Why You Need a Digital Media Strategy to promote your business

Everyone needs a digital media strategy, and not for the reasons you may expect. In fact, if you think digital strategies are just promotional, think again. Typically, small businesses have a limited marketing budget yet their products and services could be competing with with national and international brands who have deep pockets and very large marketing resources and budget.

In this digital era, smaller businesses need to take advantage of digital marketing techniques and choose to market their business efficiently. To do this requires planning. Most start up businesses get all excited and start posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and just about any other platform - presuming this will increase awareness and drive sales - if only it was that easy, then I wouldn't be typing this blog post!

In my experience, businesses who start digital marketing start without a plan. So why do you need to plan your digital marketing activities before you begin? There are many reasons why this is recommended, some of which I will outline below:

1. Give you business Direction
If your business has established a clear strategic plan and sets out precisely what the business wants to achieve through digital marketing the the activities and resources can be applied consistently and efficiently. Should you have an emphasis on gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with your existing customer base?

2. Determine your online audience
Demand for your products and services need to be researched so you understand the "Online Marketplace", compared to traditional marketing the dynamics regarding digital marketing can be very different. The digital market provides both challenges and opportunities enabling you to better understand customer profiles, customer behaviour, competitor strategies, competitor propositions and available options for marketing communications.

3. Existing and Start-Up businesses can gain market share
If your business is not allocating enough resources to digital marketing but your competitors are - your business will be at a disadvantage - the unfortunate thing is you won't even realise it!

Digital Marketing across the organisation needs to be integrated
Quite often digital marketing activities are kept effectively separate to the business as an add-on function. Digital Marketing activities are seen as an isolated function and more often than not a costly expense. If the marketing function is not integrated with the organisation it's activities will be much less efficient.

Insufficient Resource Allocation
Digital Marketing is extremely important - if you do not provide enough people resource/time or budget then it simply will not be effective or efficient.

Lack of In-house Specialist Marketing Skills
Most small to medium size businesses do not have the specialist e-marketing skills to carry out effective marketing activities. A common approach that some small business owners take is to hire a "Marketing Graduate"Marketing Graduate has indeed passed the necessary exams but do they have the experience - you decide. My view would be to determining what aspects of digital marketing can and should be done in-house and what cannot be done in-house.

Wasting time and money through duplication
More relevant to larger organisations, quite often different parts of the marketing function are using different digital tools to carry out similar similar marketing tasks. There are so many software tools available for digital marketing and communications. The best solution for your organisation should be chosen and deployed across the organisation to avoid duplication and ensure efficiency.

Keeping up with Digital Trends
You have seen the top brands lead the way with different types of digital marketing promotions and you would like to do the same. look at the top online brands like Coca Cola, Amazon, Google, Mercedes - yes they are dynamic and innovative when trying to gain new customers and keep their online audiences engaged. But consider the resources they employ including the world's largest marketing and advertising companies - however, you can adopt their tactics but you need to have the specialist e-marketing resources to do this. For most smaller business this will require outsourcing some or all marketing activities.

Digital Marketing & Website Analytics
Most businesses have a website in 2019 - surprisingly not all! Of those that do, many will use website analytics (mostly Google Analytics) but managers don't have or make the time to review and act on the analytics. This is very much an overlooked opportunity and for those that do analyse their website analytics - this gives them huge competitive advantage.

Once you have a defined strategy in place, it enables you to get the basics right early on. After that you can look at more specialist digital marketing analysis like Search Marketing, Website User Experience, User Interface, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

For most businesses in 2019, a digital strategy is essential. There are so many options available for digital marketing, so many marketing tools and digital platforms but thy all require resource - if you plan it right and allocate sufficient resources the your strategy will succeed - if not who knows - you competitor strategy may succeed!