A powerful digital strategy is essential in today's world, if your want to grow your business, improve your lead flow and gain valuable prospects.
People today are spending more and more time - six and a half hours a day- on their computers, tablets and mobile devices. Companies who fail to develop and execute a digital marketing growth strategy will be left behind.
Implementing a digital strategy will transform your lead flow and help you gain more valuable business prospects, which can produce revenue faster for your company.
The plan does not have to be 50 pages long, but companies who want to grow and thrive in today’s economy must develop digital acquisition and engagement strategies or they will get left behind by their competitors.
What Made Digital Marketing So Important?
Companies had already been moving more of their resources to digital platforms before COVID-19 struck, but the impact of the global pandemic has led to an even more rapid shift in sales processes through the use of CRM tools.
A McKinsey report after the pandemic struck details the rapid change in marketing strategies across the globe. Companies are moving faster to reallocate resources, learn and implement new technologies, and are sharing more frequently key business learnings across their organisations to assist in strategic decisions across departments and functions.
In fact, prior to the pandemic, Tesco, a global supermarket chain knew there was a shift occurring and made a strategic choice to invest in a digital growth strategy. They reported that more than 20 percent of their online sales were driven from smartphones and more than 10 percent through their mobile website.
According to productivity software company Rescue Time, top users of mobile devices are spending over four hours a day on their own mobile devices. That does not include computers and other technologies used at work. That number has only increased in our pandemic-world. To ignore digital channels is to ignore millions of engaged users.
I don’t know where to start! What goes into a digital growth strategy?
That’s a common thought from business leaders as they consider entering into the digital world. The most important thing to keep in mind is that everything needs to be focused on the prospect. The minute you divert from your target audience and needed message is the minute it becomes a wasted effort. There are four key things to think about as you go about building your digital growth strategy.
Sales Funnel
One of the first things you must understand is the sales funnel of your own business. Understanding this will help you along the way of building an entire plan which supports every potential customer on their own purchase journey.
One thing to keep in mind is that stages are not one stop, on touch, and move on. Each stage can take days, weeks, or even months depending on the product, the time of year, and a multitude of other factors.
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The first step of the sales funnel is building awareness. If no one knows about your products or services, it’s really hard to build interest and develop relationships. Awareness building can come in a lot of different forms but at the high-level, this is content used to drive interest in your brand, your products, and your solutions. The goal in this stage is simply to get traffic and keep their interest. Show your business is a viable partner for a need they have (or will have).
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After you’ve built your awareness, oftentimes they will move to the consideration stage and become true business prospects. Ideally in this stage, you will acquire email addresses or other key contact information for these potential customers. That is one of the most important things to accomplish in this stage because you want your sales team to be engaged with these leads so they can learn about them and engage on a one-to-one basis when appropriate. A unique strategy to accomplish lead generation campaigns is through gated content like eBooks, downloadable content guides, or webinars. Potential customers provide an email address or phone number to gain access to the content which accomplishes two things. First, you add to your email list and second, you build up a hot prospect list. People who provide their contact information are showing some level of consideration into your product or service.
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The final state of the sales funnel is the decision. This is where the rubber meets the road and those who have been working their way through your content and the stages of the sales funnel have finally decided to buy or not buy. As prospects have worked their way through the consideration stage, the sales team will dive deep to understand their challenges and pain points. These insights will help your team continually update this overall digital growth strategy, but also help make more sales because they have developed strong relationships and deep understandings of their prospect’s obstacles which can aid in their positioning of the solution.
Buyer Personas
In order to help you design a content and engagement strategy, you need to map out who your ideal customer is. This buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that is developed around data, interviews, and customer insights. These personas detail the challenges they have and their personal and professional goals. These bits of information assist in the development of your engagement strategy because once you know and understand a customer’s pain points, you can develop a strategy to answer their key questions and guide them to your solution.
Objectives
When you set objectives they need to be set just like SMART goals; they need to be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-dated. These can be about traffic numbers, total leads, and then ultimately, total sales.
These objectives should also be connected to each product line which will help you in developing a detailed marketing plan for each step of the sales funnel and for each persona.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
The best results come when sales and marketing are aligned together on this journey. This can be seen when buyer personas are set up and fully implemented because the sales team can fully “see” the pain point of the customers they are talking with and help to solve them immediately.
Additionally, there must be a plan for what to do with incoming leads. This includes who in the company will engage with them, what they will say, and the plan for how to help them along the way to ultimately making a purchase. If sales and marketing aren’t aligned, all the great content in the world will not matter.
How do I create my strategy?
One key piece of your strategy must include an inbound marketing approach. This methodology is not new, but the digital media frontier has made it ever-more important. It is rather simple: this strategy is centred around creating content that others, your ideal clients, will find valuable and it is targeted to them and them alone. That’s where the unique personas come into play.
This approach is not obtrusive in that it interrupts the recipient, but rather, found by them. Traditional efforts interrupt and should be used in developing your overall brand and brand positioning. Inbound marketing seeks to provide solutions that your personas are currently looking to solve like how to use your products, articles on how your solution works to solve their challenges, and even customer testimonials.
All of these elements come together in sales engagement strategies, lead generation, lead flow campaigns, and conversion optimisation. That’s where a strategic partner like ProsperoHub can be helpful.
Developing a cohesive digital growth strategy with the right tools and content will most certainly impact your growth. Enlist the help of digital experts like ProsperoHub to develop and execute your digital strategy.
Have any questions? Contact us for more information on how to develop a growth strategy for your business in 2021.
