harness the power of digital marketing

2. Develop and execute a customer-centric digital marketing growth strategy

Place the customer at the heart of your marketing strategy and focus on providing an integrated customer experience – think about what the customer needs and wants. Manage the customers’ ‘end to end experience’ efficiently and effortlessly.

Develop a strategy that provides not only a smooth and easy experience whenever and wherever the customer is on your site but allows each and every one of your customers to feel they are getting a personalised and engaging experience.

3. Implement best practices in your digital marketing strategy

These practices should enable your business to create, manage, and deliver a memorable digital customer experience every single time. This foundation helps you create great experiences that stand out from your competition, gain brand recognition, and improve interactions with customers.

Identify what your competition is doing and where their successes and failures lie. This research forms part of your digital marketing process and should assist your digital strategy to be successful. Your digital strategy must contribute to the bottom line and generates results in a measurable way.

4. Work at really getting to know your existing and potential customers

Research your target customers and develop personas of the typical consumers you want. Build a deep understanding of both customers you have and those you want so you can meet their varied needs, expectations and values.

Use analytics to help you identify the different types of customers. This includes who buys what and why, who and what influences buyers, and at what points in the consumer decision journey your marketing efforts are likely to yield the greatest return.

5. Be prepared to broaden your scope, responsibilities and knowledge

Stand in your customers’ shoes. The power of your marketing lies in understanding the customer experience and being able to improve and enhance it, and then take advantage of it.

Your responsibilities and KPIs should reflect this and they should focus on driving customer engagement, customer experience and revenue.

6. Harness digital technology in marketing

Embrace digital solutions and explore ways you can leverage technology for your business’ advantage. Aim to be a data-driven marketer and seek out applications that help determine ROI, such as analytics, marketing automation, and CRM systems.

Personalised, behaviour-triggered marketing automation programs can provide you with a wealth of information about the consumer. Identify the tools and campaigns that will give you consumer data and learn how to monitor their impact.

If you are a small business and digitally inexperienced and unfamiliar with social media, create your own account and experiment with different digital transformation solutions. For example, run your own blog and experiment with different plug-ins, themes and other capabilities, until you feel confident.

7. Make the IT department your best friends

With their skills in digital technology, IT is essential to digital marketing. Work with IT to create a more streamlined way of doing business, particularly as technical data increasingly becomes the main driver for marketing.

Encourage collaboration and synergies, and break down barriers between Marketing, IT and other digital professionals within your organisation. Consider the benefits of creating a cross-functional management or working team comprising representatives in these three areas.

8. Appreciate the importance of your business being social

According to Search Engine Marketing, social media remains the best digital channel for ROI. Post valuable content on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Content and social media have a symbiotic relationship – without each other, they fail to pack the required punches. Used together they enable you to reach and convert prospects.

Use Facebook Insights and any other research you have collected to see when your fans are online and engaging with your content. This will enable you to find the right time and frequency for your online users to engage with your content. Check out Facebook Lookalike Audience, which lets you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to a customer list you care about.

Write a compelling blog, it has the potential to rank well organically in the search engines. According to Hubspot, the performance of one in 10 blogs is compounding, which means organic search increases their traffic over time. In other words, this is a great driver of new website traffic.