How do you get the attention of consumers, who transfer a significant part of their real lives to the virtual world? There was a time when it was enough to have just a website or order a billboard campaign for a couple of weeks. Today, however, successful navigation in the virtual world requires a digital marketing strategy. Why is it useful?
You will set clear goals
Without clear and measurable communicative goals, it is difficult to choose marketing tools and evaluate their effectiveness. Let’s say you want to attract a lot of visitors to your website –do you know how many? If you want to increase sales – by what percentage? A digital marketing strategy will require very precise answers to these and similar questions.
Choose the best communication tools
Emails, social networks, websites, password optimization are only small components of digital marketing. Every day new solutions emerge. How do you decide what is the best for your business? A digital marketing strategy will help you to allocate the most appropriate tools and avoid investing in those that will not give the expected return.
Less expensive experiments
To the question of which digital marketing tools to choose, some marketing specialists are still responding: “Try it and find out if it works.” If you want to save time, effort and money, however, it is worth experimenting with a plan already in place. Otherwise, it will be difficult to plan long-term communication; do not forget the original goals and evaluate whether you are moving in the right direction.
By putting your thoughts in writing, you will get a clear overall picture
If you have a detailed marketing strategy, which includes goals, priorities, means and evaluation of results, you will see the overall situation and the vision. Therefore, your communication will become more consistent; you can evaluate more effectively, which decisions prove their value. During the preparation of your strategy, you will also have to answer fundamental questions, so you will have no choice other than to resolve more complex problems.
The communication team will work with one voice
A digital marketing strategy will allow the entire communication team to be familiarized with the goals and objectives, for responsibilities to be assigned. You will avoid the situation of individual company communication specialists or project managers working independently, guided by their personal vision, without coordinating actions among themselves.
You will not trade bad for worse
When you hear about a new digital marketing tool that promises a real revolution, you can be tempted to immediately integrate it into your communication strategy. Innovations guarantee progress. After all, it is not for nothing that they are constantly used by huge companies such as Google or Amazon. However, before investing in the commended newest communication tools, it’s worth considering the goals outlined in your digital marketing strategy. Most likely, you will agree that you should not use an application geared towards young people, if you want to attract older customers.
You will know your customers better
A digital marketing strategy begins with getting to know your customers: who uses your services, what is important to them, what annoys them? By highlighting and describing the groups of consumers important for you, you will determine where they spend time on the internet, what their purchasing habits are, how to reach them best, etc. The better you know the preferences and problems of your customers, the easier it will be to create an attracting communicative content for them.
You will highlight your strengths
Digital marketing strategies include not only your goals and target audience, but also what makes you different from others in the market. Your exclusivity, which will be the basis of the content strategy, is the added value that you offer your customers. Perhaps your services are the cheapest in a particular category? Maybe you deliver goods faster than your ompetitors? Whatever your exclusivity is, a digital marketing strategy will help to ensure consistent communication.
You will allocate the right budget for communication
Digital marketing is still considered much cheaper than other types of marketing tools. However, this does not mean that the marketing does not need to be carefully planned and that it doesn’t need human and financial resources. This is especially true when planning long-term communication, when without a plan, but with the help of experiments, you can squander large resources. An example of this would be paying for advertisements in countries where your target audience does not live.
You will optimize results
A digital marketing strategy will allow you to observe and analyze different indicators, for example, the number of visitors to your website, the number of views, the average time, spent on the website, etc. This will help you to understand, which of the digital marketing tools you use prove their value and which are worth improving.
Prepared on the basis of Forbes, QuickSprout, SmartInsights.com, JeffBullas, Ballantine, Klood.