1st November 2021

The Key to Digital Marketing Success

By Rachel Mcentee

It’s no secret that digital marketing can be a powerful, cost effective and efficient way to reach a large audience. Digital marketing provides opportunities to target new customers, understand and react to the habits of current customers all whilst building a community of loyal fans around your brand.
However, if you are generating, blogging and posting on social media with little return for your efforts, is it time to dig deeper and review your marketing strategy?

A Marketing Strategy or Marketing Plan?
Even a well-considered and executed digital marketing plan will only take you so far and provide you with limited results and data. However, if your digital marketing plan is born out of a marketing strategy built on insight and analysis combined with your business objectives- the out-turn of this collaboration could be digital gold dust.

Your marketing strategy focuses on your business goals and what you want to achieve, your marketing plan is your road-map bringing your goals to life

The 5 Golden Rules.


1. Insight & analysis-where are you now?
 What are your goals and how are you currently performing as a business? Look at your competitors, what are they doing and how, what are their key strengths and weaknesses, is there a gap in their offering that you can fulfill, who or what is your current target market and who and where else can you reach?

  1. Business Goals – where do you want to be?What is your vision for your business, what are your goals and objectives? Your marketing objectives must then support and align to these in order for your business to grow and succeed.
  2. The Marketing Strategy– How can we achieve those goals and objectives?What needs to happen to get to your goals, is it to expand on a product range, target a new market, diversify or increase loyalty? (Remember it costs 5 X to get new customers over existing ones) Additionally, the 4 P’s come in to play here – Price, Promotion, Place and Product.
  1. Tactics -What do you actually need to do to achieve your goals?This will be guided in part by your size of business and budget – you may not have the funds for an agency led TV advert or celebrity led promotional campaign but that’s OK. Remember simply put -it’s what do you want to sell, who to and how. Social media alone can give you a high ROI with minimal spend. So, maybe it’s increasing your market share or launching a new product – what social media will you use to promote it and how will the content be scheduled and generated, what tools can you use to help with the process to ensure your message is frequent, consistent and on brand.
  2. Finally and arguably most importantly -the measure of success. All your hard work and planning will pay off but being able to quantity this final step often gets missed in all the day to day activity. Refer back to your objectives – was it to increase organic sales by X% or increase loyalty by X%. Whatever your objectives were, decide how you will monitor and track these as part of your original marketing strategy. This will also enable you to remain agile with real time results to adapt your plan.
    Digital marketing gives you accurate and instant results. Adopting tools such as HubSpot will enable you to drill into these results to see who has visited your site, how often, when, what did they look at even what device they logged in on. This data is the digital gold dust you can use to prioritise and target your ongoing marketing efforts.

The beauty of digital marketing is it can be targeted and personalised with ‘high converting’ messages direct to your desired audience.

With all great marketing plans it is important to stop and think, who will deliver the marketing plan? An extension of the 4 P’s is the 7 P’s which include people – an important consideration. Having an all singing all dancing digital marketing plan is great but if you don’t have the manpower to implement your plan and content creation takes up all of your time you may need to re-think your marketing tactics. Content management can be time consuming but planned and targeted carefully will generate the engagement you are looking for. There are also some great tools to help you achieve this Hootsuite and Sproutsocial are two that offer free entry level accounts.

Digital marketing is flexible and opens up many opportunities to businesses for growth in an ever-increasing competitive world. Delivering an innovative and effective digital marketing plan based on a well thought out marketing strategy will grow your business, return a profitable ROI and stand you apart from your competitors.

-ends-

By Rachel Mcentee

Rachel is a postgraduate student on MSc Digital Marketing Management.