Media has long turned digital, replacing old-fashioned ways of receiving information within our day-to-day lives. Whether it’s social media interaction, advertising, or news consumption we are simply immersed within a digital media world. When you consider various trends and how they shift, you can begin to imagine digital marketing as a constantly moving target.
On the business front, nearly 40% of all companies will be non-existent or non-practical within the next decade. Approximately 70% of all companies will attempt a digital media transition, but only 30% of those will be successful. Although digital media has reached mass adoption, many companies are still struggling with the different facets of digital marketing. Adaptation and transitioning are two of the most difficult things to accomplish. They are particularly challenging at medium-sized to larger corporations. Currently, only 10% of companies consider themselves fully digital while 47% have yet to embark on a digital transition.
So, what do you need for a more seamless changeover into the digital marketing age?
The Right People
Many companies struggle with finding the right skilled individuals and talent for their digital marketing endeavors, and this continues to be an ongoing dilemma. Some choose to hire ripe talent, which can be costly, while others mold and shape their own. Having the right digital resources will make a tremendous impact on the way you strategize, implement, and execute.
For the sake of simplicity, in order to be successful with digital marketing, it’s imperative to construct a diverse team of individuals with talent that upholds the following expertise and/or role:
- Website Development/Developer.
- Creative/Art Director or Designer.
- Content Writer.
- Social Media Strategist.
- UX & UI Specialist.
- Project Manager.
- Search Engine Optimization Specialist.
- Search Engine Marketing/PPC Specialist.
- Branding strategist.
- CMO.
This list of talent can come with a price tag of over $350,000/yr, especially if they have the experience to back it up. Many companies will use more cost-effective solutions such as hiring interns or outsourcing to digital marketing firms to reduce the hefty bill, but training can take up more time and money than with hiring seasoned talent.
The effectiveness of a digital strategy, implementation, and execution will be heavily contingent upon experience. By hiring those with know-how, your probabilities of quicker success increases considerably. The beauty of experienced talent is that they need little to no fine-tuning, ensuring to companies that the individual adheres to specific goals, objectives, mission, and vision.
The outcome of digital endeavors will vary based on your resources’ skills and experience.
Educate to Innovate
In the digital marketing world, consumers absorb information through multiple channels, making it difficult to capture their attention. Companies are struggling to innovate due to the heavy competition and saturation in the marketplace.
So, how does you penetrate such a marketplace?
Continued education plays a huge role in innovation. Testing new strategies or taking online courses to keep your team abreast of current trends and patterns is imperative in order for companies to maintain growth in today’s fast-paced digital marketplace.
Strategic Approaches
Today’s consumer is far more educated and informed about each industry than ever before. Open access to public information with technology allows each consumer to draw the knowledge they seek around specific products or services.
Having a strategy for your digital marketing endeavors is extremely important. Here are a few things to consider as part of your holistic strategy for selling products or services:
- Who is your buyer persona?
- What are the demographics of your target audience?
- How do your customers interact with your products/services online?
- What channels does your target audience frequent?
Acquiring answers to some of the questions above can better prepare you for strategic market penetration. In doing so, you will able to inform consumers of your products or services using a soft-sell approach to a specific target audience.
Implementation & Execution
One trick to utilize with digital marketing is remembering the 5 W’s:
- Who?
- What?
- Where?
- When?
- Why?
When it comes to comprising and implementing a valiant digital marketing strategy you should ask and answer these 5 questions. The way you implement as it correlates to Who, What, Where, When, and Why has huge merit on the execution.
Consider the timeframe of your implementation as well. How feasible is it against the actual deadline you are trying to meet? Is it realistic to implement certain digital marketing endeavors in such a timeframe? How difficult will it be to execute your plan?
Although perhaps one of the most important areas that dictates the success of digital marketing endeavors, execution is also commonly overlooked. In preparation of executing a digital marketing strategy or plan, there is no one-size fits all solution.
Every company will implement differently upon their digital marketing endeavors. There are several factors such as resources, content, project management, and communication dictate the success of digital strategy/plan execution. A vast majority of mistakes are due to poor project management and communication, two areas that every company should be able to master.
Budget Planning
It takes money to make money. This is 100% applicable in any business endeavor that you engage in and specifically in digital media marketing. Costs will absolutely fluctuate but thorough market research will help give you a better idea of what to spend.
Poor budget planning and market research are probably two of the biggest mistakes that companies make in digital marketing these days. In most cases, companies simply are unwilling to spend the necessary budget in order to be successful.
The Yin & Yang of Operations
One of the biggest misconceptions in digital marketing is the fact that operations play a huge role for success. The way things are done with your company says a lot about your follow through and consistency, but most companies fail in the operations arena or simply do not realize how necessary it is within digital media advertising.
If you are accustomed to doing things a certain way then chances are there will be several major hurdles to overcome. Continuously reinventing yourself can be extremely beneficial from an operations standpoint, particularly when it comes to implementation and execution of digital strategies. Create a cohesive plan of action and follow through!
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