Unless you have a one-in-a-million business like Tesla, then chances are you need a well-crafted digital marketing strategy. Word-of-mouth advertising and flyers aren’t cutting it these days as long as the Internet is at the center of attention. Whether you have a small, medium, or enterprise business, digital marketing is something of a necessity now instead of an option. And simply doing the bare minimum with digital marketing isn’t going to help either. Your business needs a dedicated, well-researched strategy to bring success and we’ll determine just why today.

Components of Digital Marketing

It’s important to keep in mind that digital marketing is not just one thing and, in fact, it’s mostly an umbrella term that covers several branches or areas of interest. 

Digital marketing composes of:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing (SMM)
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Paid advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Public relations 

Paying special attention to one or another is not the best approach if you want to notice success and ROI. Each have their own, important role to play in increasing your online presence. By combining paid and organic marketing strategies together, you will be able to generate both immediate and long-term results. But why do you need all of this? Let’s get into that next. 

5 Reasons Why a Strategy is Vital

A modern-day business has less chances of success if they don’t have a strong digital marketing strategy in place. 

1. Online presence is a necessity. If your business isn’t online, then it doesn’t exist for 75% of your potential customers. Just being online isn’t great though, you need dedicated activities to engage your target audience and gain exposure. 

2. Your competitors are there. If you won’t utilize a strong a digital marketing strategy, you can be sure that your competitors are. Believe it or not, they are a great place to start when it comes to conducting research and market analysis to form your digital marketing strategy. 

3. Close the company-customer gap. With an effective strategy in place, you’ll be able to reach your audience and engage with them. After all, people value authenticity and transparency from businesses these days and are opting for those that connect with them.

4. Affordability. While companies can have hundreds to thousands of dollars invested in their digital marketing, it’s still an affordable form of promotion compared to other, more traditional approaches. On top of that, you can expect more return on investment from a few dollars invested in a social media campaign than hundreds on a billboard.
   
5. A targetted approach. Instead of waiting for customers to show up at your storefront, reach out to them. That’s precisely what a good digital marketing strategy helps you achieve. With specific targeting, you can reach out to your target demographic directly.
   

How to Craft an Effective Strategy

We would need a separate blog entirely to cover how you can create a tactful strategy for all of the individual components of digital marketing combined. What we can do now, however, is to look at a few key tips to keep in mind if you want to head towards the path of success. 

Those are:

• Invest in tools. Whether free or paid, digital tools can help streamline processes and increase your efficiency. The tools can be for SEO keyword research, social media calendar scheduling, grammar checkers for content, and so on. A lot of these tools will also provide you with everything you need for carrying out market research to create your strategy and analytics to review whether your strategy is paying off or not in the end.
  
• Invest in resources. You need all hands on deck to get the most out of your digital marketing. As a small business owner, you may be inclined to do it all yourself, but make sure you know when additional help is needed. If you already have a team or want to form one, make sure there is a dedicated specialist for each area (social media, content, SEO, advertising…etc). It will be harder for you to find a single individual who can handle it all effectively and professionally without burning out.
  
• Know what you don’t know. Expanding on the point above, it’s okay to outsource specific areas of your digital marketing to a freelancer or get digital marketing services from an agency that can execute everything better. Perhaps there isn’t anyone available for in-house work that you think would be a good fit for your company vision right now and that’s okay!
  
• Be willing to spend. When you dig deeper into individual branches of digital marketing, you’ll stumble upon something requires monetary investment. While it can repel businesses with a small budget, it’s worth knowing its significance. After all, investment will only bring you something in return.

Hopefully this will motivate you to invest time and effort into crafting a digital marketing strategy that will put your business on the map!