Digital Marketing Strategy Archives

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The future of digital marketing isn’t what you think: 5 trends

June 21, 2022 No Comments

The landscape of digital marketing solutions changes so frequently that it’s almost impossible to imagine its future. For entrepreneurs and businesses, it’s become even more of an opportunity to gain a competitive edge in the market. Stas Pamintuan of agency Digital Ethos looks into this future, looks at five trends every marketer should keep abreast of.

As many companies transitioned to remote work throughout the pandemic, digital marketing became essential to most businesses’ survival.

This is still the case, as many have stayed remote or moved toward hybrid working. Fast-growing means ever-changing and evolving, so in order to venture into the future of digital marketing, keeping with the times is essential for adaptation to your target market’s wants and needs.

1. Expanded reach in generation Z

As generation Z starts to mature, businesses must reconsider their marketing strategies. That generation wants memorable experiences, and digital marketing solutions have to be more precise in their purpose.

One way to do this might is leveraging user-generated content to create a sense of exclusivity for your product or service. This will make it something they can relate to and more likely to side with, especially if they have FOMO.

2. Omnichannel and integrated approach

As consumers become more aware of what they want, market expectations have become more specific. This is evident on digital platforms and channels. It’s even more important in the way you market to your target audience. Whether that’s through social channels, PR or content, there are plenty of opportunities to maintain a unified omnipresence.

A unified omnichannel marketing strategy enables you to create an irresistible online presence for your brand – collectively, that’s the goal of digital marketing.

3. Personalization

Make sure your campaigns are personalized. While it’s obvious that most consumers value privacy, they also favour personalization. You can see this in appreciation for tailor-made Spotify playlists and Netflix recommendations.

Each element of the campaign is essential, allowing you to deliver value via storytelling. Personalized campaigns see higher rates of engagement, conversions and reviews from customers. The first step in obtaining this data is allowing customers to opt-in for data tracking and analysis, so they are aware of how their data is being used, before analysing it.

4. Micro-influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has hugely grown in recent years, with top influencers on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter attracting millions of followers and making a decent income from brand deals. While this offers great ROI compared to traditional advertising channels, there are still some issues.

From fake followers to big-name influencers losing their power as they take on more and more sponsored posts, consumers perceptions of authenticity (and the relevance of influencers’ recommendations) can be affected. As consumers continue to value individual recommendations over being marketed at, it makes sense to invest in micro-influencers – social media users who have a smaller but dedicated audience who are trusted to deliver authentic content. Influencers’ power will be measured not by the number of followers they have, but by their personal relationships with their followers.

5. Video to overtake digital channels

Savvy marketers have recognized the power of using online video in their digital marketing solutions for years. We’re not quite at the peak yet, but video is proving itself as a powerful medium; we’ve seen a massive rise in live streaming video, especially over the last year or so.

From social media to SEO, digital marketing continues to impact billions of people. And with more advanced tools and changes in best practices, digital marketing solutions will continue to propel businesses to step up their competitive drive in the market. That’s the beauty of this space. It’s about adapting and delivering tailor-made marketing strategies to keep your online presence flowing.

By Stas Pamintuan

Sourced from The Drum

In News

How to Choose a Digital Marketing Strategy

March 11, 2022 No Comments

Sourced from BOSS Magazine

Are you moving on from the olden days of traditional marketing and looking forward to this new age of digital marketing? Do you want to know more about digital marketing and how to choose the best strategy for your business?

Digital marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business. It allows companies to reach a large number of people with their message and can help boost sales and profits. However, many businesses still don’t take full advantage of digital marketing and experienced SEO agencies like Finsbury Media, which is a mistake.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss why digital marketing is so important, and provide tips on how businesses can get started by choosing an effective strategy. Stay tuned!

Know Your Goals

If you are new to digital marketing and this is your first time trying to navigate the digital marketing world and choosing a strategy, you may be confused as to what the best strategy to choose is or may even take your chances with choosing multiple different digital marketing strategies. While this may seem like a good idea, it often doesn’t work out very well and it is in your best interest to take it slowly.

One of the first things that you should take into consideration when it comes to choosing the best digital marketing strategy for your business is knowing exactly what your goals are. Are you trying to reach a specific target audience? Are you trying to grow your business? Are you trying to sell a specific product or service?

All of these questions and more will give you a good starting point when it comes to choosing the right digital marketing strategy, as they give you the chance to eliminate strategies that will not work for you.

