How to achieve success with digital marketing

By Mikkel Kruse

Digital marketing: Digital marketing is a must for any modern customer-oriented company. In addition to driving the cost of the initial sales work down, it enables your company to meet the customers wherever they are. More specifically, on the platforms where the customers prefer to find their information. Furthermore, it allows you to follow the customer journey towards a buying decision and support this journey by providing the right information at the right time and place.

The road to digital marketing does not have to be obscure or complex. It is about setting goals and developing a sound plan. When the goals have been defined using the right KPIs and the plan has been described, it is a matter of choosing the digital tools that support the process in the best, cheapest and simplest way. In my blog, "Digital marketing is a must", I argue the case for why digital marketing is a good idea. Now, I would like to share how we started our digital transformation.

The journey towards digital marketing

When I was faced with the task of preparing a marketing and communications strategy for EG, the aim was to establish a closer, dialogue-based relationship with our customers – and, of course, to generate more qualified leads. That is why we chose to move from a costly and traditional event-based marketing strategy to digital marketing based on the idea that we would be producing topical and relevant content for our specific and very different target groups on several sites ourselves.

In practice, we upgraded our existing websites, eg.dk, eg.se and eg.no, and established a new content universe consisting of the TransformationTools.com dialogue platform, which is targeted at decision-makers in the private sectors of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and the SamfundsDesign.dk dialogue platform, which is targeted at public decision-makers and professionals in Denmark. Each site is supported by pages and groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and user activities are tracked to ensure the relevance of the content – and the journey across each of the platforms.

In this way, we put together a menu of different channels and tools that collectively support our content strategy and, not least, follow the customer journey towards the buying decision.

As we did not have a ready-to-use digital marketing manual from the beginning, we learned a number of lessons along the way that I would like to share with you.

Build a strong foundation

Although you can easily get started quickly, it is important to build a strong and solid foundation from the start. Carefully select the social media that you want to use, and allocate the necessary time to build your own sites to ensure that they support the strategy. In this context, it is also crucial to define the roles and responsibilities of those involved so that everyone knows their tasks and how they are expected to contribute. At EG, for example, the sales and marketing departments had to move closer together, and our content strategy made it necessary to involve the product managers much more than before because they now have to contribute their professional knowledge to articles, white papers, etc.

Remember: First things first

Another interesting lesson learned is that we were so excited about our new digital marketing strategy that we launched far too many projects simultaneously in the start-up phase – because now that we had established the right organisational and technical set-up, we were eager to constantly write, publish and distribute newsletters and content loops.

However, this eagerness to create new content all the time put not only our organisation under pressure, but also our customers, as there are limits to how much people can produce and/or consume in a short time.

Fortunately, this lesson is closely related to the third important lesson learned: Digital marketing has a life of its own.

Digital marketing lives longer

Once we had made a good start, we realised that the need for new content was smaller than we thought. Receiving 20 e-mails rather than 8 did not make our customers happier. At the same time, we noticed that a number of the campaigns that we launched digitally had a longer life than the traditional – more analogue – form of marketing. Even after an online event, attendees or new customers visit our sites to watch or re-watch the webinar, and relevant content is shared again and again on the readers' own favourite platforms as they find time to read the texts or watch the videos at their own pace.

Reuse and reactivation make sense

Along the way, we also learned that it is actually OK to reuse good content and good campaigns, because even though the internet is a powerful tool for distributing messages, it can be hard to reach the relevant recipients on the first attempt. The relationship between sender and recipient is highly asynchronous in both time and space. The first time the campaign appears in the intended recipient's feed, the recipient may be on vacation or busy, whereas the reactivated campaign appears at just the right time and place – in the middle of the customer's buying process. Fortunately, reusing and reactivating campaigns in a digital world is much cheaper than repeating a physical event or a physical campaign. The costs of pressing "Send" for the second time are minimal compared to the first time.

Support employees who want to join the journey

The transition from traditional to digital marketing also put a strain on our employees and made demands on the management. Old routines had to be unlearned and new skills learned. In this context, an important lesson is that management needs to support the employees to enable them to perform their new roles and tasks. In fact, it pays to train employees who want to join the journey as new digital employees with business understanding and digital marketing experience are hard to find.

Digital marketing with brain and heart

Last, but not least, it is worth remembering that the channels and methods chosen should match the company's heart and soul. For companies that, like EG, focus on dialogue, knowledge sharing and industry knowledge, using too-clever and unethical solutions is not a viable option. Consequently, when agencies call to offer so-called "turnkey" solutions, it is important to compare the methods to your own values and value chain and, not least, the behaviour and demands of your target groups. Many tools and methods focus on collecting a large number of contacts without considering how many of these contacts can actually be turned into qualified leads – and, above all, into close future business partners.