A Guide to Digital Marketing for Business Growth [With OKR Template]

It’s no secret that digital marketing helps businesses grow revenue, customers and brand recognition. And its success often boils down to one simple explanation – people spend more of their time online than ever before.

But as businesses all scramble to improve their digital marketing and use it to hit new growth milestones, it’s important to make sure you’re ahead of the curve and can outshine your competitors. In this guide, we’re sharing our tips and advice to help you hit your goals and set your business growth trajectory on an upward turn.

Why is digital marketing important?

The simple fact is that regardless of how good your products or services are, you’ll struggle to reach the right people at the right time without an effective digital marketing plan.

One of the biggest reasons why digital marketing is important is that it provides a cost-effective way to target your ideal audience. Not only does this improve brand recognition, but it can also help your business gain a better understanding of what brings customers through the door to your products and services. If you’re unsure of your customer demographics, you can pull data and insights from tools like Google Analytics. This can be used to help you pin down who your digital marketing should be aimed at, including the marketing channels that will work best.

Plus, digital marketing allows your customers to engage with your content, no matter where they are. Whether that’s through a social media ad or a website blog, you’ll be keeping your business’ brand at the forefront of their minds, which often leads to great customer retention.

Planning to grow your business

Whether you run a small e-commerce business or an international SaaS company, growing your business requires a strategic and tailored approach. Just as much work – if not more – should go into the planning stages of your business growth as the actions needed to get where you want to be. Every business is unique, which means growth is likely to look a little different. So, if there’s no catch-all technique to help you see improvements, where do you start?

Tying your business goals to your digital marketing strategy will help clarify exactly how it will help you achieve the success you’re after. Want more sales? Create a plan for how you’ll target new and old customers using relevant digital marketing channels. Aiming to improve customer retention? Consider incorporating customer surveys and feedback into your digital marketing strategy. 

Building your digital marketing strategy

Diving straight into digital marketing activity without a plan of action is a recipe for disaster. There’s a big difference in the impact you can make with a directionless, lacklustre strategy compared to a fully formed version targeting all the key areas requiring improvement across your business.

The strategy must complement and enhance your overarching business strategy, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to align it with your goals, actions and targets. So, what exactly do you need to consider when writing your digital marketing strategy?

Goals

What do you want to achieve and why? From increasing sales to improving website traffic, you should be able to justify your goals and understand how meeting these will drive success. Once you have clear, measurable goals in place, you can start thinking about digital marketing activity that would support your efforts. A goal-setting framework such as OKRs can help you build this part of your digital marketing strategy.

Channels

Do you know the best ways to utilise different marketing channels? Whether your strategy ends up leaning more toward one channel or efforts are evenly split between the main ones, you should be able to give a reason or two behind why you’ve chosen your approach. If you can’t, it’s probably best to go back to the drawing board and take a closer look at how digital marketing activity on each channel would help you reach your goals.

Targets/results

Every business uses targets to push for progress, but if clarity and measurability are missing from yours, any digital marketing efforts meant to support you could miss the mark. When you’re setting your targets, think about the specific actions that will help you meet your goals, and this should steer your planned digital marketing activity in the right direction, too.

Using digital marketing for business growth

From content marketing and social media to paid media and email marketing, the various channels involved in digital marketing can be utilised differently to support your business’ growth strategy. Find out about each one in a little more detail below.

Content marketing

Content marketing can help you improve organic website traffic, give your brand a recognisable voice and drive sales. Whether you’re creating insightful blog posts or optimising your site’s landing page copy and layout, this is all about creating a seamless user experience when customers encounter your brand. Ensure your content marketing team is well-versed in your brand guidelines, can match the business’ tone of voice, and understands the target audience, as this will support the foundations of a more effective content marketing strategy.

Paid media

With this channel, you’re essentially spending money to make money. So, if your business growth targets centre around increasing revenue, you should look at how this could be achieved with paid ads and searches. These will target your audience based on parameters set by your paid media team, including demographics, geo-location and more. Track your conversions and clicks from paid advertising and link these metrics to your revenue and sales targets to drive success.

Social media 

Should you increase your posting frequency to improve engagement? Could an influencer-led strategy work for you? Which social media platforms are your target demographic most active on? Taking a proactive and reactive approach to social media marketing activity allows you to stay on top of fast-changing trends and experiment with different approaches to see what works.

Email marketing

This digital marketing channel can help you boost lead generation, improve customer lead nurturing and build customer relationships. Whether you develop a monthly email newsletter or use emails to get valuable customer feedback, you can use this to develop your understanding of customers and keep the conversation going. In turn, you’ll be in a better position to improve key metrics like customer retention and conversions.

Download your OKR framework template

Working on your business growth and considering how digital marketing can help you meet your goals? Our simple and easy-to-use OKR framework template lets you streamline goal setting and action-planning to get you where you want to be without piling on the extra admin.

Need some extra steer on your OKRs? Our digital experts can investigate your business objectives and help create manageable, achievable and relevant OKRs to support business growth. Head here for more info or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.