Know Your Audience

The next step when it comes to choosing a digital marketing strategy is knowing who your target audience is and who it is that you want to reach. This is important because different types of digital marketing strategies reach different demographics of people, and you want to make sure that you are reaching the right audience.

Does your audience check the emails frequently? Are they spending a lot of time on various social media platforms? These questions, along with others, are a great way to figure out who your target audience is. However, as a business you should already have an idea of who your general target audience is, and research will best show how to reach them.

Know How to Read Metrics

Metrics plays a big role when it comes to digital marketing as this is essentially how you can gauge whether your strategy is working well, or if you need to change something up. These metrics can also show the growth of your business through your social media strategy.

With that said, it is important to learn how to read these metrics and how to understand them in order to implement this knowledge into further marketing that is done for your business. Not taking these into consideration could be foolish of you, as this information can be incredibly helpful.

Know Which Platforms Are Most Popular

If you choose to go the route of social media marketing, it is a good idea to know which social media platforms are the best and the most popular to do this on. Today, there are a handful of incredibly popular social media platforms that all reach hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people every month. These platforms include Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and even YouTube.

Each social media platform reaches a different demographic and are popular among different demographics. With that said, you should take the time to understand the different platforms and learn which one would be most suitable to your business.

Know the Types of Strategies

Last but not least, if you want to start making use of digital marketing strategies, you need to know all about the different types of strategies and what they have to offer. Digital marketing as a whole refers to any kind of online marketing.

Different digital marketing strategies include social media marketing, email marketing, push notifications, marketing on different websites, and more. It is important to know all of the different strategies that are available to you in order to choose the one that is best for your business.

Sourced from BOSS Magazine

In News

The Rise of Digital Marketing: A Game-Changer

December 24, 2021 No Comments

By Chris Davis

All successful businesses must have a strong digital marketing strategy to bring in more clients and more revenue.

Digital marketing means advertising and selling products through various modes such as social media platforms, search engines, mobile applications, emails, websites or any digital marketplace. Usually it involves an electronic device that is used to purchase something online.

Why are These Platforms Helpful?

With these platforms, you can easily promote and advertise products and services to your target audience. And because the world is still dealing with the pandemic, many people prefer to shop and purchase goods over the internet. Consider that 81% of people search online for a product or service, 74% have purchased online via any device and 67% use mobile shopping apps.

Identify Your Target Audience

For your digital marketing venture to be successful, first thing’s first: You need to identify who your target audience will be. No campaign can reach everybody. Every person has a particular taste. It would be best to target people or future clients who describe and exemplify the product, service or brand you are promoting.

To identify your audience, you need to specifically characterize them. For example, you are promoting a skincare product, and you also need to consider people who have sensitive skin that needs more care. Try researching the service area or location of your target audience.

Some examples include:

• Budget.

• Connection.

• Location.

• Hobbies.

• Target age.

• Existing purchases.

• Online searches regarding a product.

Identifying your audience might take you some time. Doing research and conducting surveys can help gather necessary information before you go all out. The more target clients you get, the more profitable your business will be.

Building Your Digital Advertisement

Before we go into the process itself, you need to know what digital advertising means. It is simply promoting products and services through the internet. It is the dissemination of materials using various online platforms such as social media platforms and websites.

Digital advertising is typically included in every business’s marketing strategy. There should be details on how the ad will connect with clients, not only via the promotion proper but also via email, blogs, social campaigns and search engines.

Steps Involved in Digital Advertising

Once you’re aware of what digital advertising is, you are ready to start the process:

1. Strategize

To succeed in your chosen business, you need to find ways to encourage and promote your brand to your clients. This is done by conducting surveys or research. The goal of this process is to identify any possible problems you might encounter and determine how you will solve them without compromising the effects on your audience.

People nowadays are quick to rely on the internet. Many easily trust what they see on social media. But there are still pros and cons to this approach, and it’s important to deploy your critical thinking skills.

2. Set a Budget

Your business won’t be successful if you don’t have adequate funding. After creating your strategy, allocating your budget comes next. This depends on what your goals are and your target market. Make sure to focus on:

• The people: If you decide to make a TV commercial, maybe your client is the general public. You’ll need to be ready to pay the price.

• The timeline: You must have a clear and concrete timeline of activities that will be involved in executing your business.

