Everyone wants to start with digital marketing tactics and methods without thinking through the “why” you should be choosing those specific types of marketing. You are a business owner and are super busy so when you are buying marketing, buying a simple package of marketing is easy. If you were sold a “package of marketing”, you just got lower-level marketing, bummer.  It was easier, you understood it, so the marketing agency sold it to you. 

The difference between “packages” and “strategies” is thinking through the “why”. This is where a digital marketing strategy helps plan out what tactics to use. What’s a digital marketing tactic? Think SEO, Content marketing, Landing Pages, Search (PPC, Pay per click, SEM), Video ads, Social Ads, Native ads, Display ads, Audio Ads, Connected TV Ads, Shopping ads, Remarketing, Email Marketing, organic social media and more!

If you resisted clicking on any of the digital marketing tactics, CONGRATULATIONS! You’re on the right track!!

A digital marketing strategy gets called a lot of different things such as a digital marketing plan but it really is your marketing agency’s life raft and needs to be revised at least every month. Woah every month you say? Yes, because you are getting digital marketing data coming in monthly that should be guiding your marketing agency’s digital marketing strategy.  

It’s not easy and it’s rare to see marketing agencies who do custom reporting every month. There should be no automated digital marketing reporting that should be happening as your marketing agency analyzes what is working and what is not.

Your digital marketing strategy is evolving for your marketing agency as they have identified more problems along the funnel to interact with your clientele. They identified in your strategy and solved one problem but then might run into another one and need to address it with mini sprints of fixing those items. Digital marketing is complex. 

It’s important to note that different digital marketing methods though require you to look at them in different amounts of time to make adjustments.

Let’s about the stages of a digital marketing strategy.

First, you start with a digital marketing analysis. These should be done every six months or so. Your marketing agency might need to do it sooner as new digital marketing tactics and channels open up and you are determining whether the digital marketing tactic should be added to your strategy.  Then there is the whole changing of the rules with algorithms. See how a package of marketing is useless?

Determining if it should be added to your digital marketing strategy depends on the resources that your marketing agencies have and whether the digital marketing tactic can help solve the problems of your strategy.

Doing a digital marketing analysis lets you know what you have and don’t have.

A digital marketing strategy is similar to a digital marketing analysis but the difference is an analysis discovers what all you have and a strategy determines what is the lowest hanging fruit.

How do you determine what is the lowest hanging fruit? Identifying what the problem is and tracking it. The problems are identified by looking at the data of your marketing.  Often the setting of tracking your marketing data step gets missed because it’s time-consuming and technical.  It’s also always evolving as technologies upgrade and how it’s tracked needs to be updated. No one wants to be patient enough to update it because its’ not bringing in traffic that can convert.  But it’s identifying why you don’t have traffic and answers as to why it’s not converting.  Here are some common questions that get asked. 

• Are you getting enough traffic?
  • If you have no traffic at all then your marketing agency looks at ways to drive traffic. Your agency doesn’t know if your website converts yet. When your website was built there was a hypothesis developed of what they thought would work but it needs to be tested with traffic.  Just having a website does not guarantee any traffic at all. 
• Are you getting the traffic but just not converting?
  • If you do have traffic to the website this can splinter into some sub-questions listed below.
    • What marketing channels are driving traffic that converts?
    • What marketing channels do I not have that can get to my target audience?
    • What is your funnel that you have to get someone to purchase your product or service? You don’t have a funnel? Well, that is a problem! But perhaps you have a product or service that is an impulse purchase so you don’t have a full fledge funnel where they need to see multiple marketing pieces but there is still a funnel.  From being aware that your product exists to what the marketing copy will get someone to take the next step
• Who is getting to my website now, and what are their demographics and interest?
  • There are lots of tools to use to see who your audience is.  Your marketing agency might be driving traffic that is not qualified yet through marketing tactics such as SEO. You then need a certain type of marketing to move them down the funnel.  You might altogether be driving in the wrong traffic. Often the buyer persona gets brought up here which is just what the demographics and interests are of your audience. 
• Does your marketing agency have marketing to fill both the TOF (Top of Funnel) and BOF (Bottom of the funnel) marketing channels?
  • Is my marketing agency just filling the TOF (Top of Funnel) and not following up, that is the problem. 
  • Or am I just doing marketing at the Bottom of the funnel? If you are only playing at the bottom of the funnel of marketing and not the top of the funnel you are constantly exhausting your funnel.  It’s also more expensive to just do BOF marketing. 
• Who are your competitors?
  • There are who you think your competitors are and who you are actually competing with in digital marketing channels.  
• What are your competitors doing?
  • There are some great tools to see what type of marketing they are doing and how they are doing it. 
• How large is my target market?
  • There are great tools to see the trends of your market availability. 
• What digital marketing tactics am I missing?
  • There are also new types of marketing popping up, ensuring that it works with your current flow and can get to your audience is important to leave time for this analysis. 

We know you just want to get to the tactics, but just like your business, it wasn’t built overnight.  You need to get started though, if you are still stuck at do I need digital marketing? Maybe you are just stuck on whether am I working with the right digital marketing company.