Building an effective digital strategy has never been a simple task and as the wider marketing landscape is currently experiencing a significant process of transformation, it is arguably more difficult than ever before.
Digital marketing is no longer solely about delivering personalised experiences and building brand awareness. As marketing must now fully serve the needs of audiences, from initial interactions to nurturing loyal customers and transforming them into powerful brand advocates, it can be difficult to determine precisely what needs to be done to secure success at any given point in time.
Here are a few marketer-approved tips that will help you to develop a next-gen digital strategy with the power to propel your business further towards achieving a variety of key goals and objectives, even in hyper-competitive marketplaces.
Set out your goals and build strategies that will support them
Before you make any decisions, you need to know precisely what you want your marketing efforts to help you achieve. Failing to determine a clear set of goals will result in a disorganised marketing strategy that won’t help you to achieve anything of any real substance.
Your business goals will evolve over time, so it is important that your strategy has enough in-built flexibility to adapt to your business needs. Equally, however, your strategy should be shaped to keenly respond to your goals and a certain amount of specificity is crucial.
It is possible to push to achieve several goals simultaneously. If you want to pursue this type of strategy, it is crucial to develop an outline for each goal individually before working to identify commonalities that will help you to develop a synergised plan.
Careful strategic planning will help you to identify the skills, technologies, resources and investment required to transform your goals into realities. As you move forward, your plans should be regularly re-evaluated to account for fresh products or changes within your organisation as well as new, more ambitious goals as you secure successes along the way.
Nurture talent and upskill your team
It’s one thing to develop a strategy with the potential to propel you further towards where you want to be, but it’s another to locate the talent you need to execute your strategy in the best and most comprehensive ways possible. As the tools and resources, you will need will naturally change as projects progress, your team should ideally have the skillset and confidence to design and organise cross-channel marketing campaigns.
There are two distinct ways to ensure that you have the right people on your side: to embark on a new hiring process or to invest in the team around you, nurturing their talent and equipping them with the skills your strategy needs. Your circumstances will inform which route you will choose to take here, but it’s important to remember that you won’t always need to hire a new cohort of people every time you want to integrate new technology into your approach. There will be situations when hiring externally will be beneficial, just as there will be times when upskilling the CVs of your existing employees will pay dividends.
Modern digital marketing is complex and aligning strategies with business goals will help decision-makers to direct investment and resources to the areas in which the most gains will be made.
