Four Ways to Improve Your Company's Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the industry right now. Everyone is talking about it, and almost every business is using it. Digital marketing is effective and costs a fraction of traditional advertising costs. What's more, the results that a digital marketing campaign delivers can be tracked and analyzed, making it easy to adapt the campaign as may be needed.

To be successful, however, you must have a strategy for your digital marketing campaign efforts. According to a study by Smart Insights on Managing Digital Marketing, 46% of brands don't have a strategy for their digital marketing efforts, while 16% do have a strategy, but haven't integrated it to fit into the context of their entire marketing efforts.

However, you should consider the fact that without a plan, there's a huge possibility that you'll waste time and resources, and end up making mistakes that will hurt your brand. Here are four simple ways to improve your company's digital marketing strategy.

1. Set your objectives from the start.

If you don't know what you want, you'll end up wasting your time and resources. Before you ever send the first email or run the first ad on social media, you should go back and decide what you want to achieve and why.

Start from your company's goals, then look at your target audience, and then do a copious amount of research. Then, set up your objectives. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate sales, or keep the conversation going?

2. Set your KPIs.

Your Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) are milestones or mile markers along your way that tells you how far you've gone toward achieving your goals and how much more you need to do. Be specific with the numbers you're targeting, e.g., 100 new page follows per week or 70 new email subscribers weekly.

Next, decide how you want to measure your KPIs. Do you want to use a third-party analytics service or the analytics embedded into the service? These tasks may be a little challenging to manage, especially for small companies. This is why they hire companies like Riserr Marketing.

3. Pay attention to conversion, and not just leads.

The goal of marketing is to produce paying customers. As such, you must be able to convert those that you reach out to via your digital marketing channels from just leads into paying, and even repeat customers.

This means your most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are those that show you how you converted digital leads into paying customers. Whatever digital marketing channel you employ to reach your audience, ensure that your primary focus is on conversions and not just on generating leads

4. Create value for the long term.

As tempting as it may be to target short-term results, you must be careful to ensure that the value you create will provide returns for the long term. For example, running adverts on social media can drive sales in the short term, but building valuable and useful content that will help you rank on search engines can deliver traffic and customers to you in the long term, so don't neglect one for the other.

There you have it - four simple ways to improve your digital marketing strategy. If you apply them judiciously, you can be sure of getting improved results.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.