Digital marketing is constantly evolving. Marketing teams must have flexible strategies to keep up with the latest trends.
While most marketing leaders know the importance of digital marketing and have integrated it into their efforts, only 49% still need a defined digital strategy. 17% describe it as a separate document.
In a highly competitive ecommerce environment, businesses must recognize digital marketing and separate it from their marketing strategy. Digital marketing is the new norm.
Let’s look at five ways to optimize your digital strategy to increase revenue, customer engagement, and digital transformation.
Refine and Assess Business Objectives
Like any strategy, business objectives should be reviewed regularly. Reviewing goals should include those achieved, those not met, and others that should be expanded due to positive outcomes. It is important to remember that a business strategy’s primary goal is to achieve its objectives. This means it’s essential to ensure alignment when reevaluating a strategy.
Looking at an organization’s possibilities is key to developing a winning strategy. Ask yourself questions like:
What does our customer want?
What are the consumer responses to social media?
What makes us different from our competitors?
What is the USP of your company? Do we use it to our advantage in content marketing?
What are the emerging trends that we should be aware of today?
Based on our data, what are the most important things for our customers?
How can we better communicate with consumers?
What platforms do our customers use that we don’t?
These questions can help identify the gaps in the market and help your company understand where it stands and what your customers want. These questions will help you map your answers to business goals and reevaluate your strategy.
Evaluation of KPIs
A successful strategy relies on performance indicators. They help you measure your marketing efforts and monitor them regularly to see changes.
KPIs, like objectives, should be adjusted to the current business environment. Content has become an integral part of your company and generates high-quality leads. KPIs must be developed to measure the impact of content, such as social sharing or conversions.
It is also helpful to align objectives with KPIs so that critical decision-makers and team members know the goals instead of just setting numbers. It is essential to base it on the current data because it creates a benchmark for growth and sets a standard. It’s critical to ensure your KPIs are realistic and achievable. Otherwise, you will set yourself up for failure.
A KPI that is not monitored has no value. Ensure that your KPIs are aligned with strategic goals by making them a top priority in the marketing department and tracking them regularly through standardized reporting.
Be customer-centric
A good strategy is tailored to your audience. If not, it is irrelevant at best and fails to engage the audience your business wants to attract.
Personas can help you with this. You can only treat some visitors the same. Each cohort has its pain points and interests. Examine your current personas, and look for elements that still need to be included, such as the social media channels they prefer, their topics of interest, contacts with competitors, or challenges they face.
Personas can help your marketing team better understand their audience and may reveal new platforms or strategies they should test to determine the impact.
Mapping the customer journey is another important aspect. Understanding the core details and how people interact with businesses and their routes is essential. A journey map can help prevent customers from falling between the cracks. It will also create a seamless experience that encourages brand advocates and return visitors.
Listen to Data
Digital marketing starts and ends with data. According to Forbes Insights, when appropriately applied, data analytics can positively and significantly impact revenue.
A marketing team can use it to create better messages for campaigns, redirect ad budgets from one platform into another, or make marketing efforts more effective during the days and times when they deliver the best results. It can help marketers become better at marketing.
The array of touchpoints available to consumers means that a lot of data is being circulated within businesses, from website statistics and customer feedback to the input of a sales team into a CRM. For a business to be successful, it must overlay the data to gain insights and feed into a marketing strategy that drives loyalty and engagement.
Listening to the data and making adjustments accordingly is critical.
Comply with the law
The amount of data organizations collects increases as society becomes increasingly digital and global. Senior executives are becoming more aware of compliance with brand protection, transparency, and ad fraud. 90% of marketers have updated digital marketing strategies to address these issues.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the latest data protection measure of the European Union, will be implemented in May 2018. This is a significant change for the marketing industry. The General Data Protection Regulation significantly impacts the marketing and sales of businesses.
To prepare your business and feed into an effective strategy:
Check and review the specifics of the regulations
Organize all the data you manage (such as who you share them with and where they come from).
Update privacy policies and procedures as well as data processing techniques
Update policies to identify and address data breaches
If your business requires it, you can designate a Data Protection officer.
As the impact of GDPR has yet to be determined, it is essential to plan so your strategy and business don’t suffer.
To optimize a marketing strategy, you must undergo a digital transformation. This includes a re-examination based on new data and the selection of KPIs that will track your progress. You also need to understand your audience better to ensure all digital marketing efforts are targeted, relevant, and personalized.
Data should be the core of any strategy, no matter how many changes are made. It can provide valuable insight into performance gaps, campaigns, tactics that have been successful or failed, and audience insights.
Finally, any marketing overhaul must address the latest compliance issues. The more online activity customers engage in, the more data they collect, and the more regulations are developed to protect their privacy.