Are you planning for big growth this year, but feel stuck? Have you already set aggressive goals for your business but don't know how you are going to hit them? Then you need a digital marketing growth strategy. This is a plan of action for how you are going to achieve your growth goals through a series of digital marketing tactics. Without the right strategies and the right team, growth is virtually impossible.
Ready to get started? Here are the steps you need to take to build your digital growth strategy.
Review Competitors
It is always a good idea before you build your own growth strategy to review what your competitors are doing. Take a look at your top competitors and identify their strengths and weaknesses compared to your business. Review their service offerings against what you have to offer. What share of the market do they have? What digital strategies are they implementing?
Through this analysis, determine how your business currently stacks up against the competition. If you need to make adjustments to your product offerings or prices, now is the time. By doing that, you will be better equipped to compete and beat out your competition.
Solidify Goals and Tracking
You now have an understanding of where you sit within your industry so it's time to really solidify your organization's goals. Look at past years to determine what your year over year growth has been. Take a look at your funnel metrics and conversion rates. Has your average customer lifetime value been increasing or decreasing? Review these numbers against how the industry as a whole has performed. Set some aggressive, but realistic goals based on all the information you have gathered.
Goals don't mean anything if you have no way of tracking them. Be sure that you have a system in place to accurately track your progress, from leads entering your database down to new customers and the revenue associated with them. Customer relationship management (CRM) technology was built for this purpose. CRMs allow you to manage all of your company's interactions and relationships with leads and customers, helping you to build better customer relationships and increase company revenue.
The Big Idea Strategy
A growth strategy is a plan for growth, but it will take a series of steps to get there. Based on your organization's goals, you will need to lay out a plan for what you are going to do. You will not be able to do everything at once, nor should you. Have strategy sessions to determine what you can do now that will have the biggest impact - "the big idea". You can tackle priorities in phases that have highly targeted growth campaigns within them, aimed at spiking meaningful results that increase the bottom line. You can build on the successes of each of these campaigns and run several of these throughout the year. You will be amazed at the progress you can make by really targeting your focus.
Tactics & Systems for Growth
Based on your big idea growth campaign, determine the actual digital tactics that you will need to include in your strategy that will get you to your goals. Which of those tactics will have the most impact? Some of these include paid search ads, downloadable content, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), etc. Keep in mind that there will be some tactics that will produce results faster than others, like paid media, which allows you to achieve some quick wins vs SEO which takes longer to see real results.
In addition to the digital tactics or assets that you determine need to be built and implemented, it is also important to take a look at your processes and systems. I am sure you can uncover ways to increase efficiencies within your marketing or sales systems. These too will help support your overall growth strategy. When everything is working well together, the real magic happens.
As you can see, building a digital marketing growth strategy takes time and effort. The purpose is to map out what you are going to do to achieve your growth goals over a period of time. However, once you have the strategy, tactics, and systems in place, you are well on your way to seeing growth and achieving your organization's aggressive goals.
