Digital Marketing Strategy – What it is and why you're missing out!

Digital marketing is fast-paced. In this industry, change moves as fast as the speed of light, leaving everyone who doesn’t keep up in the dust. With so much momentum, how can you stay on track to meet your goals? Strategy. In this article, we’ll delve into the importance of creating an effective digital marketing strategy, three examples of how you’ll benefit, and provide key insights and best practices to help readers create a strategy of their own–but first…

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business or organization will use digital channels and platforms to achieve its marketing and business objectives. It systematically leverages online tools and technologies to reach, engage, and convert target audiences.

A well-crafted digital marketing strategy provides a roadmap for your online marketing activities, helping you to effectively reach and engage your target audience, achieve your business goals, and adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape. It’s essential for any organization looking to succeed in the digital age. Without it, you might engage in random and disjointed online activities, leading to inefficiency and lack of results. Let’s take a look at three benefits of implementing a digital marketing strategy:

1. Create a Positive Customer Experience

Customer experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. Negative interaction with your business means lost money and a damaged reputation. Developing a clear and focused direction for your digital marketing efforts will promote a consistent brand image and messaging that is consistent across all channels, which is crucial for building trust and recognition among your audience.

According to McKinsey, 70% of buying experiences are based on how a customer feels the company is treating her.
68% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand that offers good customer service experiences. (HubSpot)

Creating a customer-centered marketing strategy makes it easier to improve the customer experience with your company online continuously. It allows you to identify where you’re losing your customers and how you can improve the process so that every interaction with your brand is positive. Furthermore, ensuring you provide customers with a responsive and user-friendly experience that aligns with your customer’s needs and expectations can give your business a competitive edge, evolve your brand reputation, and increase targeted audience reach.

2. Keep Your Customers Engaged

Once your customers have a positive experience with your brand, then what? You want to keep your prospects and customers engaged and coming back to buy from you again. Marketing online without a strategy makes that difficult. Your brand looks confused, which makes your customers equally (if not more so) confused.

Lead nurturing engages and attracts your targeted audiences through every stage of their buyer’s journey by offering relevant content that aligns with the prospect’s goals and challenges while bringing awareness to your products and services. Not staying top-of-mind with existing customers and “not-ready” leads is a big mistake many companies make. Too often, prospects and customers are unaware of a company’s full capabilities, or worse, they completely forget about a company and end up doing business elsewhere. Attracting a new business can cost five times more than retaining an existing one–you can decrease your costs by developing a digital roadmap to keep your customers engaged.

Digital marketing strategies that incorporate marketing automation tools like HubSpot enable teams to automate the lead nurturing process, quickly identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and tools to engage with sales-ready potential customers.

Three lead nurturing best practices to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy:

Targeted Content: Use targeted content to engage audiences at the right time. Examples include

- Email
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Video or Vlogs
- Whitepapers
- Checklists

Omnichannel Lead Nurturing: Take an omnichannel approach to gain the interest of and to stay in front of your prospects, including:

- Email Marketing
- Social Media Platforms
- Retargeting
- Marketing Automation
- Direct Outreach
- Dynamic Website Content

High-Quality, Personalized Emails: Crafting high-quality emails that give users a more personalized experience will increase your chances of the recipient hitting reply. Businesses whose lead nurturing strategy includes personalized campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

- Add the contact’s name or company name in the subject line
- Use the contact’s sales rep email in the “From” section
- Apply smart CTA’s to target different lifecycle stages
- Use smart, rich text modules

3. Maintain a Data-Driven Mindset

One benefit of online marketing is the wealth of data at your fingertips. No matter how you approach your digital marketing, you can see what’s working and what isn’t. The trick is to take the data, analyze it, and implement changes to boost your bottom line. That’s where strategy comes into play.

Conducting market research around your product, service, and sales strategies allows you to create fictional representations of your potential customers called buyer personas. Establish and utilize detailed personas for segmentation, content mapping, and lead nurturing to create stronger B2B marketing campaigns. Using this data, develop a strategic approach to boosting your online presence. Find out where your customers are most engaged, where they’re falling out of your sales cycle, and what’s helping you get found. Then, create a strategy that supports those proven efforts.

Digital Marketing Strategy–Wrapping it up

Marketing online without a strategy doesn’t let you see the big picture in your efforts. Strategy does. By focusing on the right elements in your digital marketing strategy, you keep up with the constant forward movement while making smarter choices for your brand’s digital efforts–propelling your brand forward, keeping you adaptable, and ensuring that your efforts align with your customers and business objectives.