10 reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy in 2020

10 reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy in 2020

The importance of creating and using a digital marketing plan to support digital transformation and business growth

Where should I start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It remains a common challenge as many companies know how important digital channels and mobile phones are today for customer acquisition and retention. However, they don't have an integrated plan to effectively grow and engage their audience. If your company doesn't have a plan, you will face the ten issues that you highlighted later in this article and lose them to competitors who have more digital knowledge.

Challenges in developing a digital marketing strategy?

In my experience, a common challenge is to start developing the digital marketing plan. I think there is a fear of having to write a large report, but we think that effective planning works best. Your plan doesn't have to be a good report. The strategy can be summarized in two or three aspects of A4 in a table that links digital marketing strategies with SMART goals within our RACE planning framework. We recommend creating a tight digital plan based on our 90 day planning templates to quickly implement your digital plan and improve traction. You can find more information in our free download.

Free template for a digital marketing plan
Download our free resources - Digital Marketing Plan Template

This template explains how to structure a digital marketing plan using the RACE planning system. Set your goals for 90 days based on marketing activities and set goals for KPIs.

Access the free digital marketing plan template

Another challenge is the scope and scale of digital marketing. There are many excellent digital marketing techniques ranging from research, marketing and email marketing to enhancing the digital experience of your website. Our article What is digital marketing? It shows how you can use our RACE planning framework to define a manageable number of digital marketing activities that cover the entire customer journey. In every digital marketing technique, there are many detailed methods that are important for success. Therefore, they must be assessed and prioritized, e.g. B. from dynamic content via email automation, website adaptation to programmatic content, forwarding and skyscrapers for organic research.

A recommended approach to developing a digital strategy.

Regardless of whether you have a strategy or not that is at the heart of the Smart Insights Opportunities approach, strategy, and measures to improve digital marketing, it is now comparable to compare you to see the potential based on the needs on the market To evaluate market. The future.

To help you get started, we've created a free download of digital marketing metrics with a set of standards covering comprehensive digital strategies and key tactics such as search, social media, email marketing, and website design / expertise.

Free templates for measuring digital marketing

Download the free resources - reference templates for digital marketing

Quickly evaluate your approach to digital marketing with these seven visual templates. These powerful, one-page templates let you check your speed with key digital marketing technologies on a 5-point scale using various criteria, thereby identifying gaps in your current roles.

Access to free measurement templates for digital marketing

Click the image below to view a larger version of one of our free marketing review templates that you can download for free to create a digital marketing plan.

But what if you're a company that doesn't have a digital strategy yet? Well, I think the two simple alternatives to creating a plan might suggest a way forward:

• Start with a separate digital marketing plan that describes the transformations you need to undertake and invest in and change digital marketing
• Then, after approval, create an integrated digital plan that is part of the overall marketing plan: Digital Fully Compatible and becomes part of the business as usual.

What conclusions can be drawn here? It seems to me that:

The use of digital marketing without a strategic approach is still widespread. I am sure that many companies in this category use digital media effectively and can definitely get great results through search, email or social media marketing. However, I am also sure that many of them lack opportunities to improve alignment or improvement, or suffer from other challenges that I mentioned below. The problems described below can be greater for larger institutions that urgently need governance.

Most companies in our research take a digital strategic approach. When I speak to companies, I notice that digital plans are often created in two steps. First, a separate digital marketing plan is created. This is useful for reaching agreement and committing to articulating opportunities and problems and showing a way by setting specific digital marketing goals and strategies, including how digital marketing integrates with other business activities becomes. Second, digitization is included in the marketing strategy. It is "as always" a central activity, but does not guarantee separate planning, except for tactics.

If you don't have a strategy or want to review the important points that should be included in the strategic review, we have created the ten most common problems that, in our experience, occur when you don't have a strategy.

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Do you have a digital marketing strategy?

We have been conducting an informal survey since 2012 to determine how common digital marketing strategies are. The results have shown some significant improvements over the years. A few years ago, we found that about two-thirds to three-quarters don't have a digital marketing plan. Now this number has been reduced to 45% in the last survey, although it is still very high, which means that about half of them are still doing a digital number without a fixed strategy.

