefore, more effectively. In other words, your strategy will be optimised to make the best use of these “raw materials” as well as for results.

A good strategy should also have development and ongoing improvement built in, helping you to continually maintain, tweak, and retune your digital marketing strategy in response to changes in the market and the evolution of technology. A written strategy is therefore invaluable in helping you make sure your marketing tactics stay optimised over time and do not fall behind.

Key Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy

Think Carefully About Your Next Marketing Effort

Fail to plan, plan to fail

I’m sure that many wouldn’t disagree with Benjamin Franklin’s “failure to plan” logic. It’s a highly competitive and often aggressive world out there and when you throw so much of your heart and soul into running your own business, you want to do everything you can to ensure it succeeds.

Looking back on your last 12 months of effort, what are your learnings? What worked well, and what do you plan to do better in the next 12 months? How well have your strategies for attracting new customers been working? How do you compare to your nearest competitors? Where’s your biggest marketing spend and is it working as hard as it should for you?

For help putting together a clear, effective and up-to-date digital strategy that will help you optimise your online marketing efforts, talk to the team at Digital Gold HQ – your dedicated digital partner.