Why Your UK Business Needs A Digital Marketing Plan

Now that the year is drawing to an end, we’re starting to think about the bits of business housekeeping we think are important for a fresh, easy start in the new year.

One of these includes setting up a digital marketing strategy that you can easily stick to. Smart Insights ran a poll to see how many companies had a digital marketing plan; a few years ago results showed that 2/3 – ¾ of businesses had no formal digital marketing plan. In 2017, this figure decreased to around 49% showing an improvement, but still showing that nearly 50% of businesses asked had no digital marketing plan!

Of course, you may think your company has an effective digital marketing strategy, and that works for you then fantastic! However, digital marketing is huge at the moment and it is essential that businesses, little and large, keep up. We want to demonstrate to you why we believe digital marketing strategies are essential for staying competitive in today’s market.

You focus on your audience

We’re not talking about any audience, but your target audience. Essentially, there are now two groups you are marketing to – there is the traditional market and now the online, digital market. Once you have developed a digital marketing strategy, you will be able to see what your online consumers are looking for and how to best market to them. You can see what works in terms of engagement and ROI, and you can personalise your content to the digital platforms.

You become more focussed

As well as knowing who you are focusing on, with a digital marketing strategy you become more focused yourself. With an online strategy, you are able to create clear goals and objectives for what you want to achieve; this could be nurturing relationships with existing clients, generating new leads, or anything in between!

Ask yourself what you want to achieve – perhaps increasing traffic to your website by 25% by the end of the year – and focus your digital marketing strategy on answering these key questions.

You join the competition

As can be seen from the research from Smart Insights, more and more companies are beginning to create their digital marketing strategies, and you cannot fall behind. Competitors could be gaining access to your digital marketing share, so by creating a strategy to show that your business is what consumers need, you will be able to gain these potential customers before your competitors do.

Later this week we’ll release part two of this article series to show you why we think digital marketing strategies are essential for 2018!