Nearly 100 percent of businesses that don’t have a comprehensive digital marketing strategy express frustration and defeat in being able to receive intelligence that has a real benefit to their company. Seeing how metrics and analytics work together, gaining insight from those metrics, and building a strategic digital plan, seems out of reach.
Here are the top barriers to building an effective digital strategy and, in turn, how to start breaking them down:
A made up term used by digital marketers, it’s the Frankenstein of software strategy where you bring together multiple pieces of software that report marketing intelligence that don’t naturally match up with other marketing metrics or integrate with your other software.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
When working in digital marketing it’s critical to consider and integrate the needs of your salespeople as you create your marketing strategy. First, every piece of content your marketing team creates should be based on your persona and it should have relevance to how the sales department will be using it. Second, digital is all about speed. Your digital strategy should be based on the journey and user experience of your prospects. Sales should know when a prospect moves from a marketing lead to sales lead. Once that happens, your sales strategy needs to have a plan for when and how to communicate to the lead. For example, if a prospect communicates with your company through chat and wants a quote, who should follow up and how quickly should you follow up? We know that the chances of you doing business with that person goes up 400% if you follow within five minutes. Ergo, digital is all about speed.
Paid and organic ad alignment
In a well thought out strategic plan, your paid ads should support your marketing departments work on getting your website to rank organically in search engines. Too often companies farm out their digital media buys, many times, to a media vendor that has little knowledge about their marketing plan or the sales process. The reality is, those two activities are interdependent and should be managed together. This ties into the benefit of having marketing software that shows how every visitor found your website.
Closed loop marketing
This means that you can track every part of the customer journey including the sale:
1.) How they found you.
Manage actual return on investment (ROI)
Many companies can say that their marketing is working, but aren’t sure where to attribute the success to. Today, a competent digital strategy will show sales and ROI in real time. Great digital intelligence delivers metrics on what tactics are attributed to the most sales (emails, social, blogs, ads, etc). Sales metrics can tell you how each salesperson uses the digital tools and then measure their activities and their results.
Today, the speed of getting and understanding your marketing intelligence is the foundation of the choices you make in software and strategy. Researching and finding what kind of software works best for your business, aligning marketing and sales as well as your paid and organic strategy, and understanding your customers actions and how it impacts your ROI are just a few ways that can help you get answers sooner so you can pivot your business toward growth.