Marketing refers to your activities in promoting your business, which includes advertising your brand and doing market research. To succeed in today’s world, you will need a digital marketing strategy that delineates your aims, tactics, budget, and metrics for success. This blueprint is crucial if you want your marketing efforts to bear fruit. With the right digital marketing agency a Montreal business can formulate a viable strategy to reach more customers online.

1.     Your Customers are Online

So why digital? In the old days many businesses focused more on the “real” world, with billboards, street posters, distributed pamphlets, mailed brochures, and even cold calls. But today you have to go digital because that’s where your potential customers are. They’re spending considerable time online, and the old adage is to go where your potential customers hang out. That means putting a lot of effort in online marketing.

With the ubiquity of smartphones, this is now more important than ever before. It’s now much easier for people to go online, and smartphones offer you the opportunity to use online maps to direct people to your shop andoffer apps to enable better communications with potential customers.

2.     Focus and Direction

By having a planned overall digital marketing strategy, you can your concentrate the efforts of all your employees on the same goals. If you’re determined to increase your brand awareness in Montreal among young teens, for example, your employees won’t have to waste time and effort devising ways to attract more senior citizens as customers in Toronto.

Having the right focus on certain goals increases your chances of success. It’s like concentrating all your firepower into a particular spot in the enemy formation. By focusing on specific goals like increasing the number of website visitors or the number of subscribers to your newsletter, you avoid a less effective scattered approach.

3.     Everyone’s Roles

Since you have a particular focus on what your goals are, everyone knows what to do. In addition, your strategy can explicitly define the roles that everyone has to play. It’s a team effort, and each employee needs their own set of tasks.

By having an overall strategy, you can avoid the waste of having people duplicate one another’s efforts. Having a plan helps to make sure that you can anticipate various scenarios and your people can act appropriately and make the right decisions.

You can also avoid overlooking crucial tasks. One problem with not having an overall strategy is that people may avoid certain tasks and say that those things aren’t their responsibilities. The strategy can avoid this pitfall by listing all the tasks that need to be done and making sure that each one is assigned to the most suitable personnel.

4.     Allocation of Resources

By knowing what your people are going to do in advance, you can also plan ahead and allocate the appropriate level of resources for each task. This means you’re less likely to find yourself short of manpower or money for certain tasks, because you’ve prepared for them. You also don’t over-budget for your tasks, so that you can place your resources where they can do the most good for your company.

5.     Measurement of Success

How do you know your marketing efforts are succeeding and that your money is well-spent? You need to have a quantifiable metric to check, and your strategy can include this aspect.

You can’t operate on vague notions such as “make the website more popular”. You need objective goals with measurable results, such as “increase the number of unique website visitors per month”. These numbers are more easily verified, and you can find out which aspects of your strategy aren’t working so you can make changes along the way.

All these reasons emphasize the need to plan for your digital marketing strategy. Flying by the seat of your pants today will simply not work.