7 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Today, it’s virtually impossible for your business to remain competitive without an effective digital marketing strategy. According to a Pew Research Survey, 81% of Americans conduct their own research before making an important decision. In most instances, this research is primarily done online. Without a strong digital presence, it will be challenging to reach these people and convert them into valuable customers.

Despite digital marketing becoming an increasingly significant driver of success for businesses in recent years, 45% of organizations still don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. These companies are failing to leverage one of the most important tools at their disposal to help grow their business. In fact, businesses that have a well formulated digital marketing strategy tend to report greater success than those who don’t:

• Marketing teams that document their digital strategy are 313% more likely to experience success
• 75% of marketers improved the trust and credibility of their company when they employed a digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing helps you reach a broader audience than is possible through more traditional marketing tactics. Your potential customers are seeking information about their desired products and services on the internet. If your business has been struggling to implement an effective digital marketing strategy, you may find it increasingly challenging to connect with them. Over time, this will make it hard to remain competitive and experience the growth you desire.

Still not convinced? Here are 7 reasons why it’s crucial that you adopt a digital marketing strategy:

• You can target your marketing resources on the specific audience most likely to become a customer
• You gain a deeper understanding of your audience
• You can engage your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey
• Results are easily measured
• You can make adjustments to your strategy more easily
• It becomes easier to compete with bigger companies
• You can improve your conversion rate and generate higher quality leads

You Can Target Your Marketing Resources on the Specific Audience Most Likely to Become a Customer

Traditional marketing methods such as TV, print, radio or billboard advertising provide very limited control over who your ad reaches. While you can make certain calculated decisions with these channels – demographic information is available for viewership of many popular TV shows and magazines – there’s still no guarantee that the people seeing your ad will actually be interested in your product or service.

Digital marketing removes a great deal of this uncertainty from the process. You have the ability to target the specific audience that is most likely to resonate with your message and become a customer. Online marketing makes this possible in a variety of ways:

• You can target your social media ads to only be delivered to the profiles of individuals who meet the specific demographic information you identify in your buyer personas
• You can use organic SEO strategies and paid search (PPC) campaigns to increase the likelihood that your website and other digital marketing efforts reach individuals who are searching for information associated with the products or services you provide
• You can create gated content pieces that allow you to capture the email addresses of individuals who are interested in your product or service, allowing you to follow up with them using targeted email marketing journeys which will build trust and credibility in your company so that you remain top of mind as these individuals move closer towards their buying decision
• You have the ability to create sub-groups within your target audience to ensure these individuals receive the most relevant information for their needs

Digital marketing allows you to compile data that will help you better understand your buyer personas and refine your marketing strategy to address their needs more effectively. Over time, these refinements should improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to improve your ability to connect with your audience and convert leads.

You Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience

In order to ensure you’re targeting the right audience and delivering a message that will resonate with them, you first need to understand your audience on a deep level. What are their pain points? What information are they seeking out? What motivates them to take action?

With many traditional marketing methods, you lack the data necessary to gain these insights about your audience. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a treasure trove of data to help you refine your efforts to connect with your target audience more effectively. You’ll be able to capture a wide range of data, including:

• Which pages on your website are visited most often
• How long people spend on each page (a measure of their level of engagement)
• What questions are most commonly being asked (which you should then address in your marketing content)
• Which CTAs on your website are clicked most often
• How far down the page visitors go when they are on your website
• Which interactive features on your website generate the most engagement
• Which pieces of content are shared the most (an indication that your audience finds this content valuable)

In addition, you can leverage social media marketing to directly engage with your audience on a more personal level. You can learn a great deal about what your audience values by reading and responding to their comments on your social media posts. When you respond to these comments, you’re also creating a direct connection with the individuals who made them. This demonstrates that you truly value them, which will help forge a relationship which may lead to these individuals becoming customers down the road.

You Can Engage Your Audience at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Most people don’t make purchases on impulse. Instead, it’s common for them to engage in a lengthy process where they research their options to understand what they need. Part of this research will involve learning more about specific products and services, but it will also give them an opportunity to learn more about the companies which provide these products and services.

When you’re able to engage your audience in the early stages of this buyer’s journey, it gives you a greater opportunity to capture their attention and move them through your sales funnel. Digital marketing allows you to accomplish this at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

With digital marketing, you have the ability to create content that targets every stage of this journey. Therefore, you can meet your audience where they are at the moment. In addition, you can track your audience through the journey to better understand their buying process. As you gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, you’ll be able to refine your marketing efforts to convert more leads.

Results Are Easily Measured

One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing strategies involves the ability to accurately measure the results of your efforts. It’s virtually impossible to identify how many people contacted you after watching your TV commercial or viewing your print ad. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a wealth of data that allows you to accurately measure the ROI on your efforts.

You can use analytics data to gain a comprehensive understanding of your website traffic, including:

• How many people visit your website
• Which pages they visit
• How many pages they view while visiting your website
• What type of device (desktop, tablet, mobile) was used
• Where these visitors are from
• Where your website traffic is coming from (organic search, paid search, social media, etc.)