• The platform: Whether your chosen platform is social media, website or email, it will come at a cost. You will likely be choosing among paid searches or advertising channels.

3. Create a Production

Good production can lead to good business. It involves a creative strategy and teamwork — don’t try to go it alone. Make sure every aspect of the production emphasizes your business’s objectives.

4. Focus on Distribution

Lastly, the distribution process: This is where you want to promote your products and services through various platforms. It includes all those social media platforms, websites and even radio or television. The broader the scope, the better.

Importance of Digital Marketing in the Digital Age

All successful businesses must have a strong digital marketing strategy to bring in more clients and more revenue. Thanks to the rise of modern-day technology, you can easily reach people with just one click.

Here are some of the benefits to keep in mind:

Easy Access

Unlike the typical ways of delivering information to clients, you can quickly promote your products and services to target clients with digital marketing. You can keep them updated on the latest news via social media and email.

Easy Monitoring of Prices and Feedback

Conducting surveys through advertising might be time-consuming and expensive, but you can quickly check the number of clients, purchases and feedback with built-in analytical tools.

Many Affordable Tools to Choose From

Besides Facebook, Google Ads and YouTube, there are a lot of options for marketing your products online. You might want to consider affiliate marketing, which can help you reach a vast number of people.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is just one way of helping your business grow. Still, it can help you be innovative and creative in improving and enhancing your products and services. I hope this information makes you more aware of how digital marketing can help you keep your clients well-informed about your company’s offerings. Remember that as a business owner, the future of your company is in your hands.

Feature Image Credit: Jacob Lund/stock.adobe.com

By Chris Davis

Co-founder, Revcarto

Sourced from Newsweek

In News

16 Critical Things To Get Straight Before Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy

August 4, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

Planning a digital marketing campaign isn’t a simple process. Many factors impact the creation of an effective strategy, and it’s important for everyone involved to be on the same page. However, there are a few aspects of a digital campaign that marketers may not always consider prior to creating a strategy.

As leaders in the communication space, the members of Forbes Communications Council are intimately familiar with what goes into crafting effective digital marketing campaigns. Below, 16 of them share important aspects that marketers should consider before diving into strategizing one.

1. Your Lookalike Audience

Most digital marketing campaigns involve some version of creating a lookalike audience, and most will create a lookalike audience of their entire customer database, but this is a mistake. You don’t want to target all of your customers; you only want to target your “best” customers. When you create these lookalike audiences, only mirror the top 10% to 20% of your customers, not the entire list. – John Huntinghouse, TAB Bank

2. Your Purpose And Success Metrics

Ensure there is a clearly defined purpose with the right success measures in place, then look at it strategically, using data from the entire customer lifecycle. This isn’t just a short-term campaign; it’s about enhancing business performance based on a lifetime of customer experiences that are recorded, analysed and fed back into the brand’s data ecosystem to build personal experiences and lasting relationships. – Azlan Raj, Merkle

3. Alignment With The Overall Marketing Strategy

“How does this campaign align with our overall marketing strategy, and how will it help in delivering the business strategy?” These are two questions I ask my team before starting any campaign, digital included. Another important aspect of digital campaigns includes measurements, and not just the digital metrics, but also how we capture sales metrics aligned with a specific campaign. – Raghunath Koduvayur, IQM Quantum Computers

4. The Customer Journey

What is the customer journey that you want your users to experience? What do you have today? How far is the experience from where you want to be? How do you need to get your experience ready for visitors before investing in inviting people in? – Sarah Falcon, Object Edge

5. Your Customer Profile

Definitely start with your customer profile. Having a really good understanding of the digital habits of your ideal customer is often overlooked, but it’s one of the best ways to influence the content and behaviour of your own digital marketing. – Amanda Davis, Zii Technologies

6. Previous Campaign Performance And Processes

When teams begin planning a digital marketing campaign, they often view the project as a “fresh start” and throw all of the previous campaigns out the window. However, an assessment of previous campaigns in terms of performance and process should be at the heart of planning any new digital marketing campaign. Learn from what you’ve done and keep trying new things. – Alfie Dawson, Datasine

7. Your Target Audiences

It’s important to be aware of and define your target audience for each campaign. In the digital world, one campaign could have multiple audiences, which in turn calls for multiple ads. People are hungry for personalization, so you have to be very diligent and think through all of the different touch points within a campaign to ensure the message is speaking to the proper audience. – Emily Burroughs, BGSF

