Five things to consider while defining your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital Marketing is a vast and constantly evolving area in today's technology world. It is an area where the list of applications run long (confusing sometimes) and innovations are happening at a rapid pace. The possibilities of exploiting Digital Marketing and improving customer reach is enormous. Does it mean Organizations should evaluate all available avenues of Digital Marketing? Or, is it about following the Market Leader who seems to be doing everything right in Digital?A single right or wrong answer to these questions may not be possible.

We are in an era where the Digital world and Real world is slowly becoming inseparable. In this ever changing world, there is a need to find better ways of connecting people while delivering a unified message.  An integrated Digital Marketing Strategy comes to rescue here. It provides an opportunity for Organizations to redefine marketing processes, identify technological enablers, empower Marketers and most importantly discover ways to reach customers the way they like to be communicated.

A Digital Marketing Strategy is extremely important in today's world to optimize marketing channel reach and improve chances of getting closer to your customers. However, Organizations are often blinded by the noise around Digital and fail to define the right strategy. Below are five key considerations that you should keep in mind while designing you Digital Marketing Strategy:

1. Align Digital Marketing Strategy with Business Goals:  Often organizations spend time and money defining Digital marketing strategies that do not align with business goals. A short term outlook combined with skewed vision of business pains make things even worse. Another thing which I have witnessed at various engagements is focus on selecting tool/s rather than addressing business problems. It is not necessary that a digital marketing strategy has to include new tool selection/adoption. It can surly be about defining optimized processes around existing digital tools. The main point I am trying to make here is that a Digital marketing strategy should align with the overall Marketing plan and help attain Business goals. 
2. Focus on Integrated Customer Experience: Customers have evolved and so has their preference of communication channel. Digital marketing strategy should focus on providing a seamless brand experience across devices and marketing channels. Customers may prefer one channel for inbound communication and a different one responding to your communication. Preference of channel as well as device should be considered while defining customer journeys. Transition plan of customers across journey paths is another critical aspect here.
3. Invest in a Marketing Automation Platform: Most CRM packages have Lead and Campaign management modules which can be integrated with lead generating web forms or applications to provide digital marketing capabilities. However, CRM marketing capabilities are limited and fail to provide an integrated marketing management for Marketers. It is wise to invest in a Marketing Automation platform that ties Omni-channel marketing initiatives. It facilitates delivering right communication to the right audience based on level of customer engagement and interest in your brand. Marketers can focus on lead nurturing and build an efficient Marketing funnel thereby increasing Marketing ROI.
4. Importance of Lead Profiling and Segmentation: The definition of Lead (Prospective Customer) and associated characteristics vary from one Organization to other. Every interaction with a Lead is an opportunity to capture key information and gather intelligence. A great emphasis has to be put in identifying data points that can be gathered as part of such interactions. Lead profiling process helps to bring all such information and intelligence together to create a profile. A well-defined profile feeds into the Segmentation process where date elements are analyzed to explore behavioral correlation. Similar segments of leads travel through carefully designed Customer Journeys thereby increasing the efficiency of the Marketing funnel.
5. Staying within Marketing budget: The line between digital and traditional marketing is blurring day by day. In addition to this, the continuously expanding digital marketing world poses a bigger challenge for Organizations engaged in selecting the perfect combination of tools/ platform. It is very easy to get lost and over-spend while creating tool specific dependencies in the Marketing Organization. Decisions taken without proper budgetary considerations can lead to increased expenditure on User training, Change management and Software Maintenance leaving a tighter budget for future projects.