When we researched our Digital Marketing Management report, we were interested in knowing how that relationship looked for a particular sample.

Management of digital marketing in the research report 2020

Digital Marketing Management Report

Premium members can read our survey results and recommendations based on how more than 900 companies use digital marketing today.

Access to the research report of the Digital Marketing department in 2020

We found the following in our digital marketing approval survey:

Does your organization have a clearly defined strategy for digital marketing?

Our latest research, therefore, shows an improved approach to planning in this sample of marketing professionals, less than half of whom have no digital strategy. Congratulations, if you're from these companies, if not, keep reading.

10 reasons why you may need a digital channel strategy?

1. You have no address

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many of them) don't have a clear strategic goal of what they want to achieve online to attract new customers or build closer relationships with existing customers. If you don't have goals with SMART digital marketing goals, you may not be using enough resources to achieve goals, and you may not be analyzing whether you are achieving them.

2. You don't know your audience on the Internet or your market share.

Customer demand for online services can be minimized if you don't do research. Perhaps, and above all, you will not understand your online market: the dynamics differ from traditional channels with different types of profiles and customer behavior, competitors, suggestions and marketing communication options. There are excellent tools available on digital platforms that we can use to determine customer demand. We recommend doing a search gap analysis with Google Keyword Planner to find out how you can benefit from the search engines' intent to lure them to your website, or to know how many people are interested in products, services or the industry you can use Contact via Facebook IQ.

3. Current and new competitors will gain market share

If you don't provide enough digital marketing resources or use a custom approach without clearly defined strategies, your competitors will have your digital lunch!

4. You don't have a strong suggestion on the Internet

By showing the value of a clearly identified and customized online customer with different target customers, you can differentiate between online services, which encourages existing and new customers to get involved and stay loyal. Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key for many companies because the content attracts audiences through different channels such as search, social networks, email marketing and their blog.

5. You don't know your customers well enough online

It is often said that digital is the "most measurable medium". However, Google Analytics and the like only tells you how much traffic there is, not how your visitors feel and what they think. You need to use other types of website user feedback tools to identify your vulnerabilities and then fix them.

6. They are not integrated ("promiscuous")

It is very common to conduct digital marketing activities in silos, regardless of whether it is digital marketing, information technology or a separate digital agency. This makes it easier to package digital marketing in a suitable part. But of course it's less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media works best in combination with traditional media and response channels. We always recommend developing an integrated strategy for digital marketing. Once digitization is complete, digital marketing activities will be part of your marketing and business plan as usual.

7. Digital does not have enough employees / budget due to its importance

Not enough resources are available to plan and implement e-marketing, and there may be certain e-marketing skills that hinder an effective response to competitive threats.

8. You are wasting money and time on duplication

Even if you have enough resources, this can be wasted. This is particularly the case in large companies where different parts of the marketing organization buy different tools or use different agencies to perform similar online marketing tasks.

9. You are not graceful enough to catch up or move forward

When you look at the big online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco and Zappos, they are all dynamic and try new ways to attract or keep your audience online.

10. They are not optimized

Any company that has a website will have an analysis, but many top managers don't make sure their teams are working or have time to review and act accordingly. Once the strategy gives you the right basics, you can continuously improve important aspects like search engine marketing, website user experience, email and social media marketing. These are the ten main problems that can be avoided with a well thought-out strategy.

The good news is, therefore, that there are important reasons to develop a digital strategy and transform your marketing that you can use to convince your colleagues and customers. Now there is also a lot of experience with how other companies successfully integrate digital marketing into their activities, as demonstrated by the example of digital plans, templates and best practices in our toolkit for digital marketing strategies.

So, digital marketing is about utilizing digital technology to achieve marketing objectives. There is no essential need for digital marketing to always be separate from the marketing department as a whole, as the objectives of both are the same. However, for now, it remains a useful term because digital marketing requires a certain skill set to utilize digital technology effectively.