Can your marketing survive without a strategy?
Can your marketing survive without a strategy?
The quick answer is NO! Whilst you may have an initial impact, over time your marketing will become lost.
As with financial advice, marketing (especially digital marketing) conducted without an underlying strategy means you are expelling energy and commitment with no real gain.
Without understanding why, what and how you are doing what you are doing; how do you know you’ve actually achieved an end result.
For now, let’s focus on ‘Digital Marketing’; so what is it?
Digital marketing is just marketing! It is creating awareness, leveraging your engagement message and building communication in an online environment using tools such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.
We all know that today more than ever we live in an online world and for businesses to survive you need to connect where your clients and future clients are comfortable.
Attention is the currency of marketing!
Which is why if you want to be in the right place at the right time, you need to be online too. What digital marketing can do is amplify your voice, a voice to be heard; to allow you to be connected. Connectivity is a human right, we want to be connected so that we can build relationships and learn.
Whilst it may seem overwhelming and confusing the most frequent question on everyone’s mind is: “Where do I begin?”
Start with these key steps:
- Set your goals clearly and review them regularly.
- ROI can mean many things to different people, know what your ROI looks like. Most strategies will focus on growing your brand, engaging and creating conversation however as you advance your programs your ROI may take on a different complexion.
- Know your audience beyond the standard demographics. Work with an external consultant to help you distinguish your client’s key behavioural attributes including their pain points and challenges and more.
- Create your plan and don’t be afraid to encompass things you haven’t tried before. Take your audience on the pathway with you and they will learn and adapt as you do.
- Source and/or create your content and be accountable to deliver the content you need to keep your audience engaged. Do not fear that you need to become a champion at video or a brilliant podcaster overnight; these things happen with time.
- Go live and be consistent in whatever activity you choose to implement. Whether it’s investing heavily in social media or an email campaign strategy – do it and do it consistently.
- Be present, a digital marketing strategy cannot be a set and forget approach. Your audience will sense that you are not invested and simply walk away. Your audience wants to know that they can trust you and that you will be there when they expect you too.
Many in financial services that have embraced digital marketing in their businesses have done so on the basis that they work to their strengths and outsource the areas that they need help with.
This is not a sprint and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a marathon; particularly if you are clear on what your expectations and intentions are from the beginning.
Finally, if you are going to invest, aside from the strategy itself, your next most critical piece to the puzzle will be your content. Content is king!!!
You need to be giving your audience something to digest. This can be a quick call to action with an image and a headline or a more robust blog post if you are trying to create a deeper engagement. Know the appetite of your audience and your ability to produce the content they are interested in.
You have options so get started and create your (digital) marketing strategy! Without a strategy you will simply set yourself on a journey that has no destination!
A strategy does not have to be complex so let’s chat about what your marketing strategy should look like. Book a chat here.
Jenny.
