Does Your Business Put Digital Marketing First?

Whether it’s because you don’t have the resource or you just aren’t familiar with all the amazing results it can bring your way, there’s a chance your business isn’t putting digital marketing first right now.

And that’s OK. Every business has their own things they’re focused on. But if you’re still unsure (or sceptical) about digital marketing’s power, then this post is for you.

Below, we’ll look at the importance of digital marketing in more detail, offer up some ways to improve digital marketing across your business and why you should start putting it first if you’re focusing on optimising digital growth. 

Why is Digital Marketing Important?

There’s no shortage of reasons why digital marketing is something that businesses invest in. We’ll delve into things in more detail over the course of this article, but at its simplest, it’s important because it’s a proven way of reaching new (and larger) audiences, boosting brand awareness, and driving sales. And it can be done in all sorts of different ways that can be tailored to your business’ audience, values and goals.

Assessing Your Current Digital Marketing

Whether you’re doing little in the way of digital marketing, or you’re putting the work in but not seeing the results you want to, then it’s worth gauging where your digital marketing currently stands so you can work out what you need to do next. Here’s what we’d recommend looking at…

Time & Resource

How much manpower and budget are you putting behind your digital marketing? Is there a team of people taking care of your marketing or does the business’ activity fall on one person – and if so, are they stretched too thin?

Reporting & Results

Whatever the amount of money you’re putting into your marketing efforts, it’s important to know if they’re bringing in results or not. Are your current reporting methods providing you with insights into performance? And are you actioning these insights in ways you can improve your efforts with?

Strategy

Are you sticking to your strategy or is your activity on the ad-hoc side? If it’s the latter, then that’s when things start to lose focus, with tactics becoming irregular and, more often than not, ineffective. Review your strategy to see if you’re current channel activity is in line with what’s detailed in it.

Goals

Much like your strategy, are your digital marketing goals (if you have them) synced up to the goals of the business as a whole? When they are, it helps to give your efforts more focus, and increases the potential for success across the whole business.  

Take Our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz

Another way of assessing your current level of digital marketing is by taking our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz. In a matter of minutes, you’ll have a clearer picture of the lay of the land of your business’ digital marketing. Get started with it below…

Why You Should Put Digital Marketing First in Business

So, let’s go into more detail about why digital marketing is at the centre of so many businesses’ activity and expand on what we’ve mentioned above.

• Improves brand awareness: Digital marketing tactics let you broadcast your brand far and wide, landing on the radars of people you otherwise wouldn’t, letting a new batch of potential customers learn about your products or services.
  
  
• Targets online customers: With billions of users worldwide, netting your share of business from the internet makes total sense in this day and age. And with so many channels available, fostering an online presence, is a no brainer. Without one, users will opt for a competitor who does.
  
  
• Cost effectiveness: Traditional marketing, like TV ads, billboard space and print, can be effective but costly. For cash-strapped businesses, digital marketing is the better option, giving brands a chance to get their name at very little expense. You can be flexible with what you spend to, allocating money elsewhere when you need to.
  
  
• Quickly implemented: Again, traditional marketing tactics take a long time to get up and running. In comparison, a digital marketing strategy is a lot quicker to put into motion
  
  
• Competitive advantage: It’s highly likely that your competitors are already benefitting from digital marketing. The good news is you can swing by their channels and website to see what they’re doing – and then do it better. Seriously, we’ll show you how to do it here.
  
  
• Strong return on investment: Since digital marketing tactics are measurable, you can use the day-to-day results to see which channels are performing well, and which aren’t. And with this info, you can then set about improving your campaigns so that more people see your brand, convert into sales, and boost the return on your investment.

Upgrade Your Business’ Digital Marketing

There are plenty of ways you can level up your activity and start seeing results. Give these actionable tips a try and make a start on getting your digital marketing priorities straightened out.

Putting a team together

Whether you keep it in-house or outsource certain roles to freelancers, assembling a team of experts with the skills to put ideas in action is a must – and it takes the pressure off anyone who might have been trying to balance the businesses’ digital marketing on their own.

Creating a strategy

Like we said earlier, a strategy makes sure activity remains focused because it lays out what you want to achieve, how you’ll achieve these goals, details key info on your target audience and lays out the methods you’ll use to report performance with. In other words, you’ll always have a path that everyone on your team can follow.

To learn more about how to create powerful digital strategies, we’ve got you covered here.

Planning your campaigns

Dictated by the business’ wider company goals, you should also familiarise yourself with campaign planning too. Again, this will strengthen focus and stop you from falling into ad-hoc activity, but they’re also a great way to better understand your audience, your competition and your industry as a whole in more detail. We’ll show you how to go about creating them here.

Reporting the results

Reporting isn’t just about collecting stats. It’s about what you should do with these stats after you’ve collected them. Strong stat reporting lets you make better decisions, change tactics if things aren’t working and adds value to the business – all of which help in the long term. And with our handy guide, you can learn how to properly report on your campaigns here.

Download Our Free Digital Marketing Matrix

Keep the results from our Digital Marketing Maturity quiz handy, because you’ll be able to plot yourself on our downloadable Digital Marketing Maturity Matrix. And with that, you can then find out what you need to do next to reach that level of maturity and start seeing even greater commercial growth.

Download it here…

Like the sound of the benefits Digital Marketing can bring you, but you’re not sure how to get started with your own? Get in touch with the BANC team or give us a call on 0345 459 0558 to see what we can do for you.