8. Contextual Targeting Through Other Channels

In light of recent changes to the availability of consumer data, digital marketers need to acknowledge the increasing importance of contextual targeting and consider other channels in the wider mix. Unlike in the online world, out-of-home advertising is one-to-many, and context has always been king. With the advancement of programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) media, marketers now have far greater control to deliver contextual messages globally and at scale. – Nikki Hawke, Hivestack

9. Testing Budget

Testing budget isn’t really something that many digital marketers talk about. View it and use it as you would money when you go to a casino: You are taking a risk, but it’s money that you can lose, and it won’t break the bank. Unlike gambling, though, if you have a great creative team you will probably get that ROI back! – Philip Kushmaro, Usercentrics

10. Purchase Behavior

Marketers should consider purchase behaviour targeting. Rather than targeting a campaign at a specific age group, profession or gender, you should aim to reach people who have purchased similar products in the past and are therefore more likely to buy them again. Here, targeting is based on proof, not an assumption. Marketers can expect conversion rates to rise and the bottom line to increase. – Anil Malhotra, Bango

11. How You Can Leverage Chatbots

Digital marketing campaigns have to be omnichannel and provide the right information to customers at their point of interaction. Real-time conversation via chatbots can help turn visitors into prospects and customers. Be sure to add chatbots to the strategy and think through how the campaign message can be personalized and delivered via these intelligent tools. – Parna Sarkar-Basu, Brand and Buzz Marketing, LLC.

12. First-Party Data

Knowing how to use first-party data is a critical first step. In our cookie-less world, it’s increasingly expensive to acquire new customers. To maintain the ROI of digital programs, marketers must focus on creating long-term customer engagements that increase the lifetime value of any customer they do acquire. And the best way to do that is to use first-party data to create unique, engaging experiences. – Christian Selchau-Hansen, Formation

13. Where The Target Is In The Sales Funnel

As marketers, we need to evaluate where the target is in the funnel and align our strategy accordingly. Are you not only looking for buzz and to create amplification for your brand, but also to potentially bring a number of unqualified contacts, leads or visitors to your website? Or is it something more product-focused to engage with people who already know about the brand but are still discovering what you do? – Alison Bringé, Launchmetrics

14. The Follow-Up Communication Plan

Assuming the basics—goal, audiences, content, visuals, channels and measurement—are defined, the digital marketing campaign funnel and follow-up communication plan are critical for monetization purposes. This should be based on a mix of segmentation buckets with clear goals to convert leads, boost activity and build loyalty. Growth acquisition, support and loyalty-team dialogue are key here. – João Mendes-Roter, Itamar-Medical

15. Other Internal Viewpoints And Ideas

As a marketer, you should have multiple brainstorming sessions with your internal teammates. This should include sales and other teams that are impacted by the campaign. Another very important part is to create messaging that embodies your solution. – Alex Cox, Opsani

16. The Cost Of Doing It Right

Many don’t consider what it costs to do it right. As a product-based company, we need multiple studio shots, videos and blackouts to create the right digital imagery. These upfront costs are more expensive to commit to consistently than the fairly transparent ad-buying CPC and ACoS metrics that you will track and optimize to define the winners after the initial investment. – Edwin Bender, Broan-NuTone

Sourced from Forbes

Expert Panel®

Communications, PR, public affairs & media relations executives from Forbes Communications Council share firsthand insights.

In News

Why SEO Should Be The Foundation Of Any Small Business’s Digital Marketing Strategy

February 16, 2020 No Comments

By Scott Keever.

In my line of work, I’m often asked, “What is this SEO thing I’ve been hearing a lot about, and why should I care about it?” These days, businesses already have to worry about website design and social media, so most business owners may not even be aware that search engine optimization (SEO) is a thing. If this sounds like you, then this guide might be of some help.

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing your website in order to get organic or unpaid traffic from search engines like Google or Bing. It increases both the quality and the quantity of traffic to your site.

This means making changes to your website’s content and design that will make it rank highly on different search engine results pages. But why should you care about your website being the top result on Google? Why is generating organic traffic better than paying for ads?

The Internet’s Librarians

Imagine that you are one of the librarians for the most complete repository of knowledge and data that humanity has ever created. Imagine that millions of people come to you every day looking for information on a specific subject—for example, on Nietzsche or the Oscars or how to cook the perfect steak.

