Using a digital marketing plan to support digital transformation
Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It's a common challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet they don't have an integrated plan to grow and engage their audiences effectively, so they are suffering from the 10 problems I highlight later in this article and they are losing out to competitors.
The challenges of creating a digital marketing strategy?
In my experience, a common challenge is where to start drawing up your digital marketing plan. I think there is a fear that a massive report is required, but we believe that lean planning works best. Your plan doesn't need to be a huge report, a strategy can best be summarised in two or three sides of A4 in a table linking digital marketing strategies to SMART objectives within RACE. We recommend creating a lean digital plan based on 90-day planning to implement your digital plan rapidly to gain traction. You can learn more in our free download.
Another challenge is the sheer scope and scale of digital marketing. There are so many great digital marketing techniques ranging from search, social and email marketing to improving the digital experience of your website. Our article, What is digital marketing? shows how by using our RACE planning framework you can define a more manageable number of digital marketing activities which cover the full customer journey. Within each digital marketing technique there are lots of detailed tactics that are important to success, so they need to be evaluated and prioritised, for example from dynamic content for email automation, website personalisation to programmatic, retargeting and skyscraper content for organic search.
A recommended approach for developing a digital strategy
Whether you have a strategy or not, at the heart of the Smart Insights 'Opportunity, Strategy, Action' approach to improving digital marketing, is benchmarking to compare where you are now to assess the potential against where you need to be in the future.