Do you know what exactly digital marketing is and why it is important?

Digital marketing is all about employing different tools to connect with your target audience at the right place and time. It has become the norm for successful businesses irrespective of the industry. With a well-planned digital marketing strategy, your company will witness significant growth.

The digital advertising and marketing market across the globe is estimated to reach $786.2 billion by 2026, which shows why digital marketing is so crucial for businesses. 

The traditional marketing techniques are still followed by many businesses due to their relevance but the shift of the mass towards the internet has boomed digital marketing. 

Successful businesses realize the importance of a digital marketing strategy and hence invest in it. A robust digital marketing strategy helps businesses to accelerate business growth by broadening and enhancing customer engagement. 

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital marketing strategy is defined as the alignment of the brand to the specific objectives and goals to attract its target audience by using a combination of marketing techniques. These methods usually include content marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, and more.

A digital marketing strategy is tagged effective when it fits perfectly with your brand, target audience, and campaign objectives. It could be a content marketing strategy that uses content such as blogs and whitepapers to engage audiences or an event-based strategy that creates buzz around product launches and trade events to capture media attention and grow engagement. 

Importance of Digital Marketing Strategy 

A highly-developed digital marketing strategy can fuel businesses to accomplish their marketing objectives/goals, boost brand visibility & awareness, sales and lead generation, and growth of the overall business.

When it comes to digital marketing, an effective strategy can help your business in numerous ways. Mentioned below are some of the really important ones:

• Allows targeting: A well-thought digital marketing strategy empowers businesses to reach their target audience with value-added personalized engagement. By identifying the channels preferred by customers, businesses can use relevant and consistent content that will boost conversion rates.
• Streamlines direction: Creating a digital marketing strategy helps carry out tasks in a structured manner. A well-defined strategy provides a better understanding of combining the different marketing channels to achieve marketing goals.
• Accelerates business ROI: When you carry out your campaigns and other tasks in an organized way, the chances of the occurrence of mistakes are reduced. With a well-designed plan, you can easily identify the gaps and address those areas faster. It helps to save both time and money to boost the overall business revenue. 

9 Practical Benefits of Digital Marketing Strategy

Now that you have a better understanding of the importance of digital marketing strategies, let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of having a strong digital marketing strategy for your business.

We have summarized the key reasons for how it benefits organizations.

1. Develop a focal point & direction

A crystal-clear digital marketing strategy provides a streamlined approach to your team. It also helps to outline your business’s goals and objectives and provides a sort of coherence to all the marketing campaigns. Hence, having a digital marketing strategy in place is extremely vital.

2. Know your market share

Market share is the total percentage of total sales or revenue in a given market that is captured by a particular company or brand. It is crucial as it indicates the relative competitive position of a brand within a market. 

The competitive position is identified as a key performance metric to track growth or decline over some time. When your digital marketing strategy is focused on growing the market share of your brand, the campaigns deliver significant results, which is essential for your business.

3. Understand your target audience better

Businesses that invest time and money in knowing their target audience, learn about buyer personas, and different phases of their journeys, stay ahead in this hyper-competitive marketplace. 

By leveraging an effective digital marketing strategy businesses can:

• Expand their customer data capabilities
• Better audience segmentation
• Effective personalization efforts 

All of these capabilities help in designing marketing campaigns that are more targeted and effectively align with customers and accelerate business growth.

4. Create an effectual value proposition

Having a strong value proposition is extremely critical in the modern marketplace to keep your business distinguished from its competitors. Having a well-planned digital marketing strategy can help businesses significantly in creating a fruitful value proposition and empowers your brand to stand tall among competitors.

When you keep aligning your products/services with your messaging to maintain the customer satisfaction index, you cement your value proposition. It eventually helps to enhance customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value (CLTV). 

5. Effective resource allocation

In big companies or enterprises, there are chances that the efforts get duplicated. Due to siloed teams, the allocation of resources can be to the same channel or campaign several times. 

By outlining a digital marketing strategy, you can plan to assign teams to handle tasks. It will result in the effective utilization of resources and workflow will be streamlined. 

6. Gain authentic data

In planning and executing a digital marketing strategy, a thorough analysis provides a huge amount of data about what is favorable for your brand and what is not. 

The data acquired can also help you to prepare a mockup catalog for addressing the gaps and improving your business.

7. Improve organizational goals

The growing competition on digital channels has impacted the different strategies designed by businesses. At the same time, it is quite difficult to optimize when you are running multichannel campaigns.

As a business, you have to: 

• Identify the right metrics and KPIs
• Conduct effective data analysis
• Make informed decisions

It will help them to adapt to the changing trends. A digital marketing strategy can significantly help to enhance the important aspects and ensure that it aligns with your business goals and objectives.

8. Smooth integration across multiple channels

Digital advertising campaigns that are well-planned navigate various channels while coordinating with one another to provide a consistent outcome throughout. 

But the challenge is when you focus on multiple channels at the same time, there are high chances for individual campaigns to lose their grip and impact.

A beautifully defined digital marketing strategy helps maintain the cohesiveness of the campaigns, is aligned, and consistent, and heads in the right direction

9. Helps to remain flexible and competitive

When you outline your digital marketing strategy, it acts as a blueprint for your marketing team to get started with. As everything is so well planned that the team can easily understand and refer. 

The strategy also allows you to stay competitive and remain flexible in dealing with the big crowd of industry-level competitors.

10. Enhance access to budget

With a digital marketing strategy, you can enhance budgeting by providing a holistic view of what your marketing team is currently engaged with. In this way, you can effectively allocate your resources and eventually boost the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

When you get a 360-degree view of the entire marketing budget distribution, it is convenient for higher budgets and more resource allocation.

