A marketing strategy is similar to a puzzle.
If all the pieces don’t fit properly together then your puzzle will never be complete. Likewise, if all the pieces of your marketing strategy don’t fit together, or you are missing one completely, it will never quite work as well as you want it to and it will never be complete.
Over the last two decades, marketing has evolved. The average marketing portfolio used to consist of advertisements, brochures, phone scripts and a television spot. This type of portfolio would have generated massive sales in the 1990’s, however, fast forward to 2018 and the world we live in is almost completely digitalised. And if your business does not have a strong digital presence, then you are missing out on a large customer base.
Why You Need A Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital channels are vital for acquiring and retaining customers. The shift to digital first marketing means that consumers no longer need to rely on salespeople for information – they can find everything with the click of a button. However, this also means that as marketers, we must focus on becoming more strategic, as consumers are seeing so many messages at once, their attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter.
By developing a digital marketing strategy, you will learn more about your business’ strategic goals, target audience, online market share and competitors.
Digital marketing offers businesses a chance to become more creative with their marketing tactics. With the right digital marketing strategy, a whole new world of possibilities is opened. There are multiple channels to work with, so your business can experiment and see which one works for you and which one doesn’t. The main digital marketing channels most businesses work with include email, social, search and retargeting, however, moving into the future we will also start seeing more digital marketing strategies that revolve around artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
The missing piece of the puzzle.
It’s important to remember that a successful digital marketing strategy needs to fit with the rest of your marketing tactics. Digital marketing is considered the missing piece of the marketing puzzle because it connects marketers directly with consumers in new ways.
However, to have a real competitive edge, businesses will need to implement a combination of online and offline marketing strategies. This means that marketers need to change their tactics again to create a more cohesive well-rounded marketing strategy. Businesses can no longer just rely on one single tactic to get them through the door with a generation of more informed buyers. They need to look at marketing like a puzzle and see that digital marketing helps make the marketing puzzle complete.
Without digital marketing, traditional marketing tactics will not work. However, by the same notion, digital marketing still relies on traditional marketing to increase sales and revenue. The lines between traditional and digital marketing are blurring and both are becoming increasingly intertwined, so start thinking about your digital strategy today.
