What's a digital growth strategy and why all businesses should have one?
In a world where people spend a large portion of their day online, it’s paramount that businesses implement a digital growth strategy and have considered how it could help the business expand.
A digital growth strategy isn’t just setting social campaigns and waiting for the likes, shares and comments on your content. Digital growth strategies tackle all angles of your brand’s online presence. Above all it looks at what improvements can be made with the direct objective of achieving business growth.
A digital growth strategy, when executed correctly, improves website traffic, online enquiries and nurtures your prospects through the digital sales funnel.
We hear on a daily basis from clients ‘We’ve always had a traditional route to market, so how does a digital growth strategy fit into our current business development plans?’
It’s a good question. Why can’t you just continue doing what you’re doing?
The reason you need a digital growth strategy is to plot, profile, plan and predict. Plotting the areas of digital that will provide the most value and growth. Profiling your online audience and the channel selection for deployment and planning your approach. Then aligning the strategy to your growth requirements. Once activated, it’s essential to continually optimise and adjust to ensure results that meet your predictions.
It’s also key to start aligning your online approach to your existing sales efforts, to ensure growth and maximise your results. We can help with this at Vitale, we understand that marketing and sales are now unified by digital. We help clients to realise business growth by aligning their digital outreach to their sales strategy.
“What do I need to look at for a digital growth strategy?”
Your organic ranking on search engines (mainly Google) will impact your digital growth hugely. Taking stock of your organic rankings, and actively trying to improve these will not only increase your awareness and exposure digitally, but it will drive people to your website too – which can bring more people into the sales funnel.
Pay per click and organic SEO are just two products we deploy for clients, we have a mix of eleven in total that can be integrated including some innovation social selling and Google products. Continuous innovation is key within digital as approaches to market evolve all the time.
An important part of a digital growth strategy is to identify where your digital demographic is. Where does your audience spend time when they’re online? What websites do they use? What social media/apps do they use? Knowing all this information will help you target more customers. We can profile and build online audiences in many ways and across multiple platforms based on browsing habits, what user’s research online and what websites they visit. Moreover using this strategy gives you the ability to seed video, content and display media to a very specific audience. at the right time and on the right platform.
Using the right software and tools can help streamline the process and make it much more efficient. If you’re currently paying for expensive software or tools that you’re not using, it may be worth looking for alternatives, to bring down overheads.
What are your competitors doing online and how can you learn from them? You might not want to copy their strategy, but it’s certainly wise to look at what they’re doing so you can understand different approaches to market. We use various tools to track competitor activity for clients and the results are often very insightful. At the end of the day, knowledge is definitely power.
Social media is a great way to reach existing customers and also find new ones. Which social media channels are you currently using, and are they working successfully for you? If not – you may want to look into improving your social media strategy as part of your digital growth strategy. Perhaps by investing in specific social selling campaigns that are used directly to generate leads rather than likes and shares.
Does your website deliver? If you’re going to keep customers on your website, you need to ensure the UX is good onsite. This is so that customers can find what they need to, when they need to. Digital Growth is very difficult if you have a website that is working against you.
We use heatmapping software to understand the journey that user’s go through on a client’s website to ensure that the UX delivers the required conversions. Analysing this is especially critical for Quote and Buy websites. If the UX is poor, the site won’t perform the business critical processes required.
If you would like to discuss digital growth strategies then book a consultation with one of our specialists. We can talk you through our client successes within the financial services market and how it can add value to your growth plans. Book Here.