9 Key Ingredients of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

While digital channels are your pathways to reach your target audience, your content is the blood that flows through the veins of all marketing.

“Content marketing is defined as a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly-defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

 - Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute

Consider how your ideal customer currently researches and engages online based on the following research:

Salespeople are no longer in complete control of the education and sales process of a prospect. Salespeople may still close the deal, but that assumes they get the call in the first place.

As the research outlines above, your ideal customer has already conducted their investigation online and determined who will get the call based upon who gave the best and most complete information they sought and consumed throughout their buyer's journey or decision-making process.

Based on your digital research and knowledge of your ideal buyers, your content strategy should outline:

A media plan will determine how you plan to spend an Ad budget with details on the advertising platform, budget, KPIs, tracking, and estimates on reach, impressions, and clicks to a destination website page or custom landing page.

Pricing for Ads will vary based on cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), cost- per-click (CPC), or in some cases cost-per-lead or acquisition (CPL or CPA).

Details on these plans are typically listed and updated in a spreadsheet such as Excel that may also include initial assumptions on budget, clicks, conversions, leads generated, sales opportunities, closed sales, sales revenue, cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale, and ROI.

Identify the resources needed for your media campaigns along with the ad platform.

Resources can include in-house or agency specialists for PPC, social media, display, video, email, PR, design, copy, analysis, technology, and strategy.

You need a proven methodology for implementing and managing your digital marketing strategy and plans. It’s up to marketing to do a much better job online to identify, create, and deliver information their prospects or buyer personas seek and consume as part of their buying or decision-making process.

By creating the content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal customers, Inbound Marketing allows you to attract qualified prospects to your business and keep them coming back for more.

Inbound Marketing continues to expand, however, extending its methodology into sales and customer service.

In the past, we thought of marketing funnels and sales funnels as two separate items and it worked for some time.

But viewing your progress as a funnel causes you to lose momentum and customer intelligence.

In the past, Marketing stopped what they were doing when they reached the end of the marketing funnel. That was when the Sales team took over.

Sales teams then stopped at the end of the sales funnel. It was no longer their responsibility to deal with a customer.

Customer Service or Operations then took over. However, the Customer Service and Operations teams rarely knew much about the customer’s buyer journey and the sales experience that led them down the path to become a customer.

It is actually a very good thing for the Customer Service and Operations people to know the key issues that were addressed and what the factors were that lead to a customer making the decision to buy.

Therefore, the Inbound methodology has evolved from a Funnel to a Flywheel.

The Flywheel is a better model in today’s digital ecosystem because it builds an integrated process that puts the customers first.

Today, 57% of the B2B purchase processes are completed before buyers reach out to vendors.

You don’t control the sales process anymore, the buyer does. They are doing their education online at the pace and time they prefer. They check out third party review websites, and seek peer and friends’ recommendations.

Word-of-mouth recommendations still play a significant role in purchase decisions. Consumers and business people ask their network of friends, associates, and family for advice and then search for mentions of your company on social media.

Your customer base is also a great way to grow more customers.

Interact with your customers when and how they engage with you. Grow your company by applying force to the strongest areas of your business and eliminate any friction that gets in the way that may have a negative impact on your customers.

Digital analytics provides the collection, measurement, and analysis of website data. You can use this data to optimize the performance of your digital channels, understand how users are consuming your content, and understand the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. It allows you to analyze and make informed decisions to improve the performance of your digital efforts based on data.

Other benefits include:

Creating, launching, and managing your digital campaigns without robust analytics puts you at risk of operating blindly, not really knowing what is working and what is not working.

We recommend that every website install Google Analytics, which is free. Google Analytics can provide key insights on an aggregate-overall basis.

We also recommend implementing additional analytics through a Marketing Automation Platform that gives you more insights into individual users and what they are doing throughout your campaigns and channels.

This allows you to personalize each visitor’s experience based on their previous actions. Digital marketing, sales, and service platforms such as HubSpot provide key insights that give you actionable intelligence to optimize all of your digital tactics, activities, and efforts.

Identifying the marketing, sales, and service activities and processes throughout a buyer’s journey requires an assessment of your technology tools being used to support your marketing, sales, and service activities.

To be effective and efficient in delivering business and customer growth, you need a technology strategy that:

These days marketing and sales departments purchase and control as much technology as the IT department.

In fact, marketing technology will be the top investment for marketing departments in the next few years.

The average number of marketing technologies utilized in a company is 16 and range as high as 98 in larger organizations.

 

(MarTech 2017).

And that’s just the marketing department.

It appears that companies with tech-savvy executive teams and board of directors are growing, leading, and soon-to-be dominating in their markets.

Bottom line takeaway - marketing and sales teams must become tech-savvy.

Here is an example of the technology tools you will need across your marketing, sales, and service teams in order for them to share information throughout your customer's experience.

In Christopher Mims Wall Street Journal article, “Every Company Is Now a Tech Company,” he quoted Sean Sullivan, an angel investor credited with coining the phrase “cloud computing.”

Mr. Sullivan said,

“There is an existential threat to Fortune 500 companies before the end of this decade (this year). You can actually see companies that are less than 10 years old knocking off and surpassing companies that have been around for 100 years.”

Identifying the processes of a customer life cycle from marketing through sales through customer service is critical today.

It is impossible for an organization to interact effectively and efficiently throughout the life cycle of your customers’ experience with your business in a manual, paper-driven support system.

You must assess, acquire, and successfully implement the underlying technology to support these processes and the information flow that relates to your prospects, leads, and customers as they move through the buyer’s journey and interaction with all of your company’s touch points.

Creating a strategy to deliver your business or organizational goal is achieved by understanding available resources, setting timelines and budget, looking at current and past activity, and assigning ownership of activities and KPIs to team members or stakeholders. 

Managing digital marketing campaigns requires effective communications on what will be produced and implemented related to your:

Your content marketing plan should outline what content will be produced and when. It should also identify the employee, contractor, or agency responsible for producing each piece of content including the review, editing, and approval process. It should identify the type of content, platform, and channels to be produced and published.

You will also want to identify the KPIs used to evaluate the success of each piece of content.

All marketing campaigns should be identified and listed including your channels, formats, timeline, budget, and KPIs used to evaluate the success of each campaign. The marketing campaign schedule will also include any media plans where you have allocated a budget for paid advertising.

Effective project management of your digital marketing campaigns is key to staying on track to launch campaigns as designed and on time.

Using project management tools that allow collaboration, task assignment, time management, status updates, and workflows that automate key processes is important.

Identifying, tracking, and managing the resources needed and utilized throughout the building, launching, and management of your marketing campaigns is key to your success.