Building a digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing is one area of your business development where a strategic approach is both essential and integral to the technology you’re already using. It’s a no brainer!

A digital marketing strategy can help you work out what activities are going to yield the best results for your business. Working alongside an integrated marketing agency can help you craft and execute a strategy that encompasses different technical elements that will benefit your website and promotion but is balanced in a way specifically tailored to your business.

But what should you be mindful of when creating a digital marketing strategy?

Assessments and audits

Internally you might have an idea of where your marketing is lacking, or you might be completely puzzled as to why your marketing efforts aren’t as effective as they could be. Using a strategic approach you will be setting goals and measuring results so you can have your assumptions tested and confirmed. Assessments and audits provide a detailed look into performance and issues that can affect your online presence and how you market your business.

Audits can look at a variety of different criteria, including:

  • Content quality and volume
  • Technical SEO issues
  • Technical problems on your website
  • Usability issues

This helps to identify problem areas in your current marketing efforts and website and provides the means to identify which services and marketing activities you would most benefit from and should assign your marketing budget to.

Strike a balance

Your strategy is built based on where your marketing budget should be assigned in order to be as effective as possible.

For example, you might have recently completed an extensive redesign on your website. This might mean that while there aren’t any technical issues in terms of how the site is constructed you need to funnel more of your budget into the SEO and content aspects of digital marketing in order to support the new site and help it gain a prominent position on search engines.

Or you might have a robust SEO strategy in place, however the usability on your website is an issue. This means you need to maintain the SEO but devote time into conversion optimisation and improving how the traffic funnelled to your website via SEO efforts interacts with your business.

Digital marketing covers several different disciplines that complement each other and work well in tandem. Audits and working alongside an experienced agency can help you to balance what is currently working with the areas that need help and support.

Flexibility

The needs of your business can shift and evolve over time. An effective strategy can adapt and change to continue to support your digital marketing.

For instance, your initial strategy may have involved major development and SEO work to make sure your site was effective. Your initial audits might have identified this as essential work that needed to be completed.

Once this work is done your strategy should shift to start building on that work, adopting an approach designed to drive your commercial goals by filtering more people to your site and building authority to help your business climb search rankings.

The flexibility required can be much more nuanced than this too. For example, you might add a new service or product range, meaning that there needs to be smaller changes to your marketing efforts to accommodate the new items. This could influence a number of aspects of a strategy, including:

  • The content you produce
  • The keywords you target
  • The links you build
  • The landing pages you produce
  • The PPC adverts you run
  • Your social media content
  • The audiences you target

An effective strategy should be able to adapt with minimal difficulty and allow you to be responsive and effective regardless of any changes to the ways your business operates. This doesn’t just apply to adding something to your business either. If you discontinue a product range or stop offering a specific service, it is important that your marketing strategy is robust enough to not suddenly be completely derailed by the change to your business.

Communication

Keeping your marketing provider up to date on what is going on with your business is crucial for ensuring a strategy remains beneficial.

Reporting will allow you to see how campaigns and results are progressing, this helps you to see how the strategy is progressing in its current form.

What’s important to keep in mind is any potential developments within your business that could impact a strategy should be communicated as soon as possible, this helps to keep marketers aware of changes and allows them to adjust a strategy to move focus away from a service that’s being discontinued or to shift focus over to new priority areas within your company.

Doing this allows your strategy to be constantly focussed on the areas that are crucial to your business’s ongoing success. Neglecting to do this can lead to situations where time, effort and budget are being used ineffectively.

An effective strategy is built on information and understanding, helping to identify what specifically will have the most impact and benefit to a business. Constant review and evaluation allows you to adjust and optimise, ensuring that whatever form your strategy takes you remain confident that it always delivers on the best interests of your brand.

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