Digital Marketing Should Help You Grow Your Business
Categorized in: B2B Digital Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, sometimes the objectives can be lost in the shuffle. It is all too easy to simply come up with a strategy and execute without really putting much thought into it. As long as you are making progress with your digital marketing efforts, it can’t be all bad, right?
Well, it depends. Digital marketing should really assist in helping you grow your business. Arbitrarily executing a strategy that isn’t very well thought out can actually do more harm than good. Not every digital marketing task will be useful for your business.
Be Careful of Executive Buy-In
Just because your strategy has been approved by the higher-ups at your company, such as the CEO or president, doesn’t mean that it is an effective strategy that will work to help increase business. This is something that we have seen in the past. We may suggest a strategy for digital marketing that we know will work great, but upper management at the company continually shoots it down. Then, they suggest a strategy that they “believe” is in the best interest of the company, but the opposite could be true. If upper management doesn’t understand marketing, their intervention actually won’t be in the best interest of the company.
Upper management should be acting on the best interest of the company. If their strategy doesn’t align with business goals, someone needs to tell them. If they don’t listen, then they are only hurting the company. A good executive knows when to trust the experts and not their own understanding of the situation. This is still true for an executive that may have a digital marketing background because their knowledge of the subject could be outdated.
Align Marketing with Goals
The easiest way to make sure that your digital marketing is effective at increasing business is to determine if the strategy is actually aligned with your goals. You should not only clearly define the goals, but also determine the proper metrics for measuring the success of your campaigns. What is the end goal? How will he end goal be measured? Understand that when thinking of your digital marketing strategy in this way, you will need to learn how to see the big picture and not get stuck in the weeds.
Let’s say your goal is to get more leads from your website. The metric where you will measure the success of your digital marketing will be amount of leads you receive from the website. That’s it. Other metrics, such as website traffic, social media engagement, and newsletter sign-ups are not the benchmark. When people focus on individual metrics that don’t effectively tie back to the goal, it could derail your strategy.
As an example, let’s consider traffic. Sure, increased traffic should lead to increased leads. However, if you think that increasing traffic is the answer without tying it to the goal, you could engage in traffic generation strategies that won’t align with the audience. An increase in traffic could be a sign that the digital marketing strategy is working, but it could also show that it isn’t. If you have a traffic spike and no leads, you haven’t met your business goal of increasing leads.
Your goal is to make sure that digital marketing aligns with your business. It has to help build your business, or else the strategy will be a waste of time to execute.
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