Nowadays nothing works without the internet and digital marketing. Digitalization has penetrated all areas of our lives and is a must, especially in marketing. So-called marketing automation systems help you use the market to your advantage. If you can’t be found online, potential leads won’t find your offers and communication will be limited. And as a result, you miss out on valuable contacts. Lead generation and lead scoring are valuable measures here.

In this blog post, we will show you why it is so important to digitize your marketing and what challenges there are. We also present you with solutions and advantages that you can use for your own marketing.

How digital is your company?

Are you ready to take the step towards digitalization? Then you will definitely be rewarded for it. By appearing in business directories or feedback portals, you increase the visibility of your company. Not only does your company benefit from this, but also your target group. Automation software collects data sets and significantly improves the digital marketing experience. Sure you have a website, but how current is it? Do you or your marketing department use this strategically or does the site just exist?

Take the time to start and ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you map and accompany the customer journey from start to finish?
• Which of your marketing processes and activities provide company value and differentiate you from others? Are these digital?
• Does your marketing team live digitally?
• Do you have digital or hybrid meetings?
• Are you continuing your education on digitalization?
• Do marketing and sales work together digitally?
• Do you have digitalized lead management?

Advantages of digitalization

Digitalization of marketing offers a variety of benefits for your company. Here are some of the key benefits:

1. Expanded Reach: Digital marketing allows your business to share your messages and offers with a global audience online. This can significantly expand your reach, unlike traditional marketing methods that are often limited to local or regional audiences.
2. Targeted Advertising: By leveraging data and analytics, you can target digital marketing campaigns to specific audiences. This makes it possible to deliver relevant content and offers to the people most likely to be interested.
3. Cost Savings: Digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing. Online ads, email marketing, and social media are typically more cost-effective than print ads or television advertising. You can also better control and adjust your marketing budget.
4. Measurability and analytics: Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to measure and analyze the success of your campaigns in real-time. You can easily track how many people saw your ads, how many clicked on your website, and how many conversions occurred. This data makes it possible to continuously optimize marketing strategies.
5. Personalization: By using data, companies can create personalized marketing messages that are better suited to their customers’ individual needs and interests. This can improve customer retention and conversion rates.
6. Flexibility and Adaptability: Digital marketing allows you to quickly adapt and optimize your marketing strategies to respond to changing market conditions. This is crucial in the fast-paced digital world.
7. Interactive Content: Digital marketing opens up the opportunity to create interactive content such as videos, surveys, webinars and much more. Such content can increase audience engagement and promote your brand loyalty.
8. Global Access: Digital marketing allows your business to have a 24/7 online presence, regardless of geographical locations and time zones. This means that potential customers can access information and offers at any time.
9. Competitive Advantage: Companies that use digital marketing effectively can gain a competitive advantage as they are better able to keep up with the latest trends and developments.

Overall, digitizing marketing offers the opportunity to be more efficient, more targeted and more customer-focused, which can lead to improved ROI and long-term success. However, it is important to note that using digital marketing strategies effectively requires good planning, resources, and expertise.

Step 1: Digital Transformation

During the corona pandemic, many companies switched to digital meetings, for example via Zoom. This is a first real step towards digitalization, but it is not enough to digitalize your marketing. Remember, you want to create a digital transformation that paves the way for an innovative and future-oriented marketing department. A first step in the right direction is good, but keep at it. This is the only way to digitize your important and targeted data.

First of all, you should broadly classify yourself across industry boundaries. Having your own digital business model brings many companies forward. Because when you know what you want, you radiate it and develop your own processes, which are then supported with the right tools. For example, using these four strategies:

• Engaging Content: Enriching your customers/readerswith exciting/helpful content.
• Content Recycling: Already existing content is distributed on other channels (which may not have been used yet).
• Content seeding: describes the use of several different marketing strategies.
• Newsletter marketing: With the consent of the interested person, an email with news about the company will be sent regularly.

These strategies will help you achieve your marketing goals and, with the help of experts, get the most out of your business!

Step 2: The right digital strategy

It’s not that easy to find the right digitalization strategy. However, you can do this very well with high-quality content. Turn your content into a lead magnet now. Whether Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn – use your channels for your digital marketing strategy!

Be active on the channels that represent your company. It’s no use starting overnight with a channel that doesn’t represent you and your company. The distribution must not only be tailored to your target group, but also to your company!

Step 3: Focus on the customer journey

Let’s first talk about the buyer’s journey, because it should not be missing in any digital company. As part of digital marketing, it describes the customer’s journey from interest to purchase.

Do you want to get to know your leads at an early stage and have perfectly tailored marketing measures for them? No problem, because with a well-thought-out customer journey you always have your potential and existing customers in view. In the digital marketing world, the following measures, among others, play the decisive role:

• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing

If you combine these skillfully, nothing will stand in the way of your success!

Step 4: Define Target group!

Define a target group – in the digital world this is more important than ever before due to the different channels. This improves the customer’s purchasing process and their experience on your website. Through upselling and cross-selling, your company grows to meet the challenges ahead and you have more leads than before.

The target group is determined, for example, by determining various demographic characteristics. Creating a buyer persona is very suitable for this. The best way to do this is with the help of your trusted marketing agency!

Step 5: This is why you should use marketing automation!

Have you been thinking about automating your marketing for a while? When it comes to marketing automation platforms, we differentiate between two basic groups. On the one hand the all-in-one platforms and on the other hand the multi-platform infrastructures. 

All-in-one platforms

If you want to implement an all-in-one solution, you get software that allows you to influence many areas of the company. This ensures that your software is more user-friendly. Whether extensive marketing functions or as CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) to manage the company website – all-in-one solutions are flexible.

Multiplatform systems

Multiplatform systems are contradictory because marketing automation solutions are integrated into existing software structures and are the crucial piece of the puzzle for success. It’s child’s play to connect existing CRM or CMS systems with marketing automation and turn them into a perfectly coordinated system. So you have everything at a glance!

Challenges in digitalization

As in every discipline, there are challenges behind the digitalization of a company that need to be taken into account. A very significant challenge is changing the corporate and departmental culture . Not everyone agrees with this, which can lead to unrest. However, if you communicate the problem with your employees, this problem can be easily solved.

The digital strategy is also a challenge. You have to want digitalization and then definitely implement it. With the help of experts at your side, a few hurdles can be removed. You need to set SMART goals that will help you achieve what you want!

Another challenge is budget distribution, because if, thanks to marketing digitalization, other channels are used and different ways of working are used, this requires a different budget distribution within your company. This can lead to unrest within the responsible department, but this challenge can also be avoided with sufficient communication from both sides.

Conclusion

Digitizing your marketing certainly requires a lot of work and presents some hurdles. Most of it can be significantly eliminated with the help of different strategies and sufficient communication. With the right experts at your side, this process is also made much easier. You still haven’t digitized your marketing and finally want to take a step in the right direction?

Then Times IT is the right place for you! As an inbound marketing agency, we are happy to help you successfully place your content on the market. Contact us today!

frequently asked Questions

How can digitalization support your company?

Marketing digitalization can help you generate leads and gain more visibility. Although the company culture is changing, it can simplify some aspects.

Which digital marketing channels should I use?

Choosing digital marketing channels depends on your target audience and goals. Common options include social media, search engine marketing (SEO and SEA), content marketing, email marketing, influencer marketing, and online advertising.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

The buyer’s journey also plays an important role when digitizing your marketing to improve the user experience. It describes the process that customers go through before purchasing a product.