For some companies, digital marketing is as natural as breathing. They just seem to get how to use TikTok, display ads, and content marketing in a cohesive whole that promotes their product and brand in an engaging, audience-growing way.
And then there are the rest of us.
No one will argue that whatever we sell, whatever size our company, wherever we are, our customers are online and expect us to be there, too. In fact, 90% of B2B buyers start with an online search, and B2C buyers aren’t far behind at 80%.
And digital marketing has many benefits. Perhaps most important for the budget conscious is its cost effectiveness. Ad spends alone are less expensive online and we can more narrowly define our target audience than we can with more expensive offline channels.
Results are easier to measure as well, helping us to identify what’s not working sooner and change tactics. It’s impossible to know how many people viewed a magazine ad, but we can measure how many people viewed a search engine ad and how many clicked the ad to take the next step.
And then there’s my favorite benefit: we can more easily reuse content online. For example, a blog post can become several shorter social media posts, an infographic, or a flyer. It can be repackaged as a white paper, video, or podcast. Several blog posts can be repackaged as an ebook or webinar.
We can’t afford to let digital marketing be an afterthought. If it has been for you, it’s never too late to change that. Let’s start with putting the right people in place.
Who’s in Charge of Digital Marketing?
Making a strategy work starts with ownership. If no one is in charge of your digital marketing strategy, you don’t have a strategy. You might have digital marketing tactics — routes to get to your chosen destination. And you certainly have tasks — the steps involved with deploying a tactic. You might even have people assigned to those tasks and ways of measuring those tactics’ performance. But what do those tactics do for your business? How do they help you reach your goals? How much do they help?
Your strategy is the map showing you where you are and where you want to go. It must have an end point; otherwise, you’re just wandering along, taking in the view. Identify your goal and choose a path for getting there. Place markers, your key performance indicators (KPIs), along the way to ensure you are on the path.
Midsized companies in particular can struggle with strategy. You’re no longer small, making things up as you go along and with the expectation of everyone helping out in every department. Staff at this point are, for the most part, doing dedicated jobs that take up all of their time. But you’re not large enough (yet) to have multiple managers and teams within every department. To grow, you need to determine how best to deploy people and budget and when to ask for more.
Without a strategy, those decisions won’t get made.
Review Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Start with a review of your current digital marketing activities, whether they’re organized under a formal strategy or not. Key people to involve in a review include:
VP/director of marketing. Who leads your company’s marketing efforts? They should have a holistic view of the marketing your company does and understand how it relates not only to sales efforts but to your company’s bottom line.
Digital marketing manager. If you don’t have someone already, this is the time to put someone in place and task them with leading digital efforts.
Other marketing managers. Who else is involved with tactical decisions around digital marketing? This might include a content marketing manager, social media manager, event manager, website analyst, brand manager, and similar folks.
You don’t need every staff member to weigh in on a strategy review, of course, but each leader or manager should know what their team does, how they do it, and what the possibilities and problems are.
How you perform the review will depend on how your staff works best. Putting everyone in a conference room for a day or two isn’t always practical. A series of meetings to cover each of the steps below is a popular option. Leaders could also asynchronously weigh in on a shared document or submit separate—but brief!—reports on each topic as they relate to their areas, with your digital marketing manager collating and writing up conclusions. Do what works best for you. What matters is thoughtfully going through the process.
1. Define Your Desired Results
You need to know your destination before you can draw your map to get there. Start with some high-level questions:
What is marketing’s role within the company?
How does it contribute to success?
How is success measured?
How does, or can, digital marketing fit into marketing’s role?
What other areas of marketing can digital marketing support?
And because marketing’s job is essentially to talk to people, ensure that everyone involved is clear on who your target audience is. Analyze your current customers, identifying specific characteristics that relate to your product. Organize your customers and other audience members into segments according to attributes, behaviors, and product needs. Each of these groups with becomes a target audience, who will respond to messaging written precisely for them.
Now let’s look at whether your current strategy meets your audience’s needs and contributes to your company’s success. If you don’t have a formal strategy yet, review what you do have.
2. Audit Your Current Strategy
Review the performance of each channel, asking questions like:
What is this channel’s main goal?
How does this channel contribute to our overall marketing strategy?
What are the channel’s KPIs?
How is this channel performing against those KPIs?
What’s the return on investment (ROI) for this channel?
Are there any performance trends or patterns for this channel?
Your goal here is to know which channels you use, why you use them, and how well they’re working.
Next, compare performance across channels, asking questions like:
Which channels are the most effective toward our marketing goals?
Which channels are the most cost-effective while still delivering results?
Are there any channels not delivering results at a level worth investing in?
If so, can they be improved? Or should we stop using them?
Are there any channels that you’re not using that could be?
Are there any opportunities to connect channels together for better results?
Here you want to see the connections: how do your digital marketing efforts work together or in comparison with each other?
Let’s say, for example, that you are a midsize financial services company offering online banking services and personal loans. You have a blog that educates readers on budgeting, investing, and other financial topics. That’s one digital marketing channel. You know the advice is solid, but you don’t get a lot of readers. How could you use other online channels to get more readership for your blog and build your reputation as a knowledgeable, supportive company? Here are some ideas:
Share the links for the blog on social media, sharing a teaser to the content.