Important Steps to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy for Professional Services

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to defining a digital marketing strategy, there are certainly some steps that are static for all businesses irrespective of size or industry. You can choose the most relevant ones from the below-mentioned steps that resonate with your brand.

Let us discuss the digital marketing strategy process step-wise:

#1. Conduct in-depth research

A solid marketing strategy starts with research, evaluation, and analysis. Thorough research provides a deeper understanding of your customers and how you can stand tall among your competitors. 

You need to evaluate the previous year’s performance over the last year. With the help of analytics, you need to determine what worked well and what did not. You should also examine your competitors by investing time in understanding their digital presence.

#2. Outline your brand goals & objectives

Once you are done with research, design your realistic goals based on the insights. You can outline specific goals that are measurable and timely for your digital marketing strategy. These goals will guide you in decision-making. You can create brand guidelines with key components like brand voice, values, and unique selling points (USPs).  

You can compare competitors’ content and know the rank of their pages with the help of tools like Ahrefs or Moz. Ensure that you choose digital marketing channels that fit your business the best way. It is recommended not to work with many channels at the same time from the beginning, rather slowly adding one by one is necessary.

#3. Collect customer data

The next step after the goals are set up is to know your target audience. You can know them better by acquiring customer data from different sources such as purchase history, previous customer service interactions, chat conversations, etc. 

The data collected through these sources can be analyzed to know customer expectations, needs, and pain points. It helps define a customer-focused digital marketing strategy.

#4. Identify the target audience & create buyer personas 

It is very important to know who your target customers are, including their demographics, preferences, and purchase behaviors. It helps to define your digital marketing strategies.

You also have to make use of the opportunity to run marketing campaigns with highly accurate targeting. Break the ice of conventional demographic targeting and be very specific. You can create buyer personas for your potential customers to know them closely with various aspects.

#5. Select digital marketing services

The next step is to choose digital marketing services wisely. You need to choose the best services that cater to the needs of your target audience, help you accomplish your goals, appease your audience, and fit perfectly with your brand.

Investing in the right digital marketing services helps to deliver increased customer satisfaction and unforgettable experiences.

#6. Check on your budget

Budget is one of the crucial aspects when it comes to developing a powerful marketing strategy. It is important to decide beforehand how much you can invest in digital marketing.

#7. Plan the campaign details 

After the budget is properly planned, it is important to plan out all the details of your digital marketing campaigns, which include their duration, key metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Once the marketing campaign details are done it becomes very easy to run the campaigns.

#8. Launch your campaigns

The next step in creating a great digital marketing strategy is the most awaited one i.e. to launch your campaigns as per your planning. While you follow the steps for creating the digital marketing strategy there is a high chance of witnessing positive results.

#9. Generate & nurture leads 

The next step will be to generate and nurture the leads that we get through marketing campaigns. You will have to optimize lead generation and search for new ways to do it. You can initiate it by sending free subscription forms.

Through this subscription form, you get users’ email addresses, names, contact numbers, and other personal details for further communication. You can create multiple forms by adding links to your messengers. Lead nurturing encourages leads in different ways to make a final purchase once they have reached out to your brand. You can deploy advanced tools such as live chat, chatbots, and social, to communicate with the leads.

Note**For that, you have to educate your target audience, add value to their presence, and at the same time, try to promote your brand in a non-intrusive manner.

#10. Value your returning clients and advocates

Once the customer has made his purchase decision, it is not just the end. In a way, it is the beginning of a relationship with him. 

• Make sure to offer deep thank you wishes to your customer for choosing you, and make a polite request for feedback or review.
•  Follow up with the customer via email to cross-sell. This reflects how much you care and value your customers.
• To encourage customers to return to you, ensure that you deliver an excellent customer service experience. 
• You have to make them feel like premium customers by offering them personalized offers and unique content. 

It encourages them to be your brand advocates as it also brings them discounts when they refer their friends and colleagues.

#11. Monitor your results

When you run a marketing campaign or anything it is vital to track it to improve it. You need to carefully track your campaign results to understand the gaps that need to be addressed to accelerate your success.

Usually, businesses face the challenge if they are getting the desired results. Every task you plan and invest in needs to be tagged with a KPI, which is your measure of success. Post that you have to set benchmarks that are your target to achieve.

For instance, if you are following email marketing, the KPI tagged would be email open rate, and the benchmark would be to reach up to 30% or more. 

#12. Analyze, adjust, and implement best practices

The ability to analyze and adjust makes digital marketing strategies powerful. It does not demand intensive planning and goes according to it. 

ust for example – if one of your ads is not delivering the expected results, take a pause and try thinking from a different perspective. 

If your website is not able to attract visitors or convert visitors to customers, you can try out running an A/B comparison test with the right calls to action such as you can test a “learn more” call to action against “sign up now” to see what works better.

Digital Strategy Examples

While digital marketing strategies include different components as per brands, every strategy has its benefits. Businesses need to pick up as per their requirements. Here are some  common digital marketing strategies implemented by businesses worldwide:

• Pay-per-click advertising
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• E-commerce
• Email marketing

Getting Started with a Professional Digital Marketing Agency

There is no doubt that a clearly defined digital marketing strategy is an asset for any business as it acts as a catalyst to acquire, retain, and reach more customers. It also helps your marketing staff to stay aligned with the goals of your organization, accelerates marketing efficiency, and drives better decision-making for your business.

If you are planning to get started on a digital marketing strategy for your business, choose a reliable digital marketing agency. Nucleo Analytics is one of the professional marketing services companies that can help you devise a strategy based on your goals and implement and monitor your campaigns for you.

Nucleo Analytics has a highly knowledgeable and experienced team under its umbrella. The team has professionals who come with years of relevant experience with digital marketing services and can get the best results for you to deliver the services your customers expect whenever and wherever they need them.