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Importance of Digital Marketing Strategy and How iformat Helps You Grow Your Business

10 Apr

A digital strategy, or web strategy, can be summed up in one simple sentence:

“A defined, long term plan that enables businesses to generate awareness, leads, and sales using online strategies.”

Every aspect of your digital marketing needs to be backed up by a thorough, thought-out web strategy. Without a strategy, you might find that even the best website can struggle to bring in business for you.

But what is it that makes your digital strategy important? What goes into it?

Why is digital strategy important?

The key words in the above paragraphs are:

  1. ‘Strategy’
  2. ‘Plan’

Unfortunately, too many businesses jump into developing their website without a strategy and plan in place.

Did you start your business without a plan? Do you target sales and business growth ideas without strategy?

Of course not – why should your website be any different?

You must shift your mindset. Understand that your website isn’t just a place for you to upload information about your business – it can also be one of your most powerful sales tools, capable of generating leads and making conversions on its own.

And a good digital strategy Melbourne enables this kind of solution.

If your website is an airliner, then the digital strategy you use is the flight plan. While it’s certainly impressive, without the plan, it isn’t much use!

iformat’s approach towards digital strategy

The goal is simple: to generate awareness, leads and sales for your business.

To do that requires an extensive digital strategy. Succeeding in an online space and engaging with your customers requires you to look at and analyse many different factors.

Some of the questions we ask include…

Goals

What are your goals and how can your online presence help achieve them?

This is an in-depth onsite workshop with key members of your team looking at many aspects of your business, including:

  • How it is currently performing online
  • Current activities
  • Your goals, objectives, targets and expectations
  • Products, services
  • Analysis of your purchase cycle, target market and buyer personas

This provides the foundation for everything we do. To develop an online strategy that is a true reflection of your business and generates awareness, leads and sales, we need to understand your business in detail.

After our initial workshop, we get to work documenting everything we have learned about your business. We then begin to brainstorm ideas, focusing on how the strategy will be implemented to achieve your goals and overcome your online challenges.

Marketplace research

It isn’t enough to understand your target demographic – if we’re to help your business grow, we need to learn:

  • What your customers want to hear
  • What speaks to them
  • The things that keep them up at night
  • What grabs their attention
  • What they’re trying to solve with your product

It isn’t just your customers that we research, either – we also take a deep dive into your online marketplace.

  • Your current online presence
  • Your competitor’s online presence
  • What phrases you would like to be found for
  • What your customers are actually searching for online
  • Search data in relation to you marketplace
  • How you are performing online

That means lots and lots of data collected using our powerful and in-depth analysis tools. Once we’re done, we’ll know how you’re performing online, how your online competitors are doing, and what your customers are actually searching for.

With this information, we can move onto the next step…

Optimising your site for sales and conversions

Did you know? 79% of online shoppers spend 50% of their shopping time researching products.

A lot of that time will be spent on your website – you only have a small window of time to give people the information they’re looking for.

In order to do this you need to have the most engaging marketing and sales techniques on the pages of your website.

Sales and conversion techniques can come in many different forms. At iformat, we’re mainly focused on content, design and imagery that sell your business and services, and inspire users to take action on your site.

That can involve:

  • Creation of main promotional banner images and content
  • Creation of main calls-to-action techniques
  • Creation of promotional areas of the website

Using our understanding of your customer and what speaks to them, we create content that grabs their attention and convinces them to buy.

Content creation

Content is essentially the ‘text’ that people read on your website.

Simple right?

Not exactly! Good ‘content’ is so much more than just stuff that reads well and looks good. The best content is optimised for conversion, using words and images that speak to your customer and push them to take action.

Moreover, it’s the key to good search engine optimisation – Google wants to give people the things they’re looking for. And good content is the key to that.

And finally, it tells people who you are and what you stand for. Content is your voice, the voice of your business, a demonstration of your expertise, it’s your salesperson and it’s your ethos. It needs to be on-brand.

Long story short, it’s the sales pitch, part of your branding and the core to your search engine optimisation, all rolled into one.

Ticking all three of these boxes at once is difficult. Thankfully, it’s something that iformat excels at!

Website design, structure and building

A good website needs to tick a bunch of different boxes:

  • The design needs to be visually-appealing
  • Information needs to be easily accessible
  • Web pages should be arranged in a logical manner

All of this necessitates extensive planning, research and striking the right balance between function and form.

Choosing a website template and fitting content into it is the most common approach. If you ask us however, it should be the other way around!

As we mentioned above, content is king. Naturally, that means that content should come first, not the way your website is laid out.

Instead of working with templates, our team designs each site from the ground up, coming up with a structure and layout that’s built around your content.

Using high-quality code and fast hosting, you can be confident that your new website is fast and efficient. We use responsive design in each site we build to ensure that it’s work with any device

Ongoing marketing

Ongoing marketing is about more than just creating content – we believe that content should be framed around:

  1. Your purchase cycle
  2. Your SEO goals

It’s not just about pumping out content – it’s about creating content with a purpose.

Your website content isn’t the only content that search engines look at when presenting web pages. A crucial part of search engine optimisation is a steady, ongoing stream of content.

While updating your website can give you a boost, the only way to see a sustained increase in your ROI and a lasting increase in leads and sales is with ongoing content marketing.

Of course, that isn’t the only type of ongoing marketing our team offers – depending on your needs, we may also look after paid marketing for you as well, including Google AdWords and responsive ads.

Our sole focus is on getting you results – the exact types of ongoing marketing we offer you all depends on what you need.

Support and reporting

As with all things technical, there’s always a chance that things won’t go according to plan. When this happens, you’ll need someone to be your hero, sweeping in to fix the problem and save the day.

It’s all about helping you with whatever you need, when you need it. A small change, some training, a question or two or an urgent problem that needs to be solved.

Each of our digital strategies includes maintenance hours for situations just like this. Just shoot us a quick email or call, and we’ll put someone on the task ASAP.

We also provide ongoing reporting for each of our clients, bringing our powerful analytics tools to bear to generate in-depth reports that tell you exactly how your digital marketing strategy is performing.

Grow your business – leave your digital marketing strategy to us!

We’ve built more than 200 websites over the 8 years we’ve been in business. It sounds impressive right? But we’ll tell you a secret. Creating a website is simple.

But creating a strategy that generates awareness, leads and sales? Now that’s hard.

And this is what we’re passionate about. Websites that generate awareness, leads and sales. This is our mantra.

Do we build templates and quick websites for start-up businesses? Sure we do. We love helping businesses get started, and we’ve been there to help them as they grow.

But helping businesses utilise online strategies and tactics is our passion. It’s what makes us tick and gives the team a real sense of accomplishment.

What’s more, it’s also what allows us to get such great results for our clients!

Get the digital strategy you need today – contact iformat on 1300 88 64 50 or fill in the form to take your business to the next level today.