By Ellie Hanson, Marketing Manager at Rawnet
With so many workers around the world remaining at home, companies that previously relied on physical operations and events for lead generation have had to shift their service offering to customers in different ways; be that online or otherwise. Whether it be an IT Supplier or an Estate Agent, businesses really embrace digital and create more of an integrated online presence.
Regular client service businesses that maintained relationships through physical meetings or networking events have had to continue nurturing relationships in much less physical ways, such as online calls or online instant messaging services, embracing digital technology.
Physical events and marketing opportunities have been cancelled. People can’t meet face-to-face. With the world having to change so quickly to be completely digital, the need for digital and the opportunities for digital marketing over the last year have really come into their own.
What is an integrated digital strategy?
Digital marketing is key in most industries today, creating an integrated strategy and collating all areas of digital help to achieve a larger goal. An integrated digital strategy means creating consistency within brand and marketing activities online, aligning messaging at every customer touchpoint to increase conversion rates.
Where to start?
To start an integrated strategy, brands need to understand the why? By diving deep into the company’s proposition, marketers can translate their business and user needs into requirements that shape digital projects to drive commercial growth for the organisation. Understanding the overarching vision and message is essential to creating the perfect integrated strategy. Crafting the brand’s message at the beginning stage will make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful strategy later down the road. When it comes to lead generation, it’s vital to find out where customers are dropping out of the journey and what is causing it, identifying customer pains and potential opportunities. By having the correct tracking and analytics in place, businesses can informatively see where and what may have caused frustration, apprehension, or where blind spots are that they need to improve on.
The Foundation
A successful website is the backbone of any organisation’s strategy, by having an area it can drive traffic to and nurture leads from. A website can enable or limit business growth depending on many factors such as how it facilitates navigation, or how easily it can be crawled by search engines, limiting or expanding reach. A website can be the hub to start the lead generation journey through paid search or SEO strategies to increase traffic. Choosing the correct way to capture leads on the site is another challenge depending on the brand’s audience, their needs, and where they have come from. Testing what resonates with customers will come later when brand’s optimise and develop their digital strategy further on an ongoing basis.
Continuous alignment with customers
By aligning content, funnels, paid ads and CTA’s, marketers can begin to see the benefits of an integrated marketing strategy, increasing campaign ROI, and business success as well as making sure their existing marketing strategies are not limiting them in areas such as SEM (search engine marketing). By aligning the purpose, web structure, and traffic generation, they are creating a customer journey that can nurture and enable valuable MQL’s. Each business’s customer journey is different and often varies per customer segment, so there is no cookie-cutter approach. Finding the perfect combination of touchpoints for the target audience is all down to continued optimisation through data analysis and speaking to customers frequently.
Using Marketing Technology (MarTech) to track and optimise success is vital. Having all of the above areas in place is great, but to grow and have a successful customer journey, brands need to constantly be testing and optimising, studying where conversions are dropping out and what causes it. CRO and CXO are both key to tailoring the strategy to the business business.
Why an integrated digital strategy is important
There are three main areas that are improved by having an integrated digital strategy. Firstly, brand awareness, having multiple useful touch-points throughout the customer journey creates a much greater impact than when multiple campaigns are run in isolation. Secondly, the company’s conversion rate. By integrating organic, paid, and MarTech solutions, their engagement rates will increase and begin to push leads down the funnel closer to conversion as their touch-points follow a narrative and the experience becomes more sticky. Thirdly, brand trust, SEO, and building brand authority online show consumers their legitimacy. Also, Hubspot found that B2B companies are getting 14% of their leads from SEO, which is in the top three lead generation sources, but businesses are only investing 12% of their budget into it showing there is room for improvement and to get ahead of the competition.
Improving the customer journey
By integrating a digital strategy, brands have improved and elongated their customer journey leaving them with high-quality leads which are ready to be converted either online or offline. With this in mind, the digital world has become one of the most critical factors to keeping everyone connected and making sure businesses are functioning without physical workspaces and events.
Online is the way forward for all businesses that are aiming to generate MQL’s. Creating seamless, convenient, and engaging customer journeys from awareness to aftercare. Creating perfect customer journeys by ensuring digital innovative solutions to modern challenges are put in place will allow them to succeed in digital lead generation.