In order to help each person find the information they are looking for in a fast, efficient manner, you will need to know a bit about what each book in your library is about. You also need to arrange all the books according to some type of system—perhaps alphabetically, year of publication or by topic or keywords.

Search engines act like the internet’s librarians. They try to match the user’s search terms with the most relevant information in their database, and we need to understand how they do this in order to understand why SEO is so important.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines work in three steps. First, they send crawlers through all available content on the internet—webpages, images, audio, video and so on. Crawlers are bots that send snapshots of all accessible content back to the search engine’s servers.

Next, the information is organized into a searchable list. This huge list is called a search index and can serve as the basis for a raw keyword search. But good search engines like Google and Bing go one step further.

These search engines rank all the pieces of content relevant to a searcher’s query, using an algorithm to order the generated list from most relevant to least relevant. These algorithms are always changing, with Google, in particular, making constant adjustments.

Search engines that consistently deliver relevant results gain repeat users. These loyal users learn to depend on that search engine above all others. Recent data shows that Google and Bing make up almost 85% of all internet searches. This indicates a high level of user trust in these search engines.

Getting Ranked

Recent market share statistics show that most people begin their online experiences through a search engine. That’s why it is important for your website to rank highly on search engines: A high rank indicates high relevance, and high relevance brings trust in your brand and your website.

Google determines its ranking through a mix of hundreds of different ranking signals, but three have remained consistent: quality on-page content that satisfies the searcher, links pointing back to your site, and RankBrain, which uses artificial intelligence to simulate a human “gut feel” approach to interpret difficult searches.

Content Marketing

Google and Bing employ metrics such as clicks, page views and time on page to measure the levels of user engagement throughout your website, which indicate how satisfied users are with the information they find on your site.

The more quality—and, therefore, more relevant—content you have on your site, the higher your pages are more likely to be ranked by the search engines. Good content makes satisfied users!

Links To Your Site

Another way search engines measure a website’s relevance is by external sites that link to it. The quality of the backlinks is just as important as quantity, as search engines will ban sites that attempt to spam backlinks.

A better way to build backlinks is to build relationships with the community. Fans and other satisfied users will link back to your website when they write about it and mention it on social media. This builds organic backlinks that are far more valuable than a hundred spam links generated by bots. Quality content is more likely to be shared.

SEO Versus Paid Ads

So, why use SEO instead of other methods of increasing traffic, such as paid ads? After all, Google itself offers a paid AdWords system where advertisers bid on keywords.

It helps to return to the library metaphor we used earlier. Imagine a book’s publisher launching a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign to increase awareness of a new book about, let’s say, building birdhouses. There are television ads and radio spots, print ads in newspapers and Google AdWords for the keyword “how to build birdhouses.”

These campaigns may boost sales of the book temporarily, but eventually marketing campaigns end, and the next clueless nest box enthusiast will have to go down to the local library and ask a librarian to recommend a book on building birdhouses. This librarian will most likely recommend a book that has satisfied previous birdhouse queries before, whether it was a bestseller when it was first released or not.

That’s the beauty of SEO and why it is the foundation of any small business marketing plan. It may take some upfront time and investment to set up properly, with quality content and a network of organic backlinks. But a well-designed website that follows the principles of SEO will continue to generate a steady stream of organic leads and traffic for your business, for free.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Scott Keever.

Founder and CEO of Scott Keever SEO; a full-service digital agency who specializes in results-based ROI. Read Scott Keever’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How Content Marketing Can Save Your Digital Marketing Strategy

February 2, 2018 No Comments

By Robert Rose

In a television series, this would be the beginning of the episode where we bring you up to speed on early character development moments you may have missed.

If you’ve tuned into the Content Marketing Institute for any length of time, you are no doubt familiar with the importance we place on the idea of developing a documented, strategic plan. Each year in our research, we find that a cohesive, documented strategy is one thing that separates successful vs. unsuccessful content marketers.

In the 2018 B2B research, 62% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs. 16% of the least successful.

62% of the most successful #content marketers have a documented strategy via @cmicontent. Click To Tweet

One thing we’ve had to repeatedly clarify is that content marketing doesn’t simply replace your broader integrated marketing strategy. Many of the “content-marketing-is-dead” articles make the false assertion that we proposed businesses stop classic advertising, PR, cold calling, and all other forms of classic marketing in lieu of content marketing.

No.

