20 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy in 2023
1. Increased competition: As more businesses embrace digital marketing, having a well-defined strategy will help you stand out and stay ahead of the competition. 2. Growing online consumer base: The number of people using the internet continues to rise, making it crucial to have a digital marketing strategy to reach and engage with your target audience. 3. Mobile dominance: With the majority of internet users accessing the web via mobile devices, a digital marketing strategy enables you to optimize your marketing efforts for mobile platforms. 4. Changing consumer behavior: Consumer behavior is constantly evolving, and a digital marketing strategy allows you to adapt and cater to their changing preferences and needs. 5. Data-driven decision-making: Digital marketing provides valuable insights and data on consumer behavior, allowing you to make informed decisions and optimize your marketing campaigns for better results. 6. Cost-effective marketing: Compared to traditional marketing methods, digital marketing offers cost-effective options, allowing businesses with smaller budgets to compete and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI). 7. Personalized customer experiences: A digital marketing strategy enables you to leverage data and technology to deliver personalized experiences to your customers, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. 8. Global reach: The internet has made it possible to reach audiences across the globe. With a digital marketing strategy, you can expand your business beyond geographical boundaries and target customers in different regions. 9. Enhanced brand awareness: Digital marketing channels, such as social media and search engines, provide opportunities to increase brand visibility and awareness among your target audience. 10. Improved customer engagement: Digital marketing platforms facilitate direct and real-time communication with your customers, allowing you to engage and interact with them, build relationships, and address their queries or concerns promptly. 11. Precise targeting: Digital marketing allows you to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring your marketing efforts are directed towards the most relevant audience. 12. Measurable results: Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing provides measurable metrics and analytics that help you track the effectiveness of your campaigns and make data-driven improvements. 13. Continuous optimization: A digital marketing strategy allows you to continuously test, analyze, and optimize your marketing campaigns, ensuring maximum efficiency and effectiveness. 14. Integration with offline marketing: Digital marketing can seamlessly integrate with offline marketing efforts, providing a unified brand experience across different channels. 15. Increased website traffic: A well-executed digital marketing strategy can drive more traffic to your website, resulting in more leads and potential conversions. 16. Social media influence: Social media platforms have a significant impact on consumer behavior. A digital marketing strategy helps you leverage social media to build brand awareness, engage with your audience, and drive traffic to your website. 17. Online reputation management: With the prevalence of online reviews and discussions, a digital marketing strategy allows you to actively manage your brand's reputation and address any negative feedback or issues promptly. 18. Stay updated with trends: The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and having a digital marketing strategy ensures you stay up-to-date with the latest trends, technologies, and consumer expectations. 19. Accessible customer feedback: Digital marketing channels provide an avenue for customers to provide feedback, reviews, and testimonials, which can be utilized to improve your products or services. 20. Scalability and flexibility: Digital marketing offers scalability, allowing you to adjust your marketing efforts based on your business's needs and goals. It also provides flexibility to experiment with different strategies and tactics to find what works best for your business.
Starting the development of a digital marketing strategy can be a common challenge for businesses that understand the importance of digital and mobile channels in acquiring and retaining customers. Without an integrated plan to support digital transformation and business growth, businesses may struggle to effectively engage their audiences online.
Research from Global Web Insight, as published in the Datareportal 2023 Global Digital Marketing statistics summary, emphasizes the significance of digital channels in influencing purchasing decisions. Failing to compete by maintaining quality online content and visibility within search engines and social networks means missing out on opportunities to reach potential customers online.
Regardless of the business type, not having a strategic digital marketing plan aligned with the overall business plan can lead to ten highlighted problems or missed opportunities. To address these challenges, it is important to make the business case for investing in digital marketing. Failure to do so puts the future of the business at risk, as attracting new customers will become increasingly difficult.
Here are 10 reasons why a digital marketing strategy is essential:
1. Lack of direction: Many companies, even those implementing digital marketing, lack a clear strategic goal for their online efforts, whether in acquiring new customers or building relationships with existing ones.
2. Insufficient resources: Businesses often allocate inadequate resources for planning and executing digital marketing, hindering their ability to effectively respond to competitive threats.
To justify increased investment in digital marketing, it is recommended to assess the organization's digital maturity. This can be done by evaluating current levels of proficiency across different pillars of effective digital marketing and setting targets for improvement.
Several downloadable templates, including maturity benchmarks, are available to assess digital marketing effectiveness and plan for growth. These templates cover various aspects, such as digital marketing for small and medium businesses, digital transformation for larger businesses, and specific digital channel marketing activities (e.g., SEO, social media, email, and content marketing).
By scoring the business's current maturity and setting improvement targets, organizations can progress towards a more planned and competitive approach to digital marketing.
It's essential to remember that a digital marketing strategy is crucial for businesses to thrive in today's digital landscape and effectively engage their target audience.
Each pillar in the digital marketing framework is crucial, regardless of the business's size. It emphasizes that success in digital marketing goes beyond media and platforms, encompassing factors like creating effective digital experiences, messaging, and quality content.
In the demanding digital landscape, marketers face internal and external pressures to grow their businesses, especially considering the effects of inflation.
This division of digital marketing best practices can also aid in education, simplifying the understanding of various types of marketing activities.
There are six types of marketing activities represented by the six pillars:
1. Strategy and governance: Setting goals, analytics, segmentation, targeting, brand positioning, integration, resourcing, and marketing technology.
2. Goals and measurement: Forecasts, digital reporting, KPI dashboards, attribution, and customer insight.
3. Media: Paid, owned, and earned media, including search, social, and display ads.
4. Experience: Desktop and mobile websites, apps, and customer service.
5. Messaging: Email, chat, social media, on-site interactions, and personalization.
6. Content: Product and blog content for content marketing, PDF downloads, and interactive tools.
The digital marketing plan template provided by Smart Insights offers more details on the key decisions for each pillar.
Digital marketing strategies should be considered for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. The RACE Marketing planning framework by Smart Insights integrates customers' digital experiences across the full customer journey, making it applicable to both B2C and B2B markets.
Success in digital marketing requires mastering the details of various marketing technologies across different digital media channels. These technologies include search engine marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, digital PR, digital messaging, pay-per-click, paid social, programmatic display, and more.
However, for true success, digital techniques should be integrated with traditional media such as print, TV, and direct mail as part of multichannel marketing communications. Demonstrating the value of your work is also essential.
To start creating a plan, Smart Insights recommends using their RACE Growth system, which simplifies digital marketing planning. A concise strategy can be summarized in a table linking digital strategies to SMART objectives within the OSA Framework (Opportunity, Strategy, Action). Smart Insights provides planning templates and guidance for different sectors to support businesses in creating effective digital marketing plans.
