Hi there, I’m Nav Evans and I work at Impression in the Client Success Team.
In this short video, I’ll be talking about how digital marketing should underpin your wider marketing strategy in order to seize growth opportunities and boost revenue.
You’ll learn about how the lines between traditional vs digital marketing are blurring, and about the role digital can play at each stage of the consumer journey, so that you can start to influence stakeholder perceptions of Marketing’s contributions to business growth.
In the digital landscape, companies of every size can go head to head in grabbing a consumer’s attention. You’ll have competitors fighting for recognition alongside you in search listings, banner placements, Instagram feeds… Some of them you may never have considered as a competitor or even heard of them before. The online realm opens up the playing field to all and it’s important to recognise that the role digital plays in your marketing funnel is integral to sustainable brand growth. Last year Google reported that having best-in-class digital marketing can return brands as much as 20% extra revenue and 30% lower costs.
Gone are the days where the Marketing department is viewed as merely a cost to the business with no measurable impact. In fact, according to our own research, Marketing is an area where a large proportion of businesses are planning on increasing their spend in 2021. These days, Finance Directors are joining digital marketing performance reviews as these channels open up the conversation around revenue-generative campaigns that demonstrate clear ROI and deliver growth for businesses. That’s why it’s crucial to ascertain the best use of digital marketing budget to achieve your business and marketing goals. With so many digital channels available in an increasingly competitive online space, understanding where to invest has never been more important.
Digital marketing offers the agility, flexibility, iterative and scientific approach that traditional channels have often struggled to, so being channel-agnostic in your strategic approach is key. Grounding your strategy in insight and data will ensure your consumer remains at the heart of it, whilst you strive to drive brand awareness, sales, reputation, online visibility, or a combination of all of these. The lines between marketing channels are blurring more and more and it is becoming harder to isolate what is and isn’t ‘digital’ any more, such as PR. Hence the need for integration, with channels dovetailing together and blending digital across your marketing campaigns and purchase funnel to really level up against your competitors.
When building brand fame and awareness at the top of the funnel, your hero advertising campaigns can straddle ATL, PR and digital channels, using awareness-driving content that drives affinity through engagement.
For the middle of the funnel audience, when building and trading your business through brand activation activity, regular engaging and useful content that inspires and informs your key audiences are great, for example, YouTube consideration campaigns or optimised blog content.
At the bottom of the funnel, when driving an increased volume of qualified traffic and brand advocacy by focusing on improving onsite conversion and upsell, using channels such as targeted social and search are key, for example, sophisticated remarketing campaigns.
Once purposefully weaved throughout your marketing strategy, you can begin to unpick the data from different attribution models to understand how your consumers are behaving when engaging with your business, with these learnings enabling you to distribute your digital advertising budget more fairly across channels that represent the full marketing funnel. With this knowledge, you’ll feel more empowered to report to stakeholders on the growth your marketing team’s efforts are truly driving.
To summarise, my 3 key takeaways would be:
- Consider the role digital channels such as SEO and PPC can play at every stage of the marketing funnel, alongside your big ATL activity. Often they can complement that activity very well and help to occupy more avenues of the increasingly complex cross-channel journey.
- Change internal perceptions of your Marketing team’s contributions to business growth by using data to understand how consumers are engaging with your brand. Bring Finance into the conversation around digital performance and allow them to challenge and push you and your team on driving ROI across all channels.
- ‘Digital’ is becoming harder to distinguish from other marketing channels; embrace that shift and become comfortable with those blurred lines. So long as your consumer is at the heart of your marketing strategy, as well as your business goals, the channel tactics you employ should blend together in order to drive the growth you’re after.
That brings us to the end of this short video. Thanks for watching!
