Why Everyone Needs a Digital Marketing Plan
All business owners have digital marketing on their minds. They know it’s an approach they need to take to be relevant today. However, they struggle to incorporate this into their current marketing strategy.
Having a clear understanding of what you are currently doing and where you want to be is the first step in digital marketing planning. For you to define your plan, you must be able to determine where you are and what you need to do to achieve excellence in digital marketing.
According to a survey, almost 50% of companies do not have a clearly defined digital strategy. Often we create that perfect plan but then the person or team responsible for it doesn’t follow it day to day, and so the goal is hard to achieve.
It’s crucial to set and monitor the right KPIs for your business and work hard to achieve them. Measuring them in real time allows possible adjustments to be made to avoid failure, especially when these KPIs are not even close to being achieved. Having a dashboard that provides you with these metrics can help you make timely adjustments.
Rely on offline
Creating a digital marketing strategy is no different than creating any other marketing strategy. The challenge here is how to convince senior management that you need them. It is easy for those of us who have been familiar with this digital environment for a long time to realize that it is something indispensable. We believe in it and have witnessed its success. However, not everyone has this mentality, and our lack of empathy for these people and our sense of the obvious do not help us sell very well.
You would think that the digital revolution would change the mindset of owners, CEOs, managers, etc. Unfortunately, people still rely on offline and traditional efforts and think it will always work. It’s hard to get people who have relied on this approach for a while to reallocate their budget to digital, especially if they don’t know why.
Why start now?
From a business perspective, the question that CEOs or managers often ask themselves is: does this deliver immediate results? Or does it become something important to provide a return on investment? We need to be able to communicate in this language in order to be able to sell a digital marketing plan to senior management.
We should be talking about media attribution models, customer lifetime value models, and multi-channel funnels. What C-level executives want to see are revenue-driven metrics, such as:
• Cost of customer acquisition (CAC), also known as cost per acquisition (CPA): This metric provides visibility into the dollars you are spending to acquire a new customer and ultimately leads to you getting the total ROI.
• Percentage of CAC marketing and sales: The CAC is normally calculated with the total sales and marketing expenses. It is important to monitor the percentage allocated to each. In this way, we can improve and reduce costs to reduce the final CAC.
• Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to CAC (LTV: CAC): With your CAC and CLV metrics, you will get the ultimate ROI target for your business. This will help ensure that you are signing good clients who will be with you long term to generate sustainable revenue and growth.
The fact that marketing has shifted to a results-driven approach is hard to digest for some traditional marketers. They will now be responsible for every dollar spent. We should embrace it as we become a more relevant piece of the puzzle by actually measuring what we do.
Here are seven reasons why everyone should adopt a digital marketing strategy:
1. You get direction and focus. You need a clear strategy to achieve your goals. You need to measure if you are going in the right direction and if you are able to execute them in a timely manner.
2. You benefit from a powerful online value proposition. This will help you differentiate yourself to encourage interaction with your existing and potential customers. In this crowded digital world we live in, it has become difficult to earn a click. Differentiating your brand helps you increase that click-through rate, not only so new visitors know you exist and are worth it, but more importantly to your returning visitors. If you’ve already won them over, differentiating your brand with a powerful value proposition will be key to keeping them interested.
3. You get to know your customers better. Qualitative measurement and quantitative data. Numbers are not enough – you should be able to get a feeling to address your customers pain points and get to know them better. It’s important to track your customers’ behavior with the right marketing technologies. This way you can provide information and make decisions quickly.
4. You avoid silos. An integrated digital marketing strategy ensures an aligned vision across every department. Clarity helps focus. With your digital marketing plan in place, you can put in place the governance needed to drive new technologies, share data across the organization, and manage capabilities and processes.
5. You can better plan your budget. Having enough resources is not enough. You need to be able to plan in advance what your digital program needs to be successful. What skills are needed to get results? Your employees may not be using their time as efficiently as they should.
6. You are constantly optimizing. Measured by KPIs, a digital strategy will give you the direction to constantly optimize and create an environment of continuous improvement. It is important to continuously track and manage the efforts you have put in place.
7. You get a return on investment. Being able to measure every marketing action guarantees a profitable strategy. This way, you can build the capabilities needed to support digital marketing operations.
Digital marketing is no longer about adding the online factor to your marketing mix, it’s about having the right plan in place to transform your business.