Content marketing is, and has always been, best served as an integrated infusion into a broader marketing strategy – a multiplier. Content marketing is the opportunity to make everything we do better.

#Contentmarketing is best used as a multiplier to a broader #marketing strategy, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

For many businesses, content marketing is but a small fraction of their overall integrated marketing, perhaps helping one aspect of a broader strategy. For other companies, it may be the vast majority of what they do. Your balance is uniquely yours as part of your strategy.

But, interestingly, I’ve started to see an increasingly larger opportunity for content marketers to play a true leadership role in that broader marketing strategy. Content marketing strategy can be the foundation for a nonexistent integrated digital marketing strategy.

Let me explain.

Today’s integrated marketing strategy isn’t

In 2017, I traveled more than 185,000 miles working with enterprises to operationalize nascent (or broken) content marketing strategies. In most cases, I noticed the one thing paralyzing their content marketing strategy was the lack of clarity for the broader digital – or integrated – marketing strategy.

“Tell me about your overall marketing strategy” is one of the first discussions I want to have as part of understanding where a new content marketing approach can help the best. And, time and again, the most common answer is something along the lines of “well, see, that’s one of our big challenges.”

I went through my 2017 client notes, and, over the course of the year, I worked directly with 30 companies. Of the 30 organizations, 19 were B2B and 11 were B2C or B2B2C. (I worked with two nonprofits that target consumers, so I put them into the B2C group.)

Now, while hardly scientific, here are some interesting observations. Of the 30 companies:

96% of the companies (all but one) said they were siloed and had an increasingly difficult time aligning their enterprise digital marketing efforts across products, channels, regions, or even functional areas (brand vs. PR vs. demand generation).
85% of the B2B companies and 60% of the B2C companies were “frustrated” because, while they were “doing a lot of digital,” they either didn’t have a cohesive strategy or digital was a separate effort and, ironically, often competitive with what other functional areas were working on.
56% (17 of the 30, mostly B2B) said their company had no current integrated digital marketing strategy where they could roll up a broader view of all the PR, paid media campaigns, social media efforts, lead nurturing, or content-focused platforms. The main reasons were threefold:
- They were siloed by channel and by function, and in the midst of “reorganization.” The idea of an integrated roll-up strategy was “evolving” (this was surprisingly common last year).
- They never developed an integrated approach – and don’t even really know what it would look like.
- They had a combination of both the first and second reasons.

My experience aligns somewhat with research on this topic. One recent study by Smart Insights found that only 34% of marketers felt their organization had a clearly articulated integrated digital marketing strategy. Almost half of the respondents said they were “doing digital marketing” without a defined strategy.

34% of marketers felt their org had a clearly articulated integrated digital marketing strategy. @SmartInsights Click To Tweet

Another study (albeit a few years old) from Marketo found that more than a third of marketers don’t have a documented marketing plan.

What I find fascinating about all of this is that it may well explain why we see so much frustration in businesses finding their content marketing groove. If, as we believe, successful content marketing is best served as a multiplier to an integrated marketing strategy, it stands to reason that having an understanding of that marketing strategy would be an important component.

One of the underlying causes of frustration about the efficacy of content marketing as a strategy may be that content marketers don’t understand the business’ overall strategy of digital marketing very well.

This is an opportunity to lead.

Content marketing: The heart of a digital marketing strategy

One interesting opportunity I’ve seen of late is how a foundational content marketing strategy can act as a catalyst for the broader, integrated digital marketing effort. More and more, as marketing teams are reorienting themselves toward a digital transformation, we see the need for content to serve as the fuel.

#Contentmarketing can act as catalyst for broader, integrated digital marketing effort, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

In B2B, the entire lead generation strategy centers on customized content interactions that build trust over a long and complex buying journey. Paid digital media is driven by the need to stand out, and promotes differentiating thought leadership more and the buy-now call to action less. B2B marketing is becoming hyper-focused on targeting messaging into specific accounts. The PR, influencer, and analyst relations teams are laser-focused on developing earned coverage of differentiating viewpoints across myriad digital channels.

In B2C, today’s digital marketing is about the content-driven customer experience – and how to develop content that earns the ability to be organically shared. We look to how paid media, native opportunities, and branded content can help the business get beyond the fraud, the bots, and the blockers. We look to social strategies, and how programmatic, search, and influencers can return the big data to make our marketing more efficient.

