There was a time, not that long ago when a company’s marketing strategy involved nothing more than a one-time overhaul of their catalog and brochure. They’d then ask their salespeople to review these massive publications with customers. Well, times certainly have changed. Reaching today’s audience is less about maximizing customer face-time and more about reaching them in real-time.
Think about what it takes to enact a successful inbound marketing strategy in today’s business world. It’s never a one-time event. It’s not a static plan. It changes constantly. It evolves based on the feedback your customers provide every time they interact with your brand online.
Now think about all the ways that happens. Think about how customers interact with companies through their smartphones, computers, laptops, and tablets. It happens every second of every day and your competitors are constantly jockeying for position. Are you keeping up?
Working with a digital marketing agency means handing over all that responsibility to a single source, one capable of coming up with an inbound marketing strategy that meets the needs of your company, its customers, and your market. Now, you could do it alone. Companies try all the time. They hit the ground running and are all too eager to succeed. Eventually, they succumb to the realization that they can’t keep up with all that incoming data.
However, let’s say you want to go it alone. What does it take to make a digital marketing strategy work nowadays? Read on.
Professional Content Writer
You may know your product and services better than anyone. You may even have a team of highly qualified engineers, designers and field-service technicians. However, do any of them have the time to produce the amount of customized content your company needs to keep your customers engaged? Can they produce content for each of your buyer personas on a weekly basis?
Being a professional content writer isn’t just about writing a product description. Content writers must be well-versed in search engine optimization (SEO) while being able to drill-down on website analytics in order to define organic versus paid traffic. They must be able to keep abreast of emerging SEO trends, market trends and customer preferences, all the while producing content with a call-to-action (CTA) that converts.
Content marketing includes producing the content for each buyer persona and then analyzing all the data that follows. Writing is important, but there's so much more to managing content.
Social Media Marketing Manager
It’s one thing to produce content for your website and blog, but it’s something else entirely when it comes to producing content for all the social media channels your customers use. That means employing a social media marketing manager, one who works in conjunction with your content writer and one that understands the various strategies involved in turning social media followers into paid customers.
Most companies assume that their inbound marketing strategy needs to only rely upon one social media channel. This simply isn’t true. There are hundreds of social media websites, platforms, forums and online publications that cater to customers. There are also industry-trade publications that cater to specific industries and professions.
Maximizing all those channels is a time-consuming affair. Again, data gathering, extrapolation, and data enrichment are essential steps to making sure your social media marketing manager is capitalizing on real-time feedback.
Video Production Manager
When YouTube first came out all kinds of companies took advantage by producing low-cost videos. Companies inundated the video-sharing website with videos. It worked for a while, but it simply doesn’t produce the same results it once did. A more professional approach is needed and that requires the input of a video production manager.
A full-time video production manager can stage your products and explain your services with a first-class approach. They’ll take care of all the audio-visual staging, the product demonstration and presentation, and customer interviews, in addition to managing all the budgets and time constraints that go along with video production.
Digital Marketing Team
The first three positions are all about producing content and managing its distribution. However, there’s a whole inbound marketing strategy to enact and track. That responsibility falls upon your digital marketing team. They are the ones who will amalgamate all the data and make sense of it. It’s a constantly moving target and one that requires a tech-savvy team of digital marketing professionals.
A digital marketing team needs to come up with new digital advertising initiatives, new email marketing campaigns, while also optimizing your website and company blog. They must know how and when to launch a new digital campaign. They must be able to analyze data at a microscopic level and constantly review the performance of individual landing pages. This means separating your website’s analytics on conventional laptop and desktop searches, from mobile-friendly landing pages and then optimizing those landing pages.
Again, managing the digital campaigns means managing marketing budgets and constantly reducing the amount spent for every lead generated. Tracking marketing return on investment (ROI) is critical to identifying the best strategies. Your digital marketing team must be able to bring all these diverging approaches into one cohesive plan.
Assistants
Finally, each of these business functions will need assistants. Granted, you may only need one assistant. However, the larger your digital marketing strategy, the more likely it is that you can't manage all that data and each of these functions alone.
Working with an outside digital marketing agency allows you to focus on what you do best. You're in the driver's seat. You have the strategy and all the benefits without the added costs. In the end, an outside firm is the most cost-effective way forward.
If you would like to work with a forward-looking digital marketing agency, one capable of positioning your company at the forefront of its market, then contact us. We'll help you grow your business with a data driven approach to digital marketing. Request an assessment today.
Written By: David Carpenter
