A good digital marketing strategy is not so easy to be achieved. With the year 2017 approaching its end, marketing professionals are busy analyzing the impact of different campaigns run by them across the year. Along with impact analysis, this is also the right time for you to think of the future and devise better digital marketing strategies after by overcoming current shortcomings.
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With traditional marketing proving ineffective in driving customer retention, it’s the best time to adopt a planned approach towards optimized digital marketing.
There are different levels of digital marketing adoption, depending upon the intensity with which a company is performing online marketing activities.
While some companies are still doing digital marketing without any defined strategy, others have integrated it deeply into their overall growth strategy.
Steps for Taking Your Digital Marketing Efforts to The Next Level
To explore different digital channels and to adopt the best technique for improving market reach and conversions, your digital marketing efforts need to mature gradually from the initial stage to the optimized level.
A robust digital marketing strategy would include:
- Initial Stage: At this stage, the goal is unclear and there is no clearly defined strategy for digital marketing. At this point, companies are involved in creating a strategic roadmap based on the market research. The emotional connection with customers is also missing, and there is no clear communication between brand values and identity.
- Managed Stage: As digital marketing goes up to the next level, you start having more prioritized activities. Companies also start using online tools like AdWords and defined targets to improve the reach and build awareness about a product or service. Multiple channels like targeted newsletters, welcome emails, and media retargeting start getting incorporated for increasing the reach to prospects. However, owing to the lack of personalization, there is not much customer loyalty and retention. Brand values are defined by this stage, and customer reviews become important for building the trust of prospective customers.
- Defined Stage: Digital marketing strategies seem more defined when there is a multi-channel marketing plan in place. Also, the prospects are segregated into different categories based on their buying preferences, and paid media is used for driving their visits on specific landing pages. Further, blog and social media can be used for boosting the brand identity. Interaction with existing customers also increases through personalized and informative content sharing on social media platforms. To increase conversions, the approach of personalization is adopted along with retargeting of optimized emails.
- Qualified Stage: At this stage, you can adopt the technique of market evaluation to have an impactful digital marketing strategy. Other important steps to be taken at this stage are optimized personalization with AB testing of different site sections. Different loyalty programs are adapted for higher customer retention, and RFM-based emails can also be sent to one-time customers. Paid media retargeting is another significant step to be taken at this stage to have multichannel sales conversions.
- Optimized Stage: By this stage, digital transformation can be easily observed, as media channels are fully optimized. Interaction with customers further increases through optimized content marketing strategies and multivariate testing. PR strategies also get adopted for integrated brand reputation management.
Reasons Why You Need to Revise Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Adopting digital marketing steps without a strategic approach is quite common for small and medium-sized organizations.
Here’re the reasons why they need to have a fresh approach towards conventional digital marketing in the year which is around the corner.
1. You Can Give Direction to Your Sales, Marketing & CRM Efforts
Companies with clear strategic goals can put enough resources into digital marketing activities and work dedicatedly towards achieving desired goals.
Digital marketing analytics can further help in assessing the number of new customers, and the efforts taken towards building a strong relationship with existing customers.
2. You Can Track Your Online Market Share Efficiently
What if your customers demand online support service, but you are not aware of their expectations.
You are likely to lose out on a significant online market share. Without being increasingly available on digital media platforms, you may fail in tracking the buying pattern and expectations of your customers.
However, with a focussed digital marketing plan, you can stay ahead of your existing and emerging competitors by having a personalized brand connect with customers.
3. You Can Reach Out to More Online Customers
You need to have a clearly defined value proposition for online customers to have a stronger connection with your brand.
When you are successful in making your online service better, you can engage more customers with the brand identity, and make them loyal promoters of your unique value proposition.
4. You Can Be More Effective in Approaching Prospects
Digital platforms allow you to access the presence of your customers online along with their engagement level.
Accordingly, you can create personalized marketing campaigns.
Based on the customer feedback shared online, you can identify all your weak points and start working in the improvement areas.
The more you catch up on the responses of your online audience, the better you can do for their retention.
5. Sufficient Resource Can Be Allotted to Digital Marketing Plans
With no strategic digital marketing plan in place, you may end up allocating inadequate resources to e-marketing activities.
You need to put the right human resources with desired e-marketing skills for the successful execution of your online marketing tasks.
Once you get the basics of digital marketing strategy right, you can focus towards continuous improvement of its key aspects of site user experience, search marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing.
So, gear up to welcome the new year with all your resources directed towards making a significant transformation in existing digital marketing practices.
