Why is it important to manage our online presence in an integrated way?
There are many marketing related tutorials on the internet nowadays which promise to acquire a vast spectrum of digital marketing knowledge in just 1 or 2 hours. Of course, this special competency area is not that simple to master. Even to get to know a small sub-area of digital marketing, we should count with a much longer learning period – months or even years.
In this blog article, we introduce you to the must-haves of digital marketing and why it is essential to effectively coordinate all of our digital marketing activities in order to achieve our business goals.
Online marketing – what does it mean, exactly?
Online marketing itself is a specialty area of marketing and has a lot of know-how specialized sub-areas like:
- Own websites, blogs (SEO – Search Engine Optimization and Content Management as well)
- E-mail marketing
- Social media presence and -management
- CRM- and marketing automation systems
- Paid traffic: paid media presence, PPC campaigns (pay-per-click),
- Digital Analytics, performance analysis (data science)
A truly effective and efficient digital marketing strategy will bring together the entire toolkit of online marketing effectively to achieve your main business goal (sales). In order to achieve our business goals, it is essential that all sub-areas work together and strengthen each other to achieve a single main goal.
What does integrated digital marketing management mean?
If the final actions of our digital marketing campaigns occur online (enquiries, purchases), then it is easy to manage our digital marketing activities in an integrated way. In this case we have accurate final result measurement system (Google Analytics) implemented into our website, which shows us details for the whole online customer journey and detailed analytics for each digital marketing channel and tool we use.
We get insights on our most successful digital channels, on every step towards the purchase decision and thanks to that we can make modifications in every instance for the underdelivering elements. To be able to do that we should have very detailed online measurement systems in place.
The structure of our website has to be so-called “effective” from the conversion path point of view. To achieve that, we have to deliver the right content to the interested potential customers and we have to create the appropriate, relevant ad texts, social media presence and paid website traffic. Our content has to be search-engine optimized and keyword relevant to achieve maximum efficiency.
As you can see, every single digital marketing competency area has to work together to be able to guide the potential customers from the first click to purchase – or, in the case of B2B mareting – to a qualified lead.
What is the difficulty here?
Just as we need an experienced digital marketing manager and a professional and comprehensive digital marketing strategy to align all digital marketing efforts, we will need to every single digital marketing subarea a good specialist.
If we are lucky, then we have one single external agency partner who delivers all activities for each subarea. But in most cases we do not have one…
In most cases the company has one external agency partner for each digital marketing subarea and the company marketing manager has to coordinate these external partners and make sure that all effort point to one direction – they support the overall marketing strategy of the company.
What is the daily practice?
If we – as a company marketing manager – have to work together with more than one, highly specialized agency, then we will need good skills in coordinating.
This means that for example the specialty area of content marketing has to be aware of the search engine optimization aspects of content marketing as well, just like the characteristics of PPC ads. That is weird, isn’t it?
The main point is that we have to create digital content suitable for SEO and being a good basic material for paid ads.
Speaking of paid ads the most important thing is to manage them integrated (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads). This is a huge task, considering that every single ad platform has its own characteristics, possibilities and limitations and if we are aware of that, are we able to manage them in sinergies. We have to produce 1+1+1= more than 3. If we can not manage them integrated, then these channels will compete with each other instead of supporting each other.
For example if our Google Ads and Facebook Ads target potential customers in the very same phase of the buyer journey while ignoring other phases of the customer journey, then these ads will not be effective at all and we will not have the best achievable results.
How to integrate your digital marketing channels effectively?
You have more than one best practice to effectively integrate your digital marketing efforts.
The first possibility is if we have the right specialists for every digital marketing subarea in-house. The second option is to choose an integrated external agency partner to take care of everything in digital marketing. The third option is to work with highly specialized external digital marketing specialists or agencies that are able to cooperate with other competency areas effectively and can look outside of their specialty area. They are aware of the higher level interdependencies of digital marketing and deliver solutions not only for their own areas but solutions that work well with fellow specialty areas as well.
You have to choose such specialists!