Digital Marketing Strategy That Supports Business Strategy
Marketers are adapting their overall plans to the new situations they and their customers find themselves in right now, and what they will need down the road. For many, this involves relying more heavily on digital marketing strategies that serve their current needs and set them up for success in a “new normal” future.
At Trajectory, we’ve been undertaking this same kind of pivoting work with our health and wellness clients. For some clients, this involves stepping back to evaluate their brand’s digital health and their ability to support overall business strategy at the same time they are executing more digitally-driven marketing solutions.
Assessing Digital Health
Before running too quickly to execute digital marketing programs and putting to work those shiny new platforms and tools, it’s important to evaluate the strength of your brand’s digital vehicles and assets; in their own right and in regard to supporting corporate business strategy.
Overall, there are six elements we consider core for any meaningful evaluation of our client’s digital health. Our acronym is [phonetically speaking] seek:
In the words of Yogi Berra (known for his yogi-isms as much as his Hall of Fame baseball career) – if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else. As simple as the above statement is, nothing is more true.
Begin with WHY
Why is the first question you need to ask before jumping into any digital marketing tactics.
Move on to WHAT
After you answer why, you can then pass go (for those folks who remember Monopoly) and proceed to What.
Then on to HOW
How completes the picture.
Answering these questions will help ensure a business-aligned strategy and roadmap, a performance-based approach and integrated customer experience across web, mobile, email and social media channels.
Like a package sitting on a retail shelf acting as a silent salesperson, your website sits at the heart of your brand’s online presence. It’s here where visitors first come to get to know you – who you are, what you do, how you can solve their problems.
Important to keep in mind is that website visitors are impatient, and take anywhere from .05 seconds to seven seconds (depending upon the study referenced) to form an opinion on your website and determine whether to stay or not.
So we need to ensure your site is simple, familiar and easy to navigate to compel visitors to stay (dare we say to follow convention). Only by sticking around do you have any opportunity to move them through the sales funnel through any offers, strong calls to action and easy to find contact information.
Further, 85% of adults think that a company’s website when viewed on mobile should be as good or better than the desktop experience. Today, all websites should feature responsive web design (meaning the display of the website should adjust based on screen size and orientation). We’ll always take the time with clients to thoroughly test their site on different screen sizes and operating systems.
Consumers expect modern brands to contribute to simplifying their life. According to Salesforce’s 2019 State of the Connected Customer study, 84% of customers said the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. So a website that delivers a simple, frictionless experience – making it convenient to browse, shop and buy – can help drive performance in terms of share, growth and loyalty.
Social Media
Common among modern consumers and modern brands is that they’re both sharers. They both see social engagement (though trending away from “social” activities to more purposeful activities, like those based around content) as an integral part of their daily routines.
Case in point is the steep rise in Instagram Stories’ daily active users, as shown here by Statista.
Regardless of the specific platform – whether Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.; or the specific strategy, e.g. video content, influencer marketing, user-generated content, augmented reality, social media communities, etc. – social media is where your brand can interact with the audiences who will lend a hand in shaping your brands reputation.
Social media is a goldmine for data and insights. We use social listening to know what you and your competition are saying across all social platforms, to observe how audiences perceive your brand and are responding to social media campaigns – and to then refine social strategies. We understand how important your social media presence is and we make sure that it stays an active and vibrant part of your online presence.
Search Engine Optimization
Your customers are glued to the internet right now. So if marketing dollars are tight, and you need to make some tradeoffs, SEO might be a good place to shift those funds.
(SEO) is a number of elements that together help search engines more easily find your website and read it correctly, e.g. target keywords,
on-page optimization, content marketing, link building, internal linking, page load speed, reporting. All of these come together to impact the quality, quantity, and context of your website content and are the things we look at when assisting clients with their SEO. They’re the same practices we follow for optimizing our own Trajectory website.
Underscoring the importance of SEO is the fact that organic search is the channel that delivers the most traffic to web sites by a wide margin:
You can also think of SEO as Site Engagement Optimization. Keeping your visitors engaged with updated content lets Google know you care about staying relevant with your customers, and helps to improve your search ranking. Speaking of customers and engagement, we need to track what’s working and what’s not. If you don’t have analytics set up, now is the time to begin. This information can have a big impact on your entire digital marketing strategy.
The email industry is over 40 years old. Yet despite all of the new technology available to today’s marketers, email marketing has defied its critics in continuing to provide an array of benefits, from building trust to providing some of the greatest ROIs of any digital channel.
As crowded as our inboxes are, more than 55% of marketers still observe the best ROI from email campaigns. From Campaign Monitor:
Our Trajectory point-of-view is that for marketing teams looking to drive measurable results for their organization, a strong email marketing strategy should be a consideration.
Majority of research into email open rates has now concluded that mobile is providing a greater number of email opens than desktop, mirroring shifts across the digital marketing spectrum. See below from Litmus email client 2019 market stats.
When helping clients improve the performance of their email marketing programs, we consider:
Killer Content
We buy from people we trust. We also buy from brands we trust. How do you build trust through a screen? Killer content helps. Killer content doesn’t equal quantity of content. It equals quality content that is written in your distinctive brand voice and is expressly written to help better the lives of your ideal prospects – by way of your brand, expertise and products or services.
It’s content that, broadly speaking, either enlightens and delights. And therefore signals confidence and builds trust (illustrated by these stats from Lyfe Marketing:
To grow your brand, you need a way to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Killer content provides this opportunity. When working with clients on their content marketing, we always start with the target audience (their persona and their journeys).
To be of genuine value, we need to have an intimate understanding of the people you are trying to reach in order to motivate them to take action, e.g. what they care about, what their pain points are, what their challenges are, what questions they have. The more we know, the more relevant and digestible our content will be. And the more we provide a rich variety of blog posts, video and graphics, the fresher and engaging we can be and the more opportunity we have to increase leads that convert to grow business.
Killer Content Requires A Killer Plan
Our ultimate goal is to help take our clients’ content marketing to the next level. Beyond target audience understanding, this requires a structured process of:
It’s through this kind of planning that clients can really compete and win with their content marketing.
Digital Health Equals Digital Marketing Performance
There are a lot of moving parts, and certainly a lot of advantages, to a robust and fluid digital marketing strategy. And the most important is strategy. Before jumping into action, make sure your digital health is in the kind of condition to allow you to create a real and sustainable impact on your business.
As specialists in health and wellness, we take “health” seriously. Particularly as it relates to the digital health of your brand. Reach out if you’re looking for a specialist team to help guide you to a more powerful digital marketing strategy.
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