Are you wondering where to begin when you are looking to come up with a digital marketing strategy? A lot of businesses recognise the importance of having a comprehensive digital marketing strategy but they don’t necessarily know how to go about doing it. After all, having a well laid out and easily executable marketing plan can make a big difference in your ability to succeed in today’s digital dominated marketplace.
If your business doesn’t currently have an optimised strategic marketing plan, you could risk falling behind your competition. There are grants available in Hampshire for businesses to put towards digital marketing. Failure to do so could cost you significant market share to competitors that are integrating these strategies into their business.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to any kind of marketing that is done through digital media and related technologies.
These can include:
- Mobile applications
- Company website
- Social media platforms
- Search engines
- Advertising
- Digital companies
To truly experience great success in your digital marketing efforts, you will need to successfully integrate digital strategies and techniques with traditional media. This means, having a cohesive marketing framework that integrates everything from printed direct mail to your digital strategies.
Our RACE planning framework is what you need to split up the customer’s digital experience over the entire customer’s journey. This includes “Reach, Act, Convert, and Engagement.”
The Main Challenges Of Digital Marketing
One of the most common challenges of digital marketing is not knowing how to begin customising your digital marketing strategy. Many assume there is so much planning involved that it causes paralysis by analysis. However, we truly believe the requisite planning can be lean.
You don’t need to have an extremely long report. Instead, the entire plan can be comprehensive and summarised in as little as 2 sides of A4 in a table linking both the digital marketing strategies to SMART objectives within our framework.
Digital Marketing For Beginners
You may be confused at what you should be doing if you don’t currently have a digital strategy yet. There are two various alternatives that you could integrate to push forward:
- First, you can begin with a completely separate digital marketing plan that defines all of the transformations you require. Then, you can make the case needed for both investment and any changes necessary.
- Following the approval, you can customise a fully integrated digital plan that would be apart of your comprehensive marketing plan. You want this portion to be fully aligned which will make it capable of being seamlessly integrated.
It is relatively commonplace to find businesses using digital marketing strategies without necessarily deploying a strategic approach. While many companies doing this may be using their digital marketing efforts properly and getting the results they are seeking, there are likely many that have plans that are falling short. For these companies, they could be getting even better results through enhanced optimisation or they could be suffering from various other challenges listed below. The biggest problems are likely stemming from larger organisations who need better governance as a whole.
Do You Have A Digital Marketing Strategy?
We have been running an informal poll since 2012 to check to see how popular digital marketing strategies are. While the results have certainly increased over the years, it’s still not as high as it should be. Just a couple of years ago nearly 2/3 to 3/4 didn’t have a plan at all. While the number has decreased to 45{8105bdfbc696b7a4a1c164cd41e5b51966417809f6f737109e488121369dae8f} in the most recent survey, it means that almost 50{8105bdfbc696b7a4a1c164cd41e5b51966417809f6f737109e488121369dae8f} of businesses are utilising digital marketing without a real strategy or plan behind it.