The marketing landscape has evolved rapidly in recent years, and traditional “tried and true” marketing strategies are no longer delivering the results necessary for businesses to grow and thrive. We’ve reached a point where virtually everyone has become reliant on the internet to learn about the products and services they need. Without a strong digital presence, your business will struggle to keep up with your competitors that are leveraging a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to reach their audience and grow their brand.
In 2024, a digital marketing strategy is essential for the success of every business in just about every industry. 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 an effective digital marketing strategy, it will be challenging to connect with these people and convert them into valuable customers.
Your digital marketing strategy provides your business with a comprehensive plan outlining how you’ll leverage the various digital channels at your disposal to reach your target audience, grow your brand, and generate the high-quality leads necessary for your business to thrive. For your digital marketing strategy to be effective, it must go beyond detailing the specific tactics your business will use and also provide a big picture view of how your efforts will complement each other in order to achieve your overarching goals.
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:
- 75% of marketers improved the trust and credibility of their company when they employed a digital marketing strategy
- Marketing teams that document their digital strategy are 313% more likely to experience success
Still not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why it’s crucial that you adopt a digital marketing strategy in 2024.
You’ll Have More Focused Efforts Aimed at Achieving Specific Goals
- Prioritize the initiatives that will be most effective in achieving your desired outcome
- Arrive at the proper budget necessary to achieve your goals
- Determine that best way to allocate your budget in order to maximize the ROI on your efforts
- Identify the right success metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing tactics
You Can Ensure the Latest Trends Guide Your Efforts
Many businesses simply keep the same digital marketing strategy in place year after year. While this is better than not having a strategy at all, you risk using an outdated plan that either no longer aligns with your current goals or fails to leverage the latest trends that are impacting the digital marketing landscape today.
Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends has never been more important than it is in 2024. The last 12 months have ushered in a new AI era that is changing the way businesses operate. Many of the most successful companies have been early adopters of AI technology and are actively pursuing ways to use AI to improve every aspect of their operations, including marketing.
AI technology allows you to automate many aspects of your marketing efforts, improving your efficiency and results. A few ways businesses are leveraging AI in their marketing efforts include:
- Using AI tools to improve keyword research efforts
- Implementing AI-powered chatbots to improve customer experience
- Leveraging AI plugins to more effectively use existing platforms, such as Canva, with their social media efforts
- Leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze massive quantities of customer behavior data to determine the most effective targeting strategies
- Implementing AI-powered predictive analytics to more effectively examine patterns and trends that will optimize your marketing efforts
When you update your digital marketing strategy every year, it provides an opportunity to evaluate the latest trends, digital marketing channels and tools which can provide your business with a competitive advantage. This process of annual reflection and planning ensures you remain on the forefront of the digital marketing landscape rather than scrambling to catch up with the businesses that innovated before you.
You Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience
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.
Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Eliminating Negative Reviews
It Becomes Easier to Develop an Effective Value Proposition
Most businesses face a very competitive landscape. In order to succeed, it’s critical to differentiate your business from your competitors so that your audience clearly understands why your offering is superior and provides a better experience. Developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy can help you refine your value proposition so that it resonates better with your audience.
The data you compile about your target audience makes it easier to build out detailed buyer personas which help you understand their preferences, needs and motivations. This information can be used to develop messaging that will differentiate your brand from your competitors and allow you to convey the value your business provides.
Your digital marketing strategy can then outline the ways in which you’ll deliver this messaging to your audience. A cohesive strategy will also ensure that this messaging remains consistent across all your digital marketing efforts. Whether someone visits your website, engages with you on social media, reads your email newsletters or clicks on your paid ads, they will receive the same messaging about the value you provide and the ways your business is different than your competitors. This cohesiveness creates a powerful effect among your audience and helps you generate a loyal customer base.
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. Digital 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 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 success of 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.)
This data can help you 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.
You can also use this data to track all 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.
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You’ll Maximize the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts
When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you’ll have a framework in place that allows you to track the ROI of each tactic used in your strategy. An effective digital marketing strategy will always outline the:
- Specific goals you’re trying to achieve
- The marketing tactics you’ll use to achieve these goals
- The success metrics necessary to track the effectiveness of your efforts
- The benchmarks that must be hit in order to achieve your desired outcome
Your analytics data allows you to track the day-to-day and month-to-month performance of every campaign. Over time, this will provide you with a detailed understanding of which tactics are performing well and which are struggling to deliver your desired results. You can use this data to refine your campaign, focusing on the tactics that generate the best results. You can also reallocate your budget so that you dedicate more resources to the channels that are contributing the most to your overall success. This will allow you to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.
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.
Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Getting Your Content Marketing Strategy Started
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 typically result in the most conversions, allowing you to invest a larger percentage of your resources in 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 of becoming 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 the 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.
Read our other Marketing Strategy Articles full of Helpful Information.
Webolutions Can Help You Develop and Implement a Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing an effective digital marketing strategy is a complex process that takes considerable experience and expertise to get right. Unless your business has the resources to employ a team of in-house marketing specialists, it’s generally more effective to work with a seasoned digital marketing agency who can help you craft and implement a strategy that aligns with your goals. With nearly three decades of experience, Webolutions can set you up for success.
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 efforts. Based on this information, we’ll develop a detailed digital marketing strategy that brings your story to life and achieves your goals for the upcoming year.
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.
