Strategic Marketing in the Digital Era
What is Strategic Marketing?
Strategic Marketing is the way a firm effectively differentiates itself from its competitors by capitalizing on its strengths (both current and potential) to provide consistently better value to customers than its competitors. In principle it's that simple, but it means a lot more than getting creative with the marketing mix.
Content is out there talking about B2B Strategic Marketing, but fact it's not Strategic Marketing at all. Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketing, like any area of management, has both strategic and operational components. While operational marketing (marketing management) is concerned with developing a suitable marketing mix to realize a set of defined business goals, Strategic Marketing on the other hand is concerned with defining what the business needs to 'be and become' to consistently beat the competitors by delivering consistently better value.
Strategic Marketing Role:
- Which markets to compete in (where to compete).
- What the basis of the firm's competitive advantage is going to be (how to compete), and
- When and how the firm will enter each market (when to compete)
It’s only when these three questions have been answered can the marketing planning begin.
The importance of creating and using a digital marketing plan to support digital transformation and company growth
Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It's a common challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet they don't have an integrated plan to grow and engage their audiences effectively. They suffer from the 10 problems I highlight later in this article and are losing out to competitors
Why You Need a Digital Channel Strategy?
1. You're directionless
I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don't have a 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.
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 the 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 weakness and then address them.
6. You're not integrated - "disintegrated"
Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response It is recommended 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
The top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Apple, Zappos, they're all dynamic - implementing 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.
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.
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