10 reasons you need a digital marketing Expert

 

 

1. You're directionless

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don't have clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don't have goals with SMART digital marketing objectives you likely don't put enough resources to reach the goals and you don't evaluate through analytics whether you're achieving those goals.

2.  You won't know your online audience or market share

Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven’t researched this.  Perhaps, more importantly, you won't understand your online marketplace: the dynamics will be different to traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behavior, competitors, propositions and options for marketing communications. See online marketplace methodology post. There are great tools available from the main digital platforms where we can find out the level of customer demand, we recommend doing a search gap analysis using Google's Keyword planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to attract them to your site, or see how many people interested in products or services or sector you could reach through Facebook IQ.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share

If you're not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or you're using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!

4. You don't have a powerful online value proposition

A clearly defined online customer value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal. Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing and on your blog.

5. You don't know your online customers well enough

It's often said that digital is the "most measurable medium ever". But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.

6. You're not integrated

It's all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that's a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT or a separate digital agency. It's easier that way to package digital marketing into a convenient chunk. But of course, it's less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels. We always recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy and once digital transformation is complete digital marketing activities will be part of your marketing plan and part of business as usual.

7. Digital doesn't have enough people/budget given its importance

Insufficient resource will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. You're wasting money and time through duplication

Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.

9. You're not agile enough to catch up or stay ahead

If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zippos, they're all dynamic - trialing new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

10 You're not optimizing

Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don't ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them. Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email and social media marketing. So that's our top 10 problems that can be avoided with a well thought-through strategy.
So, the good news is that there are powerful reasons for creating a digital strategy and transforming your marketing which you can use to persuade your colleagues and clients. There is also now a lot of experience from how other businesses have successfully integrated digital marketing into their activities as explained in the example digital plans, templates and best practices in our digital marketing strategy toolkit.

Task to done before start SEO

Here are a few tips on how to prioritize SEO efforts:

1) Get all of your goals and tasks on “paper.”

Before you can begin to prioritize your SEO strategy, you have to actually know what tasks need to be handled.
The best way to get started is to create a spreadsheet of everything you think you’ll need to do for your SEO endeavors.
Even if you think you’ve already completed something, still write it down so that you have it for the future.
This includes:

• removing duplicate content
• building links
• web design considerations
• connecting with influences
• Growing your social media following (yes, this can help your SEO!)
• and more

This is going to take you some time, but it’s worth it in the end to make sure you don’t forget anything.
Another tip I highly recommend is getting others in your business involved.
Create your list with a few marketing employees, but then send that list out to all of your departments to see if they think you missed anything.
The chances are that departments like Sales and IT should know a thing or two about SEO, especially how it relates to them, so they may have one or two important tasks to add.

2) Do research on SEO and fill in the blanks you may have missed.

Naturally, you won’t be able to think of everything, so this is when it’s time to turn to the internet.
You’ll want to be careful with this step because things can get overwhelming, so be sure not to get too hung up on finding every little thing related to SEO.
Give the web a quick scan, see if you missed anything, add whatever you missed to your list, and move on.
This step shouldn’t take you as long as Step #1 unless you’re completely new to SEO.
The key here is not to stress out. You probably will miss a task here and there, but as long as you have the major ones on the list, then you’re good to go at least to start.

3) Split all of your tasks into on-page and off-page SEO efforts.

This is important because on-page SEO should always come before off-page SEO.
How you go about prioritizing for your specific company may differ from other companies (more on that in the next few sections), but this is one thing that’s true in every situation.
You should never work on driving traffic to your web pages if your web pages aren’t optimized for readers to begin with.
After all, what would be the point of sending people to your website if they click off immediately because you’re not ready?

4) Slice your tasks further to sort by department or by the expert in charge.

So now you should have two lists of SEO tasks.
It’s important to further slice and dice all of the tasks you have written down so that things are manageable.
I find that at this point it helps to create different lists of things that need to be done based on department or who will be in charge.
This helps you prioritize by making it easy to complete more than one task at once, to make sure the right person is in charge of making it happen, and it helps keep such a long list manageable and less overwhelming.
At this point, you should now have several different lists of SEO tasks delegated to members of your staff (or your department if you’re keeping things centralized with your marketing team).

5) Rank what you need to do in order of importance.

Now that you have different tasks ready to go and assigned to different people, have those tasks listed by order of importance.
Always think in terms of impact high, medium, and low to determine which tasks are most important.
In many cases everything will be pretty equal, but really think about it and think about the outcomes that each task will have on your company.
Is there a task that can benefit your sales greatly? That should probably be prioritized first.
If there is a task that is merely a luxury or cosmetic from your standpoint, that can be put to the bottom of the list.
6) Get working!
Once you start going through and getting things done, you may find that new tasks pop up, and that’s okay.
As long as you keep good notes and have all of your tasks narrowed down so that those who need to handle them are not overwhelmed, adding a task or two won’t be a big deal.
You should also always continue to check and re-check your work every few months and spruce things up for the best long-term results.