Create related content on social media and encourage followers to check out the blog. Think a video on TikTok and Instagram with one quick tip or a short bullet list on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Promote the blog in your email campaigns.
Create a newsletter for the blog.
Optimize your posts for SEO.
Host free webinars related to the blog.
Use paid advertising to promote your blog.
Think, too, about how you can use one content effort in multiple ways. With those blog posts, could you:
Republish several posts on one topic as an ebook?
Share the posts as videos or podcasts?
Create webinars or infographics from blog post content?
And within those blog posts, are you reminding your readers about your other digital channels, encouraging them to seek you out in other places or sign up for your emails so that they don’t miss a post?
By creating once and (smartly) reusing often, you’re not only getting more value out of your team’s efforts but also sharing your message in different places, connecting with more people and the same people more often.
3. Create Your New Strategy
With a better understanding of where you’ve been and where you want to go, you’re ready to determine how to move from the starting point on your map to your destination.
You should have a list of ideas and data by now. I often think of it as huge pile of objects that I need to sort and distribute. All budgets are limited, so prioritize your digital marketing efforts:
What has performed well? Put a greater share of your efforts here. Consider how you can improve performance, even by a little.
What hasn’t performed well or has taken more effort than it returned? This might be a channel to cut—at least for this year.
What’s something new you can try? Launch small experiments to find new opportunities, as your budget allows. If an experiment doesn’t work, let it go. If it looks promising, continue to nurture it and consider making it a permanent part of your strategy.
Especially if this is your first digital marketing strategy, set realistic goals. We know it takes time to build an audience and develop a rapport with them, even if we are in a hurry for results. I’m a fan of the SMART formula (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) to help resist the urge to ask for the impossible. With SMART goals, everyone knows what’s expected of them and what success looks like. But however you write up your goals, make sure that you can connect the dots from digital marketing’s goals to the company’s goals.
Let’s go back to our financial services company with a very simple example. A big goal for the company is to increase brand awareness by sharing their subject matter expertise, specifically by helping potential customers to become more financially astute and, therefore, to see the value of the company’s products. The blog contains a lot of information that can help readers increase their financial knowledge, so the company wants more readers for it.
Since a company goal is directly tied to the blog, the team decides to make it the anchor of its digital marketing, using the other channels to increase visits to the blog. One goal could be:
Drive a 15% increase in organic blog traffic and 25% growth in new blog subscribers over the next 6 months by refreshing outdated content and amplifying promotion through digital campaigns focused on financial literacy topics.
The team knows how much they want to increase blog visits by, what the deadline is, and broadly how they’ll do it. From there, they can start to create the paths they’ll take to get there: which content they’ll refresh, what digital channels they’ll use for promotion, and how they’ll structure digital campaigns.
As you create goals for the different channels, take the time to consider what resources you’ll need for each. Rarely do we have enough resources to do all the things we want to do. That means making choices—and the best choices align with company goals.
Prioritize tactics and tasks that will give you the best result, reserving a little for testing something new. The strategy should put a cost to each channel and try to give your budget a small cushion. You’ll be glad you did when the unexpected rolls in.
Don’t forget that “resources” includes staff time. If you’re not sure how long something takes, ask. If you think you know, increase that time. Be sure to allot enough time for data gathering and analysis. Especially if you’re new to digital marketing, you’ll need extra time to create processes and tools. This will be a learning year; creating efficiencies will come in the future. If a team member will be adding tasks to their responsibilities, think about what they will stop doing in order to have time for these new tasks.
And if you’re really struggling with how to put this strategy to work, consider hiring help. You could hire an agency to run the whole program. If that sounds budget-busting, consider your team’s expertise and what could be done better or more efficiently by outside help. For example:
A content writer to update old posts and write new ones
A designer to create brand images and social media templates your team can use
A copyeditor to help revise and finalize blog posts and other content
Tools, too, can help stretch your team’s efforts. Tools that automate repetitive, tedious tasks and gather and sort data can be a big help. Tools like HubSpot, Zapier, and IFTTT can help automate your workflow. And while AI should never be the sole creator or the last word on any content, it can help writers, editors, and designers with brainstorming and research. You’ll find AI embedded in some of your favorite tools to help predict next steps, saving you time in the long run.
Coupled with sales, marketing is key to growing your business. If your strategy has lacked a robust digital marketing strategy, make it your mission to create one this year and you’ll reap the benefits for years to come.
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Now let’s turn the focus on you!Â
What are some of the ways that you evaluate and optimize your own digital marketing strategy? What has and hasn’t worked for you as far as digital marketing tactics in the past – and why?
Leave your comments below to get the conversation started!
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Erin Brenner is the owner of Right Touch Editing, a boutique editorial agency that specializes in helping small and midsize businesses to be more engaging with their audiences, more persuasive in their marketing, and clearer and more precise in their communications.
Erin is also the author of The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors: How to Take Care of Your Business, Your Clients, and Yourself from Start-Up to Sustainability, Marketing Yourself Guide (with Sarah Hulse), Copyediting’s Grammar Tune-Up Workbook, and 1001 Words for Success: Synonyms, Antonyms & Homonyms. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading and a Full Member of ACES. Follow her on LinkedIn and Bluesky.