Integrating Digital Marketing into Your Marketing Strategy

You might already have a solid marketing strategy for your business. If you do, then it might be time for a digital transformation. If you don’t, digital marketing can serve as a good foundation for your entire marketing program. It’s challenging, so it’s OK if you need some help. However, it’s still important to have a good understanding of what digital marketing entails and how you can integrate it into your overall business operations.

Addressing Digital Marketing Strategies

The most challenging part of creating a digital marketing strategy is the construction of the marketing plan. Lean planning is a good place to start so that the resulting report isn’t so overwhelming that you lose all understanding of the results. Yes, the sheer scope of digital marketing can be quite broad since there are so many techniques, ranging from social media marketing and search to search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing. Fortunately, everything can be broken down into steps.

It’s also important to note that digital marketing is an ongoing process. It’s not effective to stop when the results are positive and resume when your return on investment begins to decline. The search landscape and internet trends are always changing. It’s imperative that those trends are monitored so that the necessary changes are immediately applied to your strategy.

Once a plan is in place and the marketing techniques are in motion, the strategy naturally becomes a part of your business.

Different Types of Strategies

It’s good to look at the different types of plans that exist. They range from “flying by the seat of your pants” to “having everything but the kitchen sink.” Below is a review of those strategies:

1. Not having a clear strategy means that goals are unclear. This usually results in ad hoc use of target ads on Facebook, Google, and other advertising mediums. SEO is not well defined. There are no customer insights to start, limited research has been conducted, and analytics are unmonitored or nonexistent.

2. A more managed strategy contains some prioritized activities, but the goals aren’t necessarily aligned. However, there may be some targeted keywords in play and calls to action on webpages. While this is better than the first “non-strategy,” it’s still not quite there.

3. Once a more structural approach starts being taken and a multichannel marketing plan is in place, results improve. At this level, the value proposition is well defined on the website, email marketing statistics are monitored, and content marketing becomes a valuable tool.

4. Taking it a step further, 90-day planning is in place with regular improvements to media and content. A/B testing becomes a priority to see what works. The brand is more defined, and sales are improving.

5. If you want the best, then you want a strategy that encompasses everything. This is a full optimization program that includes structural testing, fully optimized media, quality content marketing, multivariate testing, and everything else previously mentioned. Compared to the first type of strategy, or non-strategy, you know that this is going to get results.

But how do you get there? It starts with understanding that digital marketing encompasses SEO, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, analytics, content marketing, and making constant improvements to your website. It also involves staying on top of the always changing search landscape and social media algorithm updates. Someone must occasionally do market research, review customer insights, and do what is ethically necessary to give you the results you need.

Understanding the Impact of Digital Marketing

Just look at these digital marketing statistics. You don’t have to wonder if social media marketing should be a part of your strategy since Wordstreamsays that the click-through rate of Facebook ads is 90 percent. Other statistics:

• According to Google, 75 percent of people who search localand find helpful information are more likely to visit the physical location.
• Businesses make $2 for every $1 they spend with AdWords, according to Google’s Economic Impact Report.
• SEO and email marketingare the most frequent sources of traffic to e-commerce sites.
• Written articles, images, and videos are the three most engaging forms of contenton social media.
• An honest and authentic brand personalityis preferred by 86 percent of consumers.
• 1 in 3 millennials uses mobile voice commands to conduct searches.

As you can see, having a solid online marketing strategy is very important because people are relying heavily on the internet for information about businesses like yours. If you don’t know where to start, you don’t have to do it alone. With help, a digital marketing strategy can be the foundation of your business’s marketing or seamlessly integrated into your existing offline marketing strategy so the two can efficiently and effectively work together.