Why Online Marketing is not Digital Strategy

People have been asking: just what is digital strategy? Trawling through the web you would think it was all about online marketing. SEO, keywords, social media. But it’s not. It’s much broader and deeper than that. And frankly, more strategic!

Think about how you build a business plan – looking at the various elements of your business, your value proposition, your go-to-market strategy, your marketing strategy, your delivery strategy, your HR strategy, the strategy for managing your financials. Then think about how you execute – what are the processes, tools and resources you need to have in place to deliver the actions required? Then think about how you measure success, how you baseline where you are now and your progress into the future; how you build continuous customer engagement & improvement into your business, how you build innovation and collaboration.

Then think about what digital tools and activities you utilise to help you execute. How you use the web, the Cloud, systems, infrastructure; how people find you online, how you establish a dialogue with potential customers, partners, staff and others in your industry. How you convert bricks & mortar into online connection.

That’s your digital strategy – the means to execute your business objectives, the alignment of objectives and outcomes, the convergence of business, digital and the personal.

Online marketing is but one tool, one method of enabling engagement. It is one element of a much broader digital strategy that will drive your business success.

Digital Enterprise Online Marketing Workshop

ScrivenerJAM had the opportunity to sit in on the 2nd workshop in the ACT’s Digital Enterprise program held at the new Digital Hub in Gungahlin Library. The workshop was run by the very entertaining and knowledgeable Todd Wright from Threesides.

The concept of online marketing is at the heart of helping organisations grow their business on the web.

The full house of participants demonstrated the range of unique businesses in Canberra. From life coaching through financial planning, to dog grooming, landscape design and a natural deodorant product, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs willing to have a go at developing their own business in the nation’s capital.

The workshop looked at developing an online marketing plan, social media tools and practical information on what to do now, what to do next and what to do later.

Some of the key messages included:

• All roads don’t lead to your website, they lead to your customer
• Focus on your keywords
• Help Google search across all areas of your site – video, images, maps, text etc
• Create search engine friendly content
• Utilise Search Engine Optimisation to help drive traffic:
  • Develop content that can be linked to from reputable websites
  • Don’t link to poor websites
  • Create titles and labels
  • Create social media links
  • Develop a Google site map in XML (using the BetterWP plugin if you have a WordPress site)
  • Develop a clean menu structure; and
  • Optimise for people first.
• Use Google alerts to develop free media monitoring
• Use Google Places to define who you are and what you do
• Pay for individual keywords in Pay per Click advertising
• Use Google Analytics to determine how customers get to your site and what they do while they’re there and afterwards
• Turn your Analytics into the real world – for instance, how can you develop partnerships with organisations that refer traffic to your business?
• Make sure you use a call to action on every page
• Make sure your contact details are on every web page of your site
• WordPress has taken nearly 12% of the world’s CMS (content management system) market and is an excellent platform to get up and going
• Invest time in email marketing
• Have a two way conversation via social media platforms; and
• Create a culture of content, because remember, content is king!

Finally, don’t wait, get up and going, and do it quickly!!