There is no growth without digital marketing. Learn how businesses are driving digital marketing growth with varied strategies and get tips for your own approach.
It’s safe to say that the beginning of the 2020s has been completely unprecedented. As we near 2022, it is clear that reverting back to the old normal is not an option. As marketers think about building brands in the coming years, how is digital marketing being leveraged to help companies bounce back? More importantly, how should you redefine your strategy for 2022?
Those answers and more are in this blog post. Let’s dive in!
The Increasing Need for Digital Marketing
According to McKinsey, companies are responding to accelerated marketing trends by diversifying their spend across paid and owned media. Customers are now spending more time and resources on owned-media channels such as websites, mobile apps, and customer-service channels. There is also a noticeable increase in customer-conversion rates, with social and digital video channels driving the highest ROIs.
As a result, digital marketing has never been more important. However, digital marketing strategy is not like traditional marketing avenues of years past. It is driven by data and analytics; focused on personalization rather than a one-size-fits-all approach; delivered via both social media marketing and broadcast media; interactive and “always on” rather than static and periodic; and iterative rather than pumped out as a single campaign.
As such, digital marketing is now a growth engine for many companies across a variety of sectors such as financial institutions and telcos. Further, it has the ability to drive an increase of 5 to 8 percent in revenues over 12 months by capturing more online traffic and engaging with consumers more effectively. Furthermore, McKinsey reports that some financial institutions have seen up to a fivefold increase in digital sales, while telco companies can reduce absolute churn by 15 to 40 percent and retailers can significantly increase sales.
What are buyer personas? Learn how to target online shoppers here!
Digital Marketing Growth
You’re aware that digital marketing is crucial for growing your business, but many business owners simply don’t know where to turn once they hit a business plateau.
Below are several ways that digital marketing can help grow your business:
- Brand awareness – digital marketing helps you create an online presence that fuels your reputation as a business while also making it easy to find. Now, brands build trust in consumers by updating social media pages with a new product or service and publishing blog posts about different business trends. Campaigns are also used to build brand awareness via paid advertisements that boast optimized content and design, which are engaging, attractive, and easy for potential and existing customers to find.
- Cost–effective – compared to other forms of advertising (like buying ads on TV stations), digital marketing in the form of social media ads are much less expensive. Digital marketing can also provide businesses with a new stream of income. For example, your business has an e-commerce site and it does not currently have any banner ads on the homepage or sidebar. You could place some advertising space in those places to drive traffic back to that part of your website where people are most likely going to make a purchase.
- Better revenues – when do marketers’ plans work? When they are getting high conversion rates and a high number of website visitors. Further, you can turn website visits into customers with an effective email marketing or social media strategy. You can also increase brand awareness by making it easier for potential customers to find your company via search results on engines like Google or Bing. All it takes is someone finding a related keyword that is close and landing on your website.
- Improved ROI – it seems simple, really – the more traffic your website gets, the higher the chances that someone will make a purchase and invest in what your company has to offer. And tracking and measuring ROI isn’t difficult. It is the cost of the marketing campaign divided by the money generated from the campaign.
- Wider reach – with digital marketing, you can reach people all around the world without ever having to step foot outside of your physical bounds. When looking to build your brand internationally, digital marketing is an invaluable strategy for promoting your messaging. Campaigns can be set up easily and with a small budget to cover the cost of advertising in many different countries. They can also be geo-targeted, which is something companies may not have been able to do in the past when they were only reaching people geographically close.
5 Ways to Bolster Your Digital Marketing Strategy
So, how can you create a successful long-term digital marketing strategy? Try the five tips below:
1. Enhance customer experience with performance marketing – performance marketing focuses on continually optimizing marketing stats and performance metrics like activation, churn, and upsell along the customer-journey funnel by leveraging actionable and quick-impact levers. It plays a crucial role in driving customer experience, particularly at the lower-funnel interventions. Methods include digitizing interactions and offering a customer-service response team that responds quickly. When implemented accurately and at scale, this approach can be powerful. However, it is important to note that companies should be wary of vanity metrics (like shares or traffic) or attempting to “buy” customers. Instead, identify a key metric that is most indicative of your business’ success.
2. Be sensible about martech – before investing in martech solutions, think carefully about how your business will use them to capture ROI. When choosing a modern martech stack and data setup, make sure it covers three capabilities:
- Campaign execution: Automate and personalize campaigns and communications across owned- and paid-media channels.
- Audience management: Segment customers based on both their offline data (such as customer relationship management) and online data (such as digital-asset behavior), and share this segmentation with different marketing channels.
- Data analytics and performance: Collect and register customer behavior for audience-creation and campaign-performance tracking and provide a platform for analytics.
3. Become agile – to continuously optimize the customer journey, your marketing and technology teams need to work together. As such, leaders need to elevate digital marketing to the CEO agenda to get the necessary executive buy-in and generate momentum. They also need to establish transparency of existing marketing-activity ROI and stop marketing efforts that fall below a certain ROI threshold. One of the best strategies to use high-performing existing talent to form several agile marketing and tech squads to target key performance indicators. Team members should have expertise in growth marketing, search-engine optimization, user-experience design, HTML development, attribution analytics, broader campaign management, and copy writing. They should also work together to define, prioritize, and execute against research, product, marketing, data, and technology backlogs.
4. Balance spend allocation – how much should your organization spend online versus offline? Use characteristics like demographics, connectivity, behavioral, and income data to create specific buyer personas, then build your campaigns toward targeting those personas with personalized messaging. Further, define spend in each subchannel by leveraging omnichannel marketing, which looks at the full customer journey to understand the impact and ROI for each channel.
5. Be responsible with first-party data management – the public is becoming more wary of how their data is being used online. Therefore, to ensure you have your audience’s trust, prioritize their privacy and be transparent about how their data will be used.
Stefanini’s Support for Your Digital Marketing Strategy
In an increasingly connected world, your approach to marketing must be just as integrated. We create customized solutions for your business by innovatively combining marketing tools and technology, while keeping the focus on end-user experience.
We focus on strategy, data science, media, and advertising, using data intelligence to boost business, connect people, and create experiences. Using our expertise, best practices, and statistical techniques, we provide actionable business insights based on data mining and predictive models, as well as analytics and social insights.
Could your digital marketing strategy use a boost? We are here to help. Reach out today to connect with one of our experts and get started.