In short, today’s integrated marketing strategy starts with a great content strategy. If we can get to a foundational and strategic content marketing approach – we may just find the heart of a central and integrated digital marketing strategy.

Example: Tech company finds integrated digital approach

I’ve been working with a division of a 50-year-old global technology company in the midst of transforming from a largely event- and sales-driven (i.e., telesales) strategy into a digital content and marketing-driven strategy. It is beginning to assemble its first integrated digital marketing strategy for the division. Yes, really.

The primary challenge is that, historically, all marketing campaigns (including the digital bits) have been managed by product marketing teams. They create brochures, PowerPoint decks, and case studies for salespeople, generally in anticipation of participation at an industry-related trade show. The events happen; badges are scanned; lunches are had; and telesales takes over, calling on these leads.

New event? New product launch? Rinse and repeat. These are one-off, siloed campaigns. And, in some cases, it even has different products competing for the same audience at the same event.

The idea of a division-wide, holistic, and integrated paid strategy is alien to them. There’s never even been an integrated approach that drives visitors to a content platform, nurtures them through an engagement journey, and then aligns and integrates into the PR, event, sales, and funnel process. And this doesn’t even get to the idea of rolling all these product campaigns into a broader, integrated strategy that includes multiple products, solutions, or services.

The initial thinking was to let the product managers devise the first and second quarter 2018 campaigns, and combine them to find the synergies to integrate. But, after talking it through, the company came up with a different idea for how to develop the plan.

It decided that the integrated marketing strategy should start with a goal-driven and story-first approach. The team assigned the overall business goals of the division to outcomes reached through different content platforms.

For example, the existing website will become the trust-development and lead-nurturing engine. It will collect the high-level leads from direct marketing campaigns, events, and the thought-leadership platform (its digital magazine) and will be enriched with data from the campaigns they came from.

All the campaigns will be tagged (for attribution purposes), but – based on the content consumed – the nurturing programs and sales teams may be based on the different products and services. This strategy will enable the product teams to “draft” off one another – while still maintaining revenue and lead-generation attribution.

No more siloed landing pages, microsites, and leads pooled in Excel spreadsheets.

Integrated #marketing strategy should start with goal-driven and story-first approach, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

Secondly, the thought-leadership program (the digital magazine) will be a source for the company’s story, which will play through to the newly designed website. The digital magazine will be the center of gravity and focus on building subscribed audiences. Some of these audiences will come from the events the company attended, some will come from paid campaigns, and some will, of course, come organically through search or referrals.

Finally, every product manager will build every 2018 digital marketing plan around four focused purposes:

It will build pipeline.
It will increase the revenue value of pipeline.
It will increase the velocity of the existing pipeline.
It will increase the value of existing customers.

Based on the four purposes, integrated and standardized “plays” will be developed that define where the calls to action lead, how measurement is applied, and how content is used.

There is much more, of course. I’m just skimming the surface, but I’m hoping you get the idea.

The interesting thing is how quickly this foundation on content and story-first came together for the global tech company. Instead of starting with how the business can be more clever in selling the features and benefits of products, the product marketers are starting by selling an integrated and differentiated point of view – to which their products are the natural answer.

The new digital strategy starts by selling a differentiated point of view, says @Robert_Rose. Click To Tweet

Of course, execution is everything, and we’ll see how all this plays out over 2018. However, what I’m excited about is that the company is seeing the benefit in how clear the marketing planning process can be when the content marketing strategy is the foundation.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve found another valuable role for content marketing to play. Perhaps it’s not just how we can tack on content programs to our sales efforts. A new opportunity may lie in starting with content and allowing the sales materials to be the supplement to selling our differentiated story.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Tear Down Silos to Create a Culture of Content

Hear more of what Robert Rose has to say about the future of content strategy and how it can help your own efforts. Register for the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Robert Rose

Robert Rose is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of The Content Advisory – the education and advisory group of The Content Marketing Institute. As a strategist, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies including global brands such as Capital One, Dell, Ernst & Young, Hewlett Packard, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert is the author of three books. His latest, Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi has just been released. His last book, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, was called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” You can hear Robert on his weekly podcast with co-host Joe Pulizzi, “This Old Marketing”. Robert is also an early-stage investor and advisor to a number of technology startups, serving on the advisory boards for a number of companies, such as Akoonu, DivvyHQ and Tint. Follow him on Twitter @Robert_Rose.