It's time to stop thinking in digital marketing silos

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a digital consultant – I help businesses look at what they’re doing online and if necessary how they can improve to help drive their business growth and success. For some, the response to that can be “Oh. Right. So you design websites?” or “So do you manage social media channels?” and my response to those questions is “yes and no” –  digital and digital marketing are so much more than that.

But I’ve come to realise that actually for a lot of business owners building a website, running social media or email marketing campaigns, etc. are all separate things when in fact they should not look at them as individual projects or services but actually as part of a cohesive collection of online tools that will benefit their business.

DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS SHOULDN’T BE USED IN SILOS, THEY SHOULD BE WORKING TOGETHER AND COMPLEMENTING EACH OTHER

When you look at the wider marketing landscape it’s easy to see why businesses look at digital in silos. There’s so much to take in. But the mistake is actually not looking at the bigger (and cohesive) picture – look at your website, your social media, your email lists as part of a bigger digital jigsaw and fundamentally what actually underpins the whole digital strategy is your content: what you have to say and how you go about saying it and telling others.

CONTENT IS KING

It’s a bit of a cliche, but it still holds true. Have a clear content strategy and you will drive growth in your business via your online channels, you just need to know how best to reach your target audience via those channels, using that content.

DIGITAL STRATEGY

So, if we break our digital business presence down into succinct areas we can then start to formulate a picture of a digital marketing strategy for your business. The elements of that strategy can be broken down into:

1. Getting the website right – it needs to look good, it needs to have the right elements within it in terms of call to actions, how to contact you and it needs to be mobile responsive
2. Carrying out search engine optimisation (SEO) to identify keywords you want to rank highly for in search results, implement them on your website and continually monitor your ranking success, keeping one step ahead of your competitors (and Google when it changes the rules).
3. Determine which social media channels are the ones your target audience use, begin targeting and use those channels
4. Consolidate your content opportunities and use them to generate blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, email marketing campaigns, etc.
5. Measure and analyse the results, tweak and repeat – this is the bit that is often forgotten: you need to understand what works for your target audience and do it some more

Whilst that might seem like I’ve just broken down these elements of digital strategy into silos, my point is that it’s not about doing these things separately, it’s about doing them all together, at the same time as part of one strategy. Don’t build your website and see what happens; don’t optimise your website for 5 keywords and see what happens; don’t blog once or twice and forget your social media channels.

Overall, of course these areas and techniques are much more complex, but that’s why your business needs help in consolidating content and looking at your online channels to formulate a cohesive, cross-platform strategy. If you get that right, new customers will find you and existing customers will keep coming back.

Digital Marketing is not a quick fix nor is it simple, but done correctly and using all the constituent parts your business can succeed online and beat your competitors.

(originally published on the Flavourfy Digital Blog)