The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and it can be challenging to develop a digital marketing strategy that is effective and up-to-date.
Without a strategic digital marketing plan integrated with your overall goals, your brand will experience significant challenges, such as struggling to generate leads and losing customers to more digitally savvy competitors.
What are the steps to start developing a powerful digital marketing strategy in 2024?
One of the first steps include understanding the importance of digital channels in influencing brand discovery, followed by creating and promoting high-quality content to get seen in search engines and social networks. It’s no surprise that the most-sought-after skills in 2024 are digital advertising (almost 45%) and content creation and curation (about 42%).
Here’s all the reasons why your brand needs a robust digital marketing strategy.
10 Reasons Why You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital advertising spending is forecasted to reach $602.25 billion in 2024.
Two years back, 19.35% of UK marketers said they’d increase paid social spending. Research indicates that over 75% of marketers have increased their credibility and trust through digital marketing tactics.
For any startup or established company, it’s important to attract new customers in the future, engage your audience and build a strong brand online. Digital marketing strategy is what will help take your efforts forward and here are 10 reasons to invest heavily in that area.
Set A Clear Goal For Your Brand
Many companies, even those with a digital marketing strategy, don’t have a clear goal for what they want to achieve online, such as gaining new customers or building stronger relationships with existing ones.
A report on digital marketing management found that 45% of companies don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, but are still doing digital marketing activities! Without defining a clear goal, you are more likely to be inefficient and ineffective in your marketing activities.
According to recent research, about one-fifth (17%) of companies define their digital strategy. This is a good start, but the goal is to have a fully integrated strategy where all digital marketing activities are prioritised as part of overall marketing investments.
Elevate your Digital Maturity
Many brands don’t allocate the right set of people or budget to digital marketing, despite knowing its importance. As a result, they lack specialist online marketing skills needed to respond effectively to competitive threats.
A good first step to improve your digital marketing is to assess your digital marketing maturity. Maturity models are a common tool used by management consultants to measure an organisation’s capabilities in a particular area and identify areas for improvement.
Here’s our complete guide to measure your digital maturity and also evaluate the right tools to help you do so.
Get High-Quality Leads or Get Left Behind
Lead generation is the lifeblood for any brand. In 2024, the market will be more competitive than ever, as service-based businesses scramble to secure targeted leads.
Smart marketers will adapt to the changing landscape by embracing low-cost lead generation strategies, such as LinkedIn networking, video marketing, and interactive channels like webinars and virtual conferences.
In today’s times when most people are bombarded with content, it’s crucial to provide exceptional value to prospects through digital marketing activities before closing a deal.
Focus on Always-On Marketing
If your digital marketing strategy isn’t aligned with always-on marketing, you’ll fall behind your competitors. Always-on marketing is a comprehensive approach to digital marketing that involves continuous investment in paid, owned, and earned media. It’s essential to maintain visibility and support conversion and retention throughout the customer lifecycle.
Staying constantly active on social media, publishing new content, and running advertising campaigns has more benefits than ever.
Many brands don’t strike the right balance between always-on marketing and campaigns. This can lead to neglecting always-on marketing altogether, which is a mistake. Always-on marketing is the foundation of a successful digital marketing strategy. Without it, you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage.
Know your Customer Persona
Online marketplaces have different dynamics than traditional channels, with different types of customers, competitors, propositions, and marketing channels.
To understand your online marketplace and develop an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to develop detailed customer personas. Customer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on research and data. They help you to understand your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points, so you can create content and marketing messages that resonate with them.
Create a customer persona guide to develop actionable customer personas that map messages and content requirements through the customer journey. Once you have developed your customer personas, you can create a content strategy to support customers in selecting products to improve engagement through your search, social media, and email marketing.
Position Yourself as a Thought Leader
A content strategy is one of the pillars of your digital marketing strategy because it helps you to attract, engage, and convert your target audience. By creating and distributing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, you can position your brand as a thought leader in your industry and build trust with potential customers.
Conduct Regular Customer Surveys
While digital marketing is often touted as the “most measurable medium ever,” it's important to note that analytics tools like Google Analytics only tell you how many people are visiting your website, not what they think of it. To get a better understanding of your visitors’ sentiment and identify areas for improvement, you need to use other forms of research, such as surveys, user feedback tools, and social media monitoring.
Once you have collected data about your visitors’ sentiment, you can use it to identify areas for improvement. For example, if you notice that a lot of visitors are complaining about your website’s navigation, you can make changes to make it more user-friendly.
