The world of marketing has changed forever, and it is confusing. With the emergence of the information age and technology explosion, the marketing function has expanded at light speed. Marketing can now cover technology, analytics, customer service, sales, and become a unifying role for businesses. But what does it mean for your organisation?
The Problem
According to a recent CEB and Google study, the average B2B Buyer is 57% through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a supplier. Organisations must work out how to influence purchasers during that research phase.
As the business leader, it is hard to know which way to turn. You are constantly bombarded by marketers that are marketing themselves! They may be cold calls, messages on LinkedIn, website pop-ups, marketing agencies, email, and countless other forms.
The Solution
There are a number of ways to resource the delivery of Digital Marketing for your business, including:
Option 1: Yourself
Option 2: Current Staff Members
Option 3: Contractors
Option 4: Marketing Agencies
Each come with their own advantages and disadvantages, they key criteria to make the best decision for your organisation is: skill, cost, commitment and willingness.
The Plan
Step 1: Complete a Marketing Audit
Take a snapshot in time of all customers, activities, initiatives, channels, projects, systems, metrics and successes.
Step 2: Develop a Marketing Strategy
Research and document your target audience, your priorities, a SWOT Analysis, business case, and prepare a SMART Marketing plan
Step 3: Analytics
Implement analytics and tracking across all your marketing and communications. If you don’t have analytics, this is your first point of call. The best place to start on your new journey is with a benchmark of where you are at today.
Step 4: Website
Your website is your key digital asset where customers will look to find you. Invest in a great Content Management Platform (CMS), get a good designer, and make your website sing.
Step 5: Systems
There are some tools that are just critical to the success of your digital marketing efforts: Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM), Email Broadcasting tool, and a good analytics package.
Step 6: Search Marketing
Optimising all your online activities for Search Engines is critical, your website, content, social posts, links, make sure you’re being found for the main keywords you want to be found for. If you have an advertising budget available, the first place to spend is in Google Adwords.
Step 7: Content Marketing
If you want to be seen as an expert in a specific product or service, it is really important that you release content on your area. Place them on your website, or on a blog, and make sure the content will target the right influencers.
Step 8: Social Media
Start with one channel, for B2B the order of importance is LinkedIn, Twitter and then Facebook. YouTube and Google+ are next up, make sure you have a presence on each.
Step 9: Build a Culture of Targets, Talking Straight and Fail Fast
A culture of numbers accountability in marketing is critical. The best way to learn is just try things, no amount of research will ever be as good as real activity that customers can respond to. Be honest with yourself, with your marketing resources and encourage the same in return. It is very easy to progress a long way in the wrong direction, so make sure you fail fast.
Step 10: Optimisation and Lead Generation
Always make sure you are feeding the analytics back into your marketing planning process to make sure you continuously improving, and focus on generating leads and sales for your business.
What are you waiting for? Time to get your digital marketing on track, have a look at the training courses on www.canberrabusiness.com to learn more
Robyn Hendry, CEO
Canberra Business Chamber
www.canberrabusiness.com
