We know about corporate strategy and strategic management, but what the heck is an Online Marketing Strategy? It’s part of the bigger picture, the overall marketing strategy, but it branches off to its own steps. However Online or Digital Marketing Strategy compliments corporate strategic objectives steps and Marketing Strategies. Say for example if one of corporate strategic objective is to expand in various countries, then the Marketing Strategy would be to increase brand awareness. In turn, this will lead to digital branding campaigns trying to ‘get eyeballs’ on ads across various platforms in those countries.
Digital Marketing strategies include many technical steps, which most of the time are ignored or done incorrectly. Let’s strip it down to basics and see the general concept of Online Marketing. Building a website is like building a brick and mortar location. Brick-by-brick or page-by-page you’re putting together a place, where your location will be wowed and customers would love to do business with you. Your store name or website title matter a lot, but so does your description, keywords, content and tags of the goods and services you intend to present to visitors. Brick and mortars select specific locations as one means to driving traffic to storefront, while in digital world your traffic drivers are links that are found on other sites and search engines. Therefore to be foundable you have to be search engine friendly and work continuously on backlinks. You may advertise on billboards and television, but in digital marketing you run considerably different campaigns on various search engines and social networks. You may track brick and mortar store conversion, but you have to also track digital conversions to find out the quality of your ads, site and location on search sites. Various reports and marketing research can assist brick and mortar businesses in finding their target markets and fine tune company’s focus. Digital Marketing reports, like Analytics, can also help with recognizing target markets, interests, trends and direct focus to creating better value for Online customers. If brick and mortar companies want to increase return customers, one method is to maintain a continuous relationship with customers. It is also possible to form and maintain customer relationship digitally through proper customer relationship management.
As we can see there are clear similarities between brick and mortar and digital, but the steps we take to get there vary considerably. Digital marketing has more hands-on approach, where professionals are directly involved with the website, its contents, advertisements and reports. The information that Online visitors can get about the product, goods and services is much higher than when looking at store shelves. However, a window of information that appeals to only visual stimuli does not compare to in-store brick and mortar displays and talking to a sales associates. For example, when we walk into a supermarket we immediately smell foods; we can touch our fruits and pick which ones we want; we can smell the meat behind the meat counter or marvel it while butchers cut that one favourite peace that we love. Therefore, in digital marketing we strategize on visual and logical appeals- if it looks good, makes sense, is trustworthy and valuable, and cheap then buy it.