Integrate your Marketing Efforts
It’s common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos, meaning that different teams or departments work on different aspects of digital marketing without coordinating with each other. This can be done for a variety of reasons, such as to simplify budgeting or to give each team the autonomy to focus on their own area of expertise. However, working in silos can lead to inefficiency, inconsistent messaging and lack of visibility.
Integrated digital marketing is an approach that brings together all aspects of digital marketing under one umbrella. This allows teams to coordinate their efforts and create a more holistic and effective digital marketing strategy.
Don’t Waste Your Time & Budget
Even if you have enough resources, you may be wasting them if you’re not using an integrated digital marketing strategy. This is especially true in large companies, where different marketing teams may be using different tools and agencies to perform similar tasks.
Once you have identified the different channels and tactics that you will use, you need to create a plan for how you will integrate them. This plan should include a clear definition of roles and responsibilities, as well as a process for communication and collaboration.
It is also important to track the performance of your integrated digital marketing strategy and make adjustments as needed. This will help you to ensure that your campaigns are on track to achieve your business goals.
Optimise Your Digital Marketing
Most companies have website analytics, but many senior managers don’t make sure that their teams have the time or resources to review and act on the data. This is a mistake, because data-driven insights are essential for improving your digital marketing performance.
Once you have a solid digital channel strategy in place, you can start to focus on continuous improvement. Top online brands like Amazon, Booking.com, Dell, Google and Zappos are constantly experimenting and innovating to stay ahead of the curve.
If you want to achieve similar success, you need to adopt a dynamic approach to digital marketing. This means being willing to experiment with new strategies and tactics, and being quick to adapt to changes in the market.
The Six Pillars of Digital Marketing
There are six pillars of digital marketing that can help you adopt an effective and profitable approach. Each of these play an important role in the customer experience. In smaller businesses, one person, such as a digital marketing manager, may be responsible for all six pillars. In larger businesses, there may be a team dedicated to each pillar.
Here are the six pillars and specific examples of how you can implement each pillar of marketing:
- Strategy and governance: This pillar encompasses all aspects of developing and executing a successful marketing strategy, including setting goals, conducting analytics, defining target audiences, and aligning marketing with sales and other business goals. It also includes managing the marketing budget, team, and technology.
Pro Tip: Develop a marketing strategy that is aligned with your overall business goals. Set clear and measurable objectives for your marketing campaigns. Track your progress and make adjustments as needed.
- Goals and measurement: This pillar focuses on setting and tracking marketing goals, as well as measuring the results of marketing campaigns. This includes developing and managing key performance indicators (KPIs), tracking attribution, and gaining insights into customer behaviour.
Pro Tip: Define KPIs for your marketing campaigns and track your results on a regular basis. Use attribution modelling to understand which marketing channels and tactics are driving the most conversions. Analyse customer data to gain insights into their behaviour and preferences.
- Media: This pillar covers all aspects of paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media includes advertising on search engines, social media, and other websites. Owned media includes your website, blog, and social media accounts. Earned media includes publicity and word-of-mouth marketing.
Pro Tip: Invest in paid media advertising to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to your website. Use social media marketing to connect with your target audience and build relationships. Develop a content marketing strategy to create and distribute high-quality content that attracts and engages visitors.
- Experience: This pillar focuses on creating a positive customer experience across all channels, including your website, apps, and customer service. It also includes ensuring that your messaging and content are consistent and relevant across all channels.
Pro Tip: Create a user-friendly website that is easy to navigate and provides visitors with the information they need. Offer excellent customer service across all channels.
- Messaging: This pillar covers all aspects of communicating with your customers, including email marketing, social media marketing, customer service, and on-site interactions. It also includes personalising your messaging to meet the needs of individual customers.
Pro Tip: Develop a consistent brand message and communicate it across all channels. Use email marketing to nurture your leads and customers. Use social media marketing to engage with your audience and promote your brand.
- Content: This pillar focuses on creating and distributing high-quality content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience. This content can be in the form of blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and other formats.
Pro Tip: Create high-quality content that is relevant and valuable to your target audience. Promote your content on your website and social media channels.
By focusing on all six pillars of marketing, you can create a digital marketing strategy that is effective and profitable.
Need a fresh perspective on transforming your digital marketing strategy? Let’s talk.
At 360 OM, we specialise in helping businesses take their marketing efforts to the next level. Our team stays on top of industry trends, uses data-informed decisions to maximise your ROI, and provides full transparency through comprehensive reports.