You can use this data to prioritize which marketing channels to invest most heavily in. For example, if you’re getting most of your traffic from paid search, you may want to increase your budget for your most important PPC campaigns.

This data can also be used to track all of your sales back to an individual’s first digital interaction with your company. This process, called attribution modeling, enables you to identify trends in the way your audience is engaging with your online content. This information can be used to refine your efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey to keep your audience more engaged and increase the likelihood of converting them into a new customer.

You Can Make Adjustments to Your Strategy More Easily

The ability to measure the results of your digital marketing efforts in real time makes it much easier to quickly make adjustments when you find your strategy isn’t delivering the outcome you expected. Instead of having to wait until a specific marketing initiative has been completed to gather ROI data, you can track the results of your efforts as the campaign is being run. If you find that you’re not achieving the desired outcome, you have the ability to pivot your strategy right away to improve your results without the need for starting over from scratch.

This is much more challenging with traditional marketing methods since you lack the real time data to truly understand what is and isn’t working with your strategy.

It Becomes Easier to Compete with Bigger Companies

If you’re a small business, you most likely lack the deep resources possessed by the largest companies in your industry. With limited resources, it’s extremely challenging to compete in traditional marketing methods which require a tremendous investment of money to deliver results. Digital marketing creates an ability to target your efforts in a way that allows you to compete with these larger brands more effectively.

With some savvy SEO work, you can identify specific search queries and long-tail keywords which are being used by your target audience. By creating high quality content around these terms, you have an opportunity to outrank larger businesses who may not be focused on these valuable search terms. Creating content that resonates better with your audience than what is being produced by bigger brands gives you the ability to reach a larger number of people than is possible with a limited marketing budget that is focused on traditional methods.

You Can Improve Your Conversion Rate and Generate Higher Quality Leads

Perhaps the most important benefit you’ll experience from all the data generated by your digital marketing efforts is the ability to improve your conversion rate. You can review data associated with the various CTAs on your website and run A/B testing to see which are most effective. You can also identify which of your marketing methods tend to result in the most conversions, allowing you to invest a larger percentage of your resources on the strategies which have proven to be most effective.

In addition, you have a greater ability to target specific audiences with digital marketing. This allows you to focus your efforts on the segments of your audience which yield the highest quality leads – both in terms of their likelihood to become customers and the amount of money they’re likely to spend with your business once they convert. This not only helps improve your conversion rate, but also can boost the revenue generated by each new lead.

Getting Started Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you already have a robust digital marketing strategy, congratulations. You are way ahead of many of your competitors. For those businesses that have been struggling with creating and implementing a strategy, here are some tips to help you get started:

• Identify your marketing goals – Less is more. If you establish 10 or more goals, you will struggle to create a cohesive strategy that achieves each of them. Pick the 3-5 goals that will move your business forward most and focus on those.
• Identify KPIs for each goal – How will you measure whether you’ve successfully achieved each of your goals? What metrics are most effective at measuring this success?
• Understand your target audience – Create a series of personas that provide detailed information about each segment of your target audience. Include demographic information, pain points, what types of messages resonate with them, and what will motivate them to take action.
• Determine which tactics will most effectively achieve your goals – Are you focused mainly on organic search? Paid search? Does your audience engage with you most on social media? Make sure you’re implementing the proper strategies to achieve the goals you’ve established.
• Continuously monitor and refine – After implementing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you regularly review your data to measure the success of your efforts. When necessary, make adjustments to your strategy to improve the outcomes.

Webolutions Can Elevate Your Digital Marketing Results

It takes a multifaceted approach to achieve a successful outcome with your digital marketing efforts. By blending content marketing, SEO, paid search, social media and email marketing strategies, you can more effectively leverage your efforts to reach a larger audience, target the people most likely resonate with your message, nurture their engagement throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey, and convert more leads.

While this can be done by an in-house marketing team, most businesses lack the resources to ensure they have specialists in each of these areas on their team. In many instances, you’ll be able to get more out of your marketing budget by working with an experienced digital marketing agency. With nearly three decades of experience, Webolutions can deliver the results you need to grow your business.

Webolutions is the only strategic digital marketing agency in the United States delivering a transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. We lead you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about you as a company. Our team will then conduct thorough market research to clearly understand what your competitors are doing and saying.

As part of this process, we’ll create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that clearly differentiates you and makes you stand out from the competitors in your industry. This plan will be used to develop your Brand Platform™, which creates a cohesive story and brand messaging that will be used throughout every aspect of your marketing strategy.

Our team provides comprehensive digital marketing services, and we will recommend the right mix of methods to convey your brand story most effectively to your target audience. We’ll implement the right communications and tracking systems necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Over time, we’ll make any adjustments and refinements necessary to achieve your marketing goals.

This exclusive approach results in faster, easier company growth that allows you to thrive for years to come.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.