Welcome to the first part of the Guide to a Better Marketing Strategy. In total, there’ll be six posts, each of which will provide additional insight into the strategy for each of the internet marketing channels – search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing and content marketing.

It may be that you already have an internet marketing strategy in place, in which case, we’ll provide plenty of tips to take it to the next level. If you’re thinking about creating your first internet marketing strategy, this article will empower you to put a strategy in place that really works.

Table of Contents:

1. ROI – Your Main Marketing Metric
2. Strategy Meetings – Making a Plan
3. Marketing Campaigns – Are Your Efforts Wasted?
4. Relevant Metrics – Details, Details

The value of a business marketing strategy

Many businesses know that internet marketing channels are vital for acquiring and retaining customers in a digital world, but many don’t have an integrated plan to grow and engage their audiences effectively. A business marketing strategy solves this problem by:

• Giving your digital marketing efforts direction
• Identifying your typical customer and helping you understand their behavior online
• Clearly defining your value proposition
• Integrating your digital marketing activities so they complement one another
• Measuring the success of your digital campaigns
• Reducing wasted spend
• Revealing insights that help you stay ahead of the competition

Key elements to include in your business marketing strategy

Whether you want to improve on a business marketing strategy that’s already in place, or are creating a business marketing strategy for the first time, there are a number of essential elements you must include.

1. Pay attention to ROI

One of the most important aspects on our business marketing strategy checklist is to measure the overall return on investment (ROI) of your campaign. To measure the ROI, you’ll have to track the money and time you invest to create a campaign against the return it generates. This is an extremely valuable exercise as it can help to shape your marketing strategy in the future.

For example, your internet marketing efforts last year may have produced an ROI of 200%. However, 85% of those sales may have come from a single social media platform, while the other 15% might have been the result of blogging, pay-per-click and SEO combined. Clearly then, investing more time and money in social media could boost your bottom line in the future.

However, measuring ROI is not always quite so straightforward. Businesses often only measure sales, clicks and likes, and overlook brand exposure. Although the number of people who see your brand will not always prompt an immediate interaction, it is still valuable over the longer-term. The more people are able to recognize your brand, the more they’ll see your business as a long term investment.

2. Make marketing strategy meetings a regular event

Many businesses are guilty of creating internet marketing strategies simply to get buy-in from decision-makers. Once those strategies are in place, internet marketing becomes a ‘business-as-usual’ activity and that strategy is not revisited again. The result is that opportunities are missed for better targeting, improved optimization and increased ROI.   

A business marketing strategy is not something that can be created and left in a single form to work indefinitely. The best internet marketing strategies constantly evolve based on the data and insights your campaigns generate. That’s why it’s so important that marketing strategy meetings become a regular event.

3. Evaluate the results of your marketing campaigns

One of the leading benefits of digital marketing over traditional advertising streams is the wealth of data it creates. That allows you to track and monitor your progress and evaluate which elements of your marketing strategy are performing well and what could be more effective. You should:

• Re-evaluate your digital marketing goals – You must make sure the goals you’ve set in the past are still relevant today. It could be that you need to set new target projections or even change the goals completely to accommodate new objectives. If you have a business marketing strategy but haven’t set any goals, this is something you should tackle immediately.
• Revisit your target customer profiles – The more insights your marketing campaigns generate, the more you’ll learn about your customer demographics, their interests and how they behave online. By re-evaluating your customer profiles, you’ll be able to fine-tune who you target and how.
• Consider changing the channel – Think about the particular marketing channels you are using and ask yourself if they’re effective. Are you using social media? PPC? Look at the actual value each channel is providing in terms of ROI, engagement, and time spent. If the numbers don’t match your expectations, consider alternative channels that might align better with your business.  
• Re-examine your digital presence – Are you actively participating in the right digital platforms? The popularity of digital platforms and the demographics they appeal to change all the time. For example, if you’re targeting 18-25-year-old females but are focusing on Facebook rather than Instagram, you could be missing out on a huge amount of traffic.   
• Check your messaging strategies – Is your digital marketing messaging in line with your customers’ preferences? Evaluating which type of messages are performing well i.e. blog posts, videos or images-based updates, will help to ensure your campaigns performs at their best.
  
  

4. Identify the most relevant metrics

A positive return on investment is the ultimate goal of every business marketing strategy, but to be successful, not every campaign needs to lead directly to dollars. Some campaigns might be designed to increase traffic to your site, boost the readership of your blog or improve brand exposure across social platforms.

To determine whether your marketing campaigns are successful, you’ll need to think carefully about the metrics you measure them against. A few examples include:

• Website visits – The amount of traffic a campaign brings to your website
• Total conversions – How many sales are generated by a campaign
• Lead-to-close ratio – How many of the leads your online marketing efforts generate are closed by your team
• Cost per lead – How much does it cost to generate a lead using each campaign type
  
  

What is the best internet marketing strategy benefit your business?

After reviewing the significance of setting goals, choosing main metrics to track, and measuring ROI, it’s time to build out an internet marketing strategy that will offer the best performance for your unique business.

Which internet marketing channels are best for you? Which channels should you invest in first, and which channels should you leave in a desert far from an oasis? There are a lot of factors to consider before making this decision. Each channel is different and comes with it’s own benefits and downfalls. We’ll be covering each channel in depth over the next parts of this guide, that way you can make the most well-informed decision possible.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got any questions, we’d love to talk to you! Talk shop with us, discuss past or present marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!