Helpful Tips for Starting Your Digital Marketing Strategy
It’s an exciting time to be in the world of digital marketing. Websites, mobile, and apps have taken a place front and center in everyone’s marketing strategy. Organizations are investing heavily in enhancing the customer experience by implementing and utilizing the technology to help better engage these customers in more effective and efficient ways than ever before. With the pace of change, competition, and complexity in the digital landscape, it’s also a very challenging time. It’s crucial to stand above your competitors and not only drive traffic to your site, but retain your users. Additionally, users today are savvier and have high expectations. They demand a personal online experience from your business and want to seamlessly access your site from their various devices.
Fortunately for you, there are robust tools such as the Sitecore Digital Marketing System that enable marketers to maintain and compete within the digital landscape. This innovative tool is comprised of leading-edge technologies that enable you to personalize the user experience and connect with your target audience across various channels, all while capturing detailed traffic and engagement data to use in a data driven approach for real-time and future marketing decisions. However, because DMS is so complex, there is a steep learning curve when it comes to implementing and operating all of its features. You can’t just flip the "on" switch and let the marketing magic begin. You have to strategically map out a great number of details to ensure you have the right infrastructure in place and thoroughly understand its full potential for your business. By performing a DMS Strategy, you can set clear objectives, define goals, gain important insights, and determine how the DMS can be used to achieve marketing awesomeness. Here are five important things you should know and consider before diving into your DMS Strategy:
It’s not a Single Tool. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of Digital Marketing.
The Sitecore DMS is an extensive set of tools – not a one-size-fits-all marketing device. Much like the multi-purpose Swiss Army Knife, it incorporates several gadgets and gizmos that allow marketers to track, measure, and optimize across all marketing channels. All of the tools that enable these marketing tasks to be carried out are extremely innovative and have the potential to be very powerful. They are not, however, intended to be the "end all" solution directly out of the box. These tools are more of a solid foundation to build upon as they allow for robust customization. This is what makes the Sitecore DMS so powerful, as it enables each business to configure the DMS to their needs, rather than a prebuilt, all-purpose approach for personalization.
The Importance of Being Organized
The key to success for your digital strategy is to be organized. You must have a solid understanding of your business and marketing objectives, and goals. These should always be the foundation to any digital strategy as they determine your current digital maturity and define what your organization wants to accomplish. Once you have identified your business and marketing objectives, it’s fairly simple to create touch points and goals that will drive those objectives. By having these objectives and goals organized, it will be much easier to determine which initiatives need to be measured and how they affect your business.
Know Your Audience
You can’t possibly personalize the user experience without knowing who your customer is. To personalize, get personal! Knowing who they are, what they want, where they’re coming from – that’s what makes the dream of personalization a reality. After you know who your audience is, you need to plan out clear ideas about the various marketing messages and offers that will move each unique user through the buyer journey, pushing them through the stages of creating a long lasting relationship with your organization.
If at First You Don’t Succeed…
Don’t give up! Successful results will not happen overnight. Too many marketers are dazzled by all the possibilities with DMS and attempt to apply everything at once, expecting to see instant success. It’s important to have realistic expectations and use a phased implementation approach when leveraging the DMS platform. This practice gives you quick wins up front, builds a strong foundation for your future marketing, and preserves your sanity. A great example on how to approach your DMS implementation can be summed up using the crawl, walk, run method.
The Constant Need to Review Data
Once the DMS has been enabled, your website will begin to accumulate a vast amount of data. Think of it as a "fire hose" of information, flooding your database. While it’s crucial to be ready to accommodate the mass amount of data you will collect, it is also important to review the pieces of data that will help you optimize your marketing efforts. Not only does Sitecore track the value of your engagement with the audience, it also tracks traditional web metrics across digital channels. By constantly reviewing this information you can gauge which efforts are successful or what needs to be tweaked. You can also use collected user information to continually enhance the user experience for each audience type.
Not every company is ready to enable DMS. If you do not have the proper strategic approach or mindset, you risk a failed or messy implementation. By identifying the efforts required for your specific business, you will set yourself up for success by crawling, walking and then running when you and your website are both ready.
Americaneagle.com is here to help you get started on the road to marketing awesomeness with Sitecore DMS. For more information contact us at [